Embedding links with link text in iPhone e-mails that I send to posterous?

[miked12345]

Hi!
I'm loving this course, and following along and have mostly been doing fine. I have hit a bit of a snag here, though.

I posted this in the module three section, but none of the Challenge Gods or Goddesses have answered yet after 3 days and it seems like a pretty crucial question, if you ask me.

Ed talks about and I certainly understand and agree- if I can do posting from my iphone anywhere that would help a lot. However I cannot send in a post with a link w/link text.

So... How do I embed links with link text in my iPhone e-mail? I am sending posts to posterous from my iPhone Gmail account but don't see a way to put links in with anchor text.

Anyone know how to do this? Thanks.

[Allison]

Hi Mike

The way I look at this is get the content in by iPhone and you can add links later via the web client if you want. Posterous content is an adjunct to your own content and is giving your market that all-important impression you are on top of the goings on in your niche and that you have an opinion that is worth listening to.

[technicool]

You can do it. Ed covered this in his broadcast this week on "The Challenge TV"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LisQt1A3J-Q

The demo Ed gave showed him cutting and pasting into Instapaper and posting to Posterous. You can select text, "share" to Posterous (or and email) and add link text here.

Also another tip for the highly efficient - Ed demonstrated his use of Text Expander at about 48 minutes into the broadcast.
You need a multi tasking iPhone for this.

• Same procedure, cut and past text into Instapaper, share to Posterous or elsewhere.
• Go to Text Expander
• Expand a predefined block of text (<a href="....">text</a>)
• Copy it
• Past it into instapaper
• Fill in the URL and anchor text

The cool thing is, you can pre-define templates for all of your link sites,
i.e.

<a href="http://www.mydomain1.com">Keyword Phrase 1</a>
<a href="http://www.mydomain1.com">Keyword Phrase 2</a>
<a href="http://www.mydomain2.com">Keyword Phrase 1</a>
etc

[obnox1]

FYi Guys there is an alternative to text expander for your computer (PC or Mac or Whatever) there is a Chrome extension called Popchrom, I have not played with it yet but here is the link ;-)

https://chrome.google.com/extensions...jmomp?hl=en-US

Still haven't found anything for my Android phone that I can use to add links though.

[Tim Brennan]

You can do it. Ed covered this in his broadcast this week on "The Challenge TV"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LisQt1A3J-Q

The demo Ed gave showed him cutting and pasting into Instapaper and posting to Posterous. You can select text, "share" to Posterous (or and email) and add link text here.

Also another tip for the highly efficient - Ed demonstrated his use of Text Expander at about 48 minutes into the broadcast.
You need a multi tasking iPhone for this.

• Same procedure, cut and past text into Instapaper, share to Posterous or elsewhere.
• Go to Text Expander
• Expand a predefined block of text (<a href="....">text</a>)
• Copy it
• Past it into instapaper
• Fill in the URL and anchor text

The cool thing is, you can pre-define templates for all of your link sites,
i.e.

<a href="http://www.mydomain1.com">Keyword Phrase 1</a>
<a href="http://www.mydomain1.com">Keyword Phrase 2</a>
<a href="http://www.mydomain2.com">Keyword Phrase 1</a>
etc

Sorry that doesn't work for my iphone 3g. it just displays all the code and hyperlinks the URL part.

Has anyone actually got this to work? If so what am I doing wrong?

[akalafr]

Same thing happens to me. Ed show the process he uses, and looking at his blog it works for him. I tried text expander but that just makes it easier to enter the code. As Ed said in the video, you wouldn't want to type that code in manually each time.

The only thing I can think of is that instapaper somehow gets the anchor text code to work because I've used textexpander and I've manually typed it in and neither work.

[Tim Brennan]

Same thing happens to me. Ed show the process he uses, and looking at his blog it works for him. I tried text expander but that just makes it easier to enter the code. As Ed said in the video, you wouldn't want to type that code in manually each time.

The only thing I can think of is that instapaper somehow gets the anchor text code to work because I've used textexpander and I've manually typed it in and neither work.

I have looked into this for quite a few hours. It turns out that textexpander on the mac has the option to add HTML hyperlinked text. Yet the iphone version doesn't have that option - so it adds just plain text. Then it is left upto the Mail.app on the iphone to turn that into a link, but it doesn't do it right.

Another way around this might be to send an email to yourself using gmail for example and hyperlink your anchor text in the body. Then you can copy and paste from that email to your email to posterous. Important: when you copy, you must first select the text, otherwise you will just copy the link, you need to select the anchor text.

If you want to keep that email close at hand I guess you could open it, hit "Forward", "Cancel", then "Save" to get it in your drafts folder.

[technicool]

This must be an iPhone.email account configuration issue.

This works fine for me on my 3G running 4.01 OS. The mail application MobileMail on the iPhone supports rich html formatting by default (I dont think you can turnit off). As far as I know it has always been like this.

If the URLs dont appear as hyperlinks when you receive an email you sent yourself - either the syntax entered is incorrect or - the outgoing email server is stripping it off.

Check you have the latest version of the iPhone operating system - 4.01 (via iTunes)

- enter a URL in plaintext - <a href="http://www.mydomain1.com">Keyword Phrase 1</a>
OR
- copy and paste a URL in plaintext - <a href="http://www.mydomain1.com">Keyword Phrase 1</a>

The iPhone doesn't translate this into WYSIWYG marked up hypertext at this stage. MobileMail does this on send. When you send it to your email address (set up as an html email account) it should appear as a hyperlink.

Questions to trouble shoot if it doesn't work -

Does the standard "Sent from my iPhone" email signature come up as a hyperlink?

Do any emails appear in html format (i.e. rich text emails with images) when received?

Is the outgoing email server e.g. doing anything (i.e. do your desktop outgoing email messages get sent as rich html)?

Change the default signature to a hyperlink (e.g. Sent from my iphone). Does this appear as a hyperlink on receipt?

NB : I changed my signature to my microniche address to save time adding the back links for each message. It works while we are back linking to the home page with. Later on we may have different back links here.

Sorry guys - I cant think of anything else - definitely make sure you have the latest everything and sync your phone, check your outgoing email account (if not gmail).

[Tim Brennan]

This must be an iPhone.email account configuration issue.

This works fine for me on my 3G running 4.01 OS. The mail application MobileMail on the iPhone supports rich html formatting by default (I dont think you can turnit off). As far as I know it has always been like this.

If the URLs dont appear as hyperlinks when you receive an email you sent yourself - either the syntax entered is incorrect or - the outgoing email server is stripping it off.

Check you have the latest version of the iPhone operating system - 4.01 (via iTunes)

- enter a URL in plaintext - <a href="http://www.mydomain1.com">Keyword Phrase 1</a>
OR
- copy and paste a URL in plaintext - <a href="http://www.mydomain1.com">Keyword Phrase 1</a>

The iPhone doesn't translate this into WYSIWYG marked up hypertext at this stage. MobileMail does this on send. When you send it to your email address (set up as an html email account) it should appear as a hyperlink.

Questions to trouble shoot if it doesn't work -

Does the standard "Sent from my iPhone" email signature come up as a hyperlink?

Do any emails appear in html format (i.e. rich text emails with images) when received?

Is the outgoing email server e.g. doing anything (i.e. do your desktop outgoing email messages get sent as rich html)?

Change the default signature to a hyperlink (e.g. Sent from my iphone). Does this appear as a hyperlink on receipt?

NB : I changed my signature to my microniche address to save time adding the back links for each message. It works while we are back linking to the home page with. Later on we may have different back links here.

Sorry guys - I cant think of anything else - definitely make sure you have the latest everything and sync your phone, check your outgoing email account (if not gmail).

Thanks for taking the time to help.

I was reading your post in my email and saw it does the exact same thing - so perhaps its a gmail issue. To clarify take a look at this screen shot:-



This is how it appears using Gmail on Firefox. That's exactly the issue. It's putting a hyperlink in there and ignoring the HTML code.

I am able to get this to work if I copy and paste as I described in my previous post.

Can I ask you are you using Gmail or another email client? If gmail, have you changed any of the settings, in particular the "Outgoing message encoding" - see below?



I know Ed uses mobile me which perhaps has a different encoding default?

[akalafr]

After watching the latest challenge tv episode and Ed showing the anchor text again. I FINALLY got it to work. Not exactly sure what was different this time. I was looking through my reeder feed and I found an article I liked. I did NOT use instapaper, but I used reeder to "email" the article. When I clicked on email it brought up my mobile mail which for me was hotmail. I inserted the anchor text html and sent it to posterous and it worked great.

I remember Ed saying in his Q&A that he thought the confusion had to do with needing to send it straight to posterous first. I'm not sure that is true in my case, since I originally used gmail from my iphone to send to posterous, which did NOT work.

So I think the problem for me was using gmail on the iphone instead of the mobile mail client which was hotmail for me. I imagine that would be different for others though.

Anwyay I hope that helps some of you out there.