Here's the deal.

1. I've got a Sidekick with the goofy camera that takes the tiny pictures.
2. I've got this old iBook that i'm hosting this site on.
3. I want to post pics to this site straight from the sidekick.

And it's gotta work REMOTELY and AUTOMATICALLY!

Here's the summary.
I take a pulitzer caliber photo with my Sidekick and e-mail it to a mailbox I've set up and magically it shows up on a webpage without writing any HTML or even being in the same room as a computer.

So I created a filter (Rule) in Outlook Express that, upon receiving a message with an attachment from my Sidekick, executes an AppleScript and saves the attached image to a specific folder.

One delicious caveat: since I'm using AppleScript, this method will only work on Macintosh. I've got it working in OS9.2 but it will probably work in OSX and Entourage with just a little modification.

Ingredients:

1. Macintosh
2. Outlook Express
3. BBEdit
4. AppleScript

First you have to have a website. Either on the machine that's running the mail client or hosted remotely with your ISP. It's much easier if it's all local but not that hard if it's remote. But we'll get around to that later.

The second step is to create a Rule in Outlook Express that looks for 2 things:

1. incoming mail from you
2. an attachment

Item (a) is nice because it sort of protects you from other people posting images to your site.

So now that we have the rule created, what actions are executed?

1. run the AppleScript
2. move the message to another mailbox

Action (b) isn't that important, really. I'm just anal-retentive, i guess. Action (a) is the money-maker here. That's what updates your webpage.

AppleScript is pretty sweet. Lucky for me the Finder, BBEdit and Outlook Express are very scriptable. I was able to create my script mostly by recording actions in real-time with some careful editing afterwards. It does several things:

1. save the attachment into the web folder.
2. capture the name of the Attachment.
3. capture the text of the Subject header.
4. writing the HTML code that displays the image and captions it with the text of the Subject.
5. saves the HTML file to the webserver.

Look at the script and HTML.

Of course you'll have to edit the path to the file to reflect the names of your HD and folder structures and change the BBEdit line if you're using a different version.

In my setup the machine checking the mail and editing the HTML file is also doing the webserving. If your setup is different, you can script Anarchie/Interarchy to upload your HTML and JPEG to an FTP server.

So, give it a try and let the world see your snapshots!