code in the ruins

I think I have managed to knock everything back into shape. It struck me while I was reading the comments how I really needed to set up a forum for support and discussion of mog.rif.icio.us. It's really hard to make sense out of a single comment thread with lots of different issues. Plus, if you're looking for answers, it really doesn't do much good to read through a long list of dissimilar posts.

So I started a forum using the XDForum WordPress plugin. Looks great so far - a very nicely done plugin. Hopefully, that will provide some much-needed organization to the mog.rif.icio.us discussion.

Update: forum closed.

I just realized that there are several comments in moderation… it seems that I've stopped getting mail notifications for some reason. Sorry everyone, I'll work through them and respond.

There are also some problems with mog.rif.icio.us that I just noticed as well, so I'll see if I can track those down.

I've been really surprisingly out of it…

I messed around for a while today trying to get mutt set up to use my Gmail account. Of course, I use the web interface 95% of the time, but sometimes I am on systems that do not have X and/or sendmail/procmail/fetchmail/whatever available. So I wanted a simple, self-contained way to check, and occasionally send, mail from the command line via Gmail. Here's how mine is set up, in case it's useful to anyone.

Requirements:

• mutt with POP3 and SSL support compiled in (for receiving mail)
• ssmtp (for sending mail)

mutt configuration (in ~/.muttrc)

# mail check options
set pop_host="pops://username:password@pop.gmail.com:995"
set pop_last
unset pop_delete
# mail send options
set sendmail="~/bin/gmailout"
# check for new mail on startup
exec fetch-mail

SMTP command (~/bin/gmailout)

This is just a shell script with the connection information for Gmail's SMTP server. It invokes ssmtp with certain options.

#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/ssmtp -au "gmail-address" -ap "password" $@

ssmtp configuration (/etc/ssmtp/ssmtp.conf)

mailhub=smtp.gmail.com:465
UseTLS=YES

Just be sure to replace "gmail-address," "password," and "username" to fit your information. And the "gmailout" script must be executable. That's everything. I didn't find it all in one place, so this is hopefully a working configuration for anyone who wants to do the same thing.

WordPress 2.0 just came out, so of course I had to upgrade. Took about 10 minutes. Quite painless… and very nicely done. Thanks, WP developers! I'm looking forward to seeing what new options are available in the plugin API, and the AJAX stuff is really nice. More later as I find it.