LJ by email

[avram]

Damn, just when I’d planned to take a day away from the computer to give my hand a rest.

Warren Ellis, author of many fine comics, publishes an email journal called Bad Signal. His latest entry talks about weblogs, moblogs, and LiveJournal. Here’s what he says:

LiveJournal is huge. Unlike Blogger, it's an interconnected community, where a profile page holds links to your friends on the system [...] and makes clickable links out of your list of interests [...]. And it is, I say again, bloody vast. I read Bára's LiveJournal this morning (she's the webdesigner for warrenellis.com) and looked in her profile. TRANSMETROPOLITAN is linked there. I clicked it. It showed me eight hundred other people who also have TRANSMET in their interests list. And that is, let's be honest, a minority interest.

What LiveJournal doesn't seem to have is a way to write to it remotely. Or to publish out to an email group.

I emailed him about PocketLJ, the LJ client for PDAs, to see if that fit what he meant about writing remotely. But the email publishing comment got me thinking. How hard would it be to add the ability for people to subscribe to getting your journal by email? Any bored Perl hackers out there want to take a stab at it?

Comments

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

Since I believe that one can already create an RSS feed of one's journal effortlessly, it should be a fairly trivial exercise to create an RSS reader that can pull new entries and forward them to a mailing list. I don't have time to really investigate it right now, but it's a facinating notion.

-R

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Comments! It MUST handle comments by email...and allow you to 'subscribe' to a message, to see all traffic to it.

Oh BOY do I want this...

[avram]

I don't know if it must. That's actually pretty non-trivial, considering that people can continue to add comments to a message for years after it's been written. I think that, for the purposes Ellis is talking about, just having the main messages broadcast via email would suffice. And a link to back to the message so you could call it up in your web browser and see all the comments. This ought to be nearly trivial to implement. I'm tempted to try to hack it together myself.

I suppose you could set it up so that each message gets its own email subject header, and the list software sends out daily digests of all content received for that subject that day. Cooler still if you can reply be email and the reply gets posted as an LJ commnet, but that could get hairy. You'd want to be able to just subscribe to the main message, though.