Home / Publishing a WordPress blog article by email

Many people do not know a blog can be published by simply sending an email, which is exactly how I’ve published this article.

I’ve written the email travelling on a train and required no connection to the internet to compose the email. Then, via my mobile broadband dongle, sent the email to a blog email account handler service we set up.

It didn’t take too much to set up WordPress to support updates via email, there’s a quite powerful plug-in called Postie.

If it’s just text then it really is type and send. Couldn’t be easier. I could also write an email on my mobile phone and click send to publish a blog. However, I’m not too keen on that, I’ve tried a mobile phone keyboard and find the keys a bit small for my (fat) fingers. I’ve now got an electronic keypad, but that’s much the same, too fiddly to type any decent amount of text for a blog article.

Images can be added to the end of the text. I’ll give that a whirl on another blog article, once I find a decent looking photo.

One thing worth setting up is categories and tags. I like to publish blogs in meaningful categories for SEO purposes and to improve the user experience. The Postie plug-in simply needs a category followed by a colon in the subject line followed by the blog title. In this case I’ve set up a subject line ‘WordPress: Publishing a WordPress blog article by email’ so technology permitting, this should appear in a category called ‘WordPress’.

Tags can also be set up by adding a line in the text with the word ‘tags’ followed by a colon and then the tag names separated by commas. I’ve set up two tags named ‘blogs’ and ‘Postie’.

It’s now 16:50 and my train arrives in about 15 minutes. I’m just about to send the email to the configured blog email handler. It should be published in up to one hour, that’s the way we configured the email account to scan for new email blog posts, by default it’s every 30 minutes.

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