Hacking Moveable Type

Much surfing has ensued looking for ways of implementing a “post-to-email-per-category” function within Moveable Type. The idea was to set up a ping to a distribution list so every time a post was posted (too many posts in this sentence?) to a particular category, an email would be fired off to alert the distribution list that something new had been posted.

Not difficult to do as far as announcing all new posts is concerned, but I can’t find a way of doing it per category. The nearest I can think of without the need to start hacking MT itself (which presumably would involve writing Perl, so beyond my current capabilities) would be to set up an RSS feed for each category (found a way of doing that) and using something like HEP to manage the conversion between the RSS and email.

Except that RSS is a pull mechanism, of course, so that there would need to be some kind of script to a) handle an inbound email announcing that something had been posted to the blog; b) work out in which category the post had been made; c) go off to the blog and pull down the RSS feed for the relevant category; and d) convert the feed to an email destined for the distribution list.

While I’m quite pleased with myself for working all this out by myself, I’m less pleased with the fact that this is way beyond my Perl skills. Normally at this point I’d gleefully reach for a manual and start to pick up yet another geeky skill, but time isn’t quite on my side on this one. It seems such a straight-forward requirement, but if someone’s done it I can’t find a mention of it, at least relevant to Moveable Type. Which probably means it’s something built into Radio, and that costs money

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