Problem: I want to remember the beautiful moments from day to day, capturing pictures and videos and thoughs as I go along. But I'm lazy. Probably won't keep up with a traditional journal/website/blog.
However, I do always have my phone on me, and I'm constantly texting people pictures and videos and little messages. Why not do the same to an address that collects these and makes a cute little static website out of them?
That's what Smsly does. It also has a dumb name. It's also completely unsupported, hard to get working, and may delete all your files. Use at your own peril.
To use smsly you'll need at least these things:
- Flask, Flask-FlatPages, Frozen-Flask
- avconv (for transcoding video)
- s3cmd (if you want to host your website on Amazon S3)
- PIL or Pillow
You'll want to rename config_example.py
to config.py
and change it to suit
your needs. Set up an email account accessible by IMAP (I'm using a gmail
account, you may need to make modifications to from_email.py
if you're using
a different provider). The main program fetches new emails from this account,
stores them along with their attachements in the location you described in the
config.py
, and, if there are new emails, renders the site and uploads it to
S3. There are some various conveniences along the way, such as markdown
support and a whitelist (to make sure no Viagra commercials end up on your
website).
Note that you'll need a pretty recent version of avconv
in order to transcode
video to formats readable by desktop browsers and mobile phones. I had to
compile mine with lots of weird codecs, too, but I'm sure you can figure that
out.
Good luck!