What is Express Mail Blog
The Web Diary is our attempt to make it really easy to setup a web page and keep it updated with current news. Feedback on how to improve it is very welcome.
The style of webpage that you can make is a little like a diary, in that each article that you email in is a separate story and they are all shown on the page in date order (well reverse date order, ie newest first).
We don't assume any HTML knowhow, and most users are expected to have limited internet connectivity, eg email over Iridium or similar. However, Outlook and most email programs already let you write lovely formatted emails with flashy text and embeded pictures .... so what better way to allow updates than get people to send in an email with their story!
How Do I Use Express Mail Blog
So, in order to add a story to your home page, simply send an email to your unique Express mail Blog email address that will have been set to you when you signed up for your trial account.
This is a variation of your email address and is rather complicated and random to prevent other people adding bits without your permission. Either keep this email to remind you, or add it as an address in your Outlook addressbook.
You can easily add pictures to your story - but you need to make sure your email is in HTML/Rich Text format (go to the Format menu and choose the option). However, pictures are best resized with a photo program first, otherwise you will spend a fortune uploading them. Resize to about 400-500 pixels works quite well and gives a large picture. When you save the picture, you also have a "quality" setting with JPEG's. Experiment with turning this down until the picture still looks pretty good, but is as small as possible. You may find the "PhotoRazor" utility from our Downloads section to be useful to help visually resize your photos and optimise them for quality vs size.
In order to edit or remove stories (or add position information to old entries), simply log into the Web Diary site with your normal email username and password at http://blog.mailasail.com
Notes
1) Please do NOT put your email address anywhere on your web page!! Unfortunately spammers scan the internet looking for email addresses in the same way that Google indexes the web. Putting an email address on the web will virtually guarantee you to start receiving large amounts of spam within just days...
2) Please try to avoid CC'ing your messages to the blog to other people. What happens it that your friends tend to push reply to your message and their reply will also appear on the webdiary page (possibly not what they were expecting...)
3) Please remember to resize your images before sending! Not only does this save you time sending, but your viewers will also not spend ages waiting for your pages to appear!
World Position Mapping
To activate the mapping feature all you need to do is to upload some positions for your Diary entries. For new entries this is as simple as entering your Lat/Lon somewhere in the first few lines of the message body in the format DD:MM.mm, eg "50:23.22N 0:23.15W". In fact the system will try quite hard to parse any position information out of your entry, even in different formats, but please try to be "gentle" with it and not expect it to figure out really complicated or unusual formatting.
Of course this also means that the system is "stupid" enough that if you simple talk about a position somewhere in the first part of your message then it will assume that you are giving it your position. This hasn't proven to be a real problem in practice, but if you are writing about positions somewhere other than your own location then simply either put in your own position further up in the message, or move the alternative positions so that they aren't in the first few lines of the message.
For Diary entries that you have already uploaded you can backfill the position data by logging into the Web Diary website and then clicking on the "Edit" link which appears against each entry.