I thought I would drop a little useful info in the forums about auto-posting to Posterous - info I wish I had when I spent 20 minutes brutally trial-and-erring. :-)
Quick history: I had been looking for an easy Action Stream-like way to post random things in my MT blog, in a way that seamlessly intersperses the MT blog posts and these random bits. Tumblr was first in mind, and was already a built-in Action Stream. But the integrated post method wasn't working for me - too much code and way too much template tinkering.
So I signed up for Posterous, hoping for its autopost function to work as needed without Action Streams. The form to allow access to your MT is simple enough - URL, username, and password - but they don't give you much direction as to *exactly* which path and credentials they want.
After trying out every variation and combo under the sun, here's what you're supposed to enter:
URL: your full domain (i.e. "http://www.erictabone.com"), not .../mt/ or .../rsd.xml or anything else
Username: this is your MT username that you use to log in, which is the same as your "profile" username (posterous suggests this could be an email address, but it's not - it's your MT username)
Password: finally, the part that I would not have ever figured out if it weren't for this thread - http://forums.movabletype.org/2009/06/metaweblog-api.html - you have to use your web service password, which you get in MT system overview -> manage users -> [username] -> profile preferences "web services password". (This may be common knowledge for others, but in my 3+ years with MT, I've never used this before.)
Now, I can email anything - text, link, photo, video, music, etc. - to my posterous account (essentially a shell for my use) - http://erictabone.posterous.com - and it automatically posts to my MT blog, http://www.erictabone.com
Hope this helps someone!
Reported on Movable Type 4.2
Eric,
Great tip. I spent at least a couple hours trying to get this to work. I also found that the MT 4.3 does not include this in the default Header template in the Professional Website style set:
I added it and appears posterous connected.
I also hopes this helps save someone time.
I probably spent more time trying to find this answer than I did trial-and-error-ing, but it worked. My first inclination was to march down the Metaweblog API and Really Simple Discovery route which is mentioned on the Autopost form. But something told me, it couldn't be that, since I had a feeling that was already enabled by default. Who knew I had a separate web svcs. password....go figure.
Thank you. Thank you. And thank you Eric (& Merv too).
lee
I would have never figured out that password on my own. Thanks for the tip! =D
Eric, thanks so much for this post. I've been using MT for a spell too (since 2004) and never would have come up with this solution. Really appreciate your efforts to post this for all of us looking. Peace. ~Brian
Really glad to see this helped a few people!
Just as an FYI / update, I've got what I think is a stable MT5 upgrade running. After some unrelated stumbles, I can confirm that the Posterous integration works just fine with MT5; no roaches or changes needed.
I did have some missteps with some plugins, but that's one fortunate thing about the way the Posterous integration happens - no local plugin files.
Thanks you for post- I was trying to use MT too. Very helpful.