Posting content to blogs has been becoming easier and easier everyday, with apps for iPhone, Nokia S60 and the soon to be introduced Blackberry app for WordPress, users can quickly post content to their blogs.
Yahoo Mail has introduced a new set of applications for their webmail service, and one of them is a WordPress application which will allow you to post content to either your WordPress.com or WordPress.org account from within Yahoo Mail, the interesting thing about this application is that you can drag and drop emails on the application to create new blog posts.
Here is a quick walkthrough on how you can publish posts to your WordPress blog using Yahoo Mail.
Enable WordPress Application
The first thing you will need to do is enable the WordPress application in Yahoo Mail, to do that click on the Add link next to the Applications menu item in the sidebar, enable WordPress in the application gallery, this should create a new entry in the sidebar.
Yahoo applications will not be enabled by default for all users, you will need to go to this application signup URL and enter your email address to enable them, also this feature is only available for US users right now.
Setup Blog Settings
Once you have added the application to Yahoo Mail, you will need to setup the blog settings, to do that click on the WordPress application in the sidebar, you will be shown a screen where you will need to enter the details for your blog.
Once you have entered the details click on save settings to save the information. You should see a confirmation message telling you that the blog has been added successfully.
Note: The application claims that it supports both WordPress.com and WordPress.org accounts, however I was not able to save settings for the latter.
Writing and Publishing Blog Posts From Yahoo Mail
Writing blog posts is quite similar to how you do it from your admin dashboard, to write a blog post, click on the WordPress application in the sidebar, this should launch the editor using which you can write blog posts.
Just write the blog posts as you would regularly do and publish it to your blog, you can also insert images into your blog posts, however there is no support for categories, you can only specify tags for now.
Another interesting feature in the application is the ability to drag and drop emails to the application to create posts out of them, pretty simple and easy and quite handy when you want to quickly post photos etc directly to your blog.
To create a post from a email, just drag the email and drop it on the WordPress application in the sidebar, this should open up the post editor, however it will be prefilled with information from the email that you dragged on the application.
Once you have made the edits, you can publish the post to your blog, here is a screenshot of the published post.
Hits and Misses in the WordPress Application for Yahoo Mail
The WordPress application for Yahoo Mail is definitely a nice application, the best part about it is that you can now quickly create posts from your emails without having to put in much effort, the editor is pretty decent too and will allow you to properly format content and add images and media to your posts, overall a really good addition.
However things could be a bit better with certain things, like the ability to support WordPress.org blogs would be great, in addition to that Categories is the sore missing point from the editor.
Also it would be great if users could add multiple blogs to the application, at present only one blog is supported.
What do you think about this application? Do you think it will be helpful to you? Do let me know your thoughts about it.
is it available on self hosted wordpress installation?
I’ve never really understood why anyone would post to their blog from email. If you’re at a computer you can login to WordPress or use a software application. If you’re mobile there’s WPhone.
Some people might not have access to their blog admin from a some locations, but might have access to email.
@Michael More than email it’s about convenience, if you are writing a email and suddenly got a post idea, you don’t have to leave the email interface to write the post.
Publishing posts from public computers could be problematic due to security reasons of your admin panel,so i think in all those cases where you admin panel security problem persists, its really very advantageous to publish posts right from your yahoo mail instead of posting from your blog admin panel.
I don’t use yahoo! mail anymore since gmail was around. And if I still do, I don’t get the point of composing and publishing blog posts from inside Yahoo! mail instead of your dashboard in WordPress.
@duets this is not about a debate about email services, this application allows you to drag your email and create a post, think of the amount of time users would save while they compose posts, half of the work is done with a drag and drop.
Agreed that the application is still in it’s infancy, think about the huge amount of time you would save sharing and uploading pictures you receive through email, I am a gmail user too and would surely want it to be in gmail.
If you are interested in posting via e-mail to a self-hosted (wordpress.org) blog, check out the postie plugin:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/postie
I agree that Yahoo should think about WordPress self-hosted blogs too. Anyways, this is a great guide
I can’t see any sort of practical application. Why would I give up the powerful WP dashboard for this neutered app? I can surely cut & paste an email’s text into another Firefox tab where tinyMCE is running.
Oh yeah, I’m self-hosted and exclusively use categories not tags. 😉
you should highlight this statement “this feature is only available for US users right now”, thanks anyway for the info
i’m using self-hosted wordrpress blog, can i use it?
I rather prefer the full fledge WordPress Admin Dashboard for updating posts.