I am forgetting who’s blog post I read recently asking about doing blog posts by email… ah yes, thank for Inoreader, it was JR Dingwal who mentioned this in a new post about revitalizing blogging.
Part of me was tempted to respond to JR and say Try Posterous! (old timer internet joke) Posterous was a nifty early aughts service aimed at making posting east, with the most useful route being posting via email. It was bought by Twitter and shelved. Heck, the domain is there (Twitter is so dumb it does not even redirect the url) waiting for something to be rebuilt.
Hello, 2008?
Now I found also in my flickr memory drawer that back in 2010 Chris Lott ran something through posterous called Ye Olde Motley Readers (bless you for the millionth time, Wayback Machine) where open participants could post by email in a shared reading of James Joyce’s the Dubliners.
shared into the public domain using (CC0)
I digress.
But I do remember WordPress having this capability via maybe the Jetpack plugin (which weighs like 90 gazillion internet pounds, but I still use it). I could not find it on any of its plugin pages… but did find a useful trick from Jetpack Central on how to find, turn on and off, all the modules in the Big Ship Jetpack.
You just tack on to the end of your WordPress site
/wp-admin/admin.php?page=jetpack_modules
and boom! I found the long list and activated post by email. It generates for you a special, secret (as in do not put it on your blog post) email address you can use to write an actual blog post by email.
There are a bunch of features you can use to include via shortcodes, like adding categories, etc. I do not see how to add a featured image, but that can be done after post (or I could use the shortcode to post as a draft).
Heck, I am doing it right now (maybe, will know after clicking send).
This is about as easy as possible to be blogging, or blogging about blogging, oir blogging about not blogging or blogging about JR or….
Featured Image: (added post publication, this could possible be remedied on one of those plugins that makes the first image in a post the featured image) (also for future reference, the post arrives as a Classic Block).
The amount of time I spent fighting and re-navigating Jetpack is truly unfortunate. It feels like every time I go back to it, it has become worse and harder to use. It’s really a shame.
I believe I’ve been using Postie recently if I don’t have any other Jetpack needs or prior usage.
True, I am sometimes loathe to recommend it, but as I already put up with it for Akismet (which yes can be run outside of it), I am there already.
I once used a lot of those plugins that replicated some Jetpack function independently, the ones titled “without jetpack” https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/search/without+jetpack/ I think I used the tiled gallery one.
Postie looks good, thanks!
At least one positive is that the social sharing Publicize module in Jetpack includes alt text for featured images (I had a hand in that!) which almost no other plugins do.