Today’s Giveaway of The Day (thanks darkmoon for the early head’s up in IRC) is post2blog:

set of unique functions such as automatic images (Imageshack, Flickr, FTP) uploading and live spell checking. Program integrates itself with Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Word, FeedDemon, RSS Bandit and Sharp Reader.

This program regularly costs $39 (seems a bit spendy considering there are free alternatives), but you can get an uncripped version legitimately for free if you hurry. Remember, you must not only download but install before the day is up. So even if you don’t have time to check this one out right now, at least download, activate and install and then you can come back later and see if it’s worth, well, free.

I was telling darkmoon that the comment section of GiveawayOfTheDay is just as valuable, if not more than the actual giveaway. That’s where you’ll find people saying what they think of the daily giveaway (some comments are kind of brutal) and also offering similar applications, often for free. For example, in the post2blog giveaway comments I learned about another free blogging-related tool called SEmagic.

GMail + IMified = Blog via IM inside email
I saw and bookmarked IMified yesterday, but Paul O’Flaherty reminded me about it again this morning with this:

GTalk to WordPress.. I just love that idea.

I’m not a big IM guy but really like how Gmail is integrated with GTalk. For those who enable it, it can allow a quick, convenient exchange without launching any external apps. Paul’s comment made me curious if I could post to a Wordpress blog while reading my Gmail using GTalk + IMified. First I added imified at gmail.com per the IMified instructions and typed ‘help’ in the GTalk integrated Gmail chat window:

The IMified bot shared the menu:

* Main Menu **
1 - IMified Notes
2 - IMified Reminders
3 - IMified Todos
4 - My Account

type ‘M’ at any time to return to this menu

Next I selected option 4 and was given a link to the My Services page at IMified.

The service options available include: 30 boxes, Backpack, Basecamp, Blogger, Google Calendar, Movable Type, Remember The Milk (?), TypePad and Wordpress. Clicked on the Wordpress image. I went into my Mac Mode Wordpress powered blog admin area and created a new user account and then copied over the username, password and path to the xmlrpc.php file. This successfully added to the IMified menu. Inside GTalk when I queried the bot with ‘4′ I saw the new menu (emphasis mine):

* Main Menu **
1 - IMified Notes
2 - IMified Reminders
3 - IMified Todos
4 - Mac Mode
5 - My Account

How to post to your Wordpress blog inside GMail + GTalk + IMified
STEP 1. I typed ‘4′ and the bot responded with: “What is the title of your blog entry?” My response? Test post using IMified bot inside GMail using GTalk
STEP 2. imified: “What is the body of the blog entry?” Response: IMified is available at http://www.imified.com/. Then I hit enter to see if I could add more.
STEP 3. imified: “Should I puslish this entry? (y/n)” Yes, that was the exact response with spelling error. I was curious if I could add more to my test post, so I typed some more text including an HTML link and submitted to the bot.

This kicked me back to the main menu with no other explanation. I checked my Mac blog to see if the entry was published. Nope. Apparently, you get one — and only one — chat window to make your post. No adding on is allowed at this time. I repeated STEP 2 and 3 and this time answered the question ‘y’es.

imified: “Woops! Server said: parse error. not well formed.”

Grrr. Tried a third time stripping out my HTML (how would you link to an image?). Result?

imified: “Blog entry has been posted and published!”

STEP 4. I checked Mac Mode for the published post and there it is without the hyperlinks active.

I’m not sure how useful this particular example of IMified will be if it’s text only blog posts. Maybe the IMified folks will sort this out because it would be cool to do some quick blogging through Gmail this way, but without links or the abilty to include any kind of HTML that makes it much less useful.

Update 8:42am PST: I posted to the IMified troubleshooting forum about this issue and Dave the developer responded right away that they fixed the spelling error and were reconsidering better HTML options.

Second Life blogging
For those inside Second Life, check out the free SLURLblogger tool by Ordinal Malaprop. I wrote how to use this tool back in September at VTOR.

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