I was excited when I added attached image handling to MailEdit, because now I could take pictures with my Sidekick and post them to my weblog. But I was frustrated when I was limitted to where the picture would end up. Always at the top of the post, and never embedded within the text.

After a long conversation with a friend and beta tester, I came up with the #imageAlign directive, which allows you to put the image to the left or the right side, with the text wrapping around it. Now the images were better able to work with the text, but still, only at the beginning of the post.

The same friend and I were talking about something else, and he asked me if shortcuts worked with MailEdit. I thought about it, and concluded that since MailEdit uses the same methods to post a weblog entry as the desktop weblog interface uses, there should be no reason that shortcuts do not work. A simple test verified that they do work.

After thinking about some other problems for a while, it occurred to me that there was the answer. If I could generate shortcuts for attached images, I could then use the shortcut anywhere in my post. I was no longer limitted to putting my images at the beginning of the text. It also saved space in the long run, because once the shortcut was defined, I could reuse the shortcut as many times as I wanted, without having to reattach the image I wanted to use (which uses more room on the server, and more email bandwidth, et cetera and so forth).

So #upload was born. The upload function doesn't produce any posts on your weblog, it merely saves the attached images, and then creates shortcuts in the Radio shortcut table that produce the necessary HTML to reference the image. MailEdit actually produces three shortcuts for each image -- one that embeds the image directly, and two others that align the image to left or the right side of the post.

I am hopeful that people see the utility of this function, and that it solves the problem better than templating would have.

If you're curious now, you can download the beta version that I talk about in a previous post. The rest of you can wait until the oficial release happens.

The next functions I want to work on are security related -- I will provide a way to limit the address from which MailEdit will accept a post.

[side note: all images in this post were uploaded previously, and referenced using shortcuts. this entry posted and editted using MailEdit.]

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