We Eat Bricks :: Web Development Blog

The Simsi is a moblog script written in PHP and developed by Marc Rohlfing at www.rowlff.de/simsi/

It came in handy for me when I was completing a master’s thesis at DCU. For part of our project we needed to parse incoming email and MMS mobile phone messages and extract the contents and attachments. This user generated content we received from the 3G mobiles phones (sponsored by 3Ireland, thanks!) would subsequently create a presentation. a dynamic story board of user experience of you will. The SIMSI moblog code helped us to understand how to achieve this collection part of the project.

While working with the script I added support for 3GPP mobile video and fixed some email date formatting issue.

Unfortunately I did not hear back from Marc Rohlfing , the original author of the script when I tried to contact him via email. Recently the link to http://www.rowlff.de/simsi went dead.

So I’m putting this up here as there may be others out may benefit from it as we did.

Short description

It’s a blog script an you can update by sending email/MMS messages from your phone(or not) to your email address.

Long Description

You send email/MMS messages containing text/images/video from your phone to a designated email address.

The moblog script will open that mailbox, extract the messages and save the attachments. The messages and attachments save saved into an xml file and a webpages containing the messages is presented in the browser.

Install

Extract and copy the directory containing the script to your webserver.
Download

Configure

In the index.php set following:

$MAIL_SERVER = “mail_server_here”;
$MAIL_USERNAME = “your_email_username”;
$MAIL_PASSWORD = “your_email_password”;

That’s it.

Now send a MMS to the email address. And browse to the location of the index.php

Happy moblogging!!

Note: This version has not been tested extensively. Use at your own risk. Tested on Movable Type 3.34 and 3.35. Does not work properly with Movable Type 4.

Scenario

I needed to set up 30+ users and blogs in Movable Type. I was faced with the prospect with spending all day doing this manually though the Movable Type interface. I would need to create the blog, then create the user than assign the user to that blog. Clicking and filling in several forms per user/blog. I would then need to repeat this 30 + times.

Instead I wanted to automate the creation of the bunches, batches or a multiple users and blogs in one go through PHP scripts. This is the result.

Conclusion

So if you have a group of user and blogs you would like to create in Movable Type 3.34 or 3.35 you can use this set of script to speed up the process. You can create up to 5 users/blogs per go in the current version of this script.

Backup

This is a mandatory step as the script inserts directly into the Movable Type database.
Back up your MySQL database. See here for instructions.
Back up you Movable Type files in the cgi-bin directory just in case.
Back up your Movable Type blog directories.

Install

Download files
Copy the MTBatchBlog directory to your web server.

Configure

Edit the config.php.

$dbhost = “localhost”;
$dbuser = “enter_your_mt_database_username”;
$dbpassword = “enter_your_database_password”;
$db = “Enter_name_of_your_mt_database”;
$sysadminemail = “enter_your_email_address”;

How to use

Go to http://your_url/MTBatchBlog/index.php
Log in with the username and password you put into the config.php
Next fill out the forms for each user/blog pair. It needs the same info as you would normally input when creating users and blogs through the normal Movable Type interface.

Warning

This set of scripts is provided as is. Use at your own risk. It has worked fine for me though.
I recommend you remove the MTBatchBlog directory from your web server when finished.

Good luck

Any comments, question or suggestions email me
If people would like to see additional features and support for newer versions of Movable Type please email me.

To backup a MySQL database:

mysqldump –-user username –password=password database_name > dumpfile.sql

To restore the database:

mysql -u username -ppassword database_name < dumpfile.sql

There is no space between the -p and password.

Further options are available, you can find out more at www.devshed.com.

A quick note to those users who use ScribeFire extension (formally know as Performancing for Firefox) and the Firefox browser. There appears to be a problem with the second last update. So if you find ScribeFire running amok. Update the Firefox extension.

That’ll sort it.

I heard a brilliant song on the radio the other day. I’ve got the artist name, Alison Brown, the track name Pirate Queen and the album name Stolen Moments.

Now I want to download the album. I know I could install iTunes and I might find the album through that. As for other services, a quick google search returned a smattering of music download sites but they unfortunately didn’t have the album available.

But there must be more options other than Apple’s iTunes for purchasing and downloading albums. Right?

If you know of a quality website for purchasing music please let me know.

As an after thought. A company called Hash 6 who whom we share the same building offer a service whereby upon having heard the song on the radio, you could text the radio station and the song would be saved for you to purchase and download at a later stage.

Now that would have been handy.

EDITED: No. False alarm. I can browse to Yahoo now. Google is also serving me google.ie now as it should.

Can anyone get Yahoo.com? Can’t browse to it.

I get “The connection has timed out”
It appears down to me.

and Google.com is still sending me to the german google.de.

Are the standards slipping?

On the other hand it could be some issues with the <a href=”http://www.eircom.net”>Eircom</a> DNS.

Having installed the XAMPP on your winXP machine followed by Movable Type you may come across the following issue:

The Movable Type Perl files look for the Perl interpreter located here:

Replace following line in all the MT cgi files

Movable type will not accept spaces in the Local Site Url to change the “Program Files” to “PROGRA~1″.

“PROGRA~1″ is the short name for “Program Files”, useful for software that does not accept names with spaces.

Viola!