Ocasta

As a user of Movable Type I always found it frustrating that Nokia's Lifeblog posted to Typepad but not Movable Type.

1. Download this file and replace the standard Moveable Type version found in lib/MT.
2. Create a directory lifeblog with the normal 755 permissions in the root directory of your blog.
3. Add the following entries (to be customised as you wish) to your style sheet template and rebuild it.

   .lifeblogsms {
   font-family:'Monaco',courier,monospace;
   font-size:small;
   color:#000;
   background-color: AliceBlue;
   border:#EEE 1px solid;
   padding:0 5px 0 5px;
   width:50%
   }
   
   .lifeblognote {
   font-family:'Verdana', arial,sans-serif;
   font-size:small;
   background-color:LightYellow;
   border:#EEE 1px solid;
   padding:0 5px 0 5px;
   width:50%
   }
   
   .lifeblogimage {
   border:#000 2px solid;
   width:480px;
   padding:5px 5px 5px 5px;
   }
   
   .lifeblogimage img{
   width:100%
   }
   
   .lifeblogvideo{
   }
   

4. Configure the Lifeblog client with your username and Atom Authentication Token (not password). This can be found on your Author Details page. The server address to use is http://yourwebaddress/cgi-bin/mt-atom.cgi/weblog/
5. Post an entry from your phone. I'd recommend enabling the Lifeblog Optimise images setting.

Note: If you use any other Atom client that needs to authenticate itself, it may no longer work due to changes I had to make to allow the Lifeblog client to do so. If you need this other client DO NOT use this version of the script.

I have fixed a problem with the script that prevent the correct display of uploaded 3gp video. The video clip has its own Stylesheet entry too.

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When I discovered that Movable Type 3 shipped with an Atom server I tried posting from Lifeblog with no success. I was recently inspired to try again on reading a posting by Robert Price who has implemented it for his own blog.

I encountered a number of problems on the way. Firstly, I could never get the phone authenticated. After some trial and error I narrowed this down to differences in the way that Lifeblog and MT create the PasswordDigest. I don't know which is correct, but only one is and I think it's MT. I also had to disable the Nonce timeout check that MT performs. It was too hard to get my server and the phone to agree on the time. The first of these changes means that this version of AtomServer.pm may well not work with other Atom clients. I'm sure that the script could be modified to to check for both forms of PasswordDigest but for now it doesn't. The second change makes the script prone to replay attacks if your username/password is compromised. Given time I may get round to fixing these.

Once I could authenticate I could get down to implementing the Lifeblog posting protocol. In this each segment of an entry is posted individually and then the actual entry posting links them together. This meant implementing a storage area for lifeblog uploads and then processing the entry link tags to put in an image tag for uploaded images or import the actual text for SMS or Notes. Each is wrapped in a DIV tag to enable customisation of the display. I do not delete the original uploads.

Annoyingly, there is no way to set the category the post goes to.

I'm no Perl expert (hadn't touched it in 8 years) but since the MT Perl modules are so well written this was all much easier than I had expected.

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