Post by Email on WordPress.com

By getting a Mac and using OS X I’ve lost the ability to use Windows Live Writer which has to be the best blogging software out there offered free by Microsoft. So with that loss in mind I had to find an alternative way to blog and found out about the ability to post by email.

Steps to enable Post by Email on WordPress.com

1. Dashboard > My Blogs
2. Click on “Enable” on the appropriate blog (this will generate an email address for your to send your posts to)
3. Email to the address generated

Ensure that you keep this email address private as anybody who mails to this address will be able to post on your blog

Typical bold, italics, links and images work without issues. Multiple images can even be combined into a gallery. Shortcodes enable configuration of meta data and post settings. They are short pieces of text that can be put anywhere in the post and are listed below.

• [category x,y,z]
• [excerpt]some excerpt[/excerpt]
• [tags x,y,z]
• [delay +1 hour]
• [comments on | off]
• [status publish | pending | draft]
• [password secret-password]
• [slug some-url-name]
• [title Your post title]
• [end] – everything after this shortcode is ignored (i.e. signatures)
• [nogallery] – disables the auto-gallery and displays all images inline

This is great as it allows you to compose an email using the mail client of your choice and use your mail client’s rich text editing features too. As WordPress is pretty strict on the tags you use, take note that not all your rich text formatting will be transferred to WordPress.com’s strict HTML tag policy, thus it may be useful to submit the post as a draft and preview it in your dashboard before publishing it.