ext_45850: guitarist seen from behind, playing acoustic guitar behind head, with legend, "Can you hear me now?" (Default)
posted by [identity profile] dglenn.insanejournal.com at 09:32am on 2008-03-22
First off, Clive (which I didn't write, I'm just customizing it a bit) is a command-line client, so it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea (but I find it especially convenient for the same reason some folks won't like it). So to use it normally, to post to a single site (it defaults to LJ but you can change that in a config file) you would do one of two things:

1) Type
clive -u {username} -w {password} -i {icon} -s {subject -- in quotes if it has spaces}
and it'll fire up the editor you configured it to use and then log in and post the entry you typed in the editor ... or

2) Compose your entry separately and store it in a file, then type
clive -u {username} -w {password} -i {icon} -s {subject} < {filename}
and it'll log in and post the contents of the input file. I nearly always do it this way.

(There are more options you can use, and -i and -s are really optional, but I wanted to show a 'typical case' example.)

I haven't tried to compile it under Cygwin yet, but it can be made to work under Linux and Unix and I think MacOS (which these days is Unix under the hood anyhow); in any event, you run it from a command line ("terminal window" or "console window" or on a Linux box not running X, just the console itself ... even a dumb terminal dialed in via modem will work).

So right there, a lot of people are going to go, "Command line? Eww." I imagine one could write a cute GUI shell around it, but it'd probably be easier just to download one of the popular GUI clients. Me, I wanted three things: to use the editor of my choice; to be able to pipe text into it or read from a file; and to be able to use it no matter which computer I'm sitting at without having to install and configure it on every single machine. Since it's a command-line app, I can just telnet or ssh from any computer I find, to a computer where I've already installed it (such as at my shell-and-mail ISP[*] or my main Linux box at home).

You're supposed to be able to store the username and password in a config file in your home directory on the machine where you run it instead of putting them on the command line each time. I don't remember offhand whether it'll prompt for them if you do neither. In any case, the password doesn't normally get sent off of the machine on which Clive is running[**].

So that's the tool I'm starting from. With that, in addition to normal posting of entries, I was able to write a shell script to pluck the first entry from a file containing a queue of them and post it as my quote of the day (and, of course, set up that script as a cron job); and write a Procmail recipe that pipes certain text messages from my cell phone into Clive to be posted (which means 1: not relying on the site I'm posting to to support SMS posts directly at my account level or at all, and 2: the ability to crosspost the SMS entries).

Next, the crossposting hacks.

[*] I buy shell access, an email address, and some disk space (and web space) from one ISP, and my broadband connection from another.

[**] IIRC, it can be forced to do plaintext authentication (where it sends the password to the server in the clear), but that's neither the default nor recommended.

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