Create Posterous Posts from Google Forms

I've been organizing dog agility bloggers for Dog Agility Blog Action Days and wanted to automate updating our group's blog when each blogger posted their article on the event/action days. For past events I had the bloggers email me with the information and manually created each entry in the blog.

Since posterous supports posting via email I knew I could create a form on one of my web servers and have the page format the data so posterous could turn it into a post. Here are the details for formatting emails for posterous: how to get the most out of posting by email.

Instead I stumbled upon an article on using Google Forms to send emails via the Google infrastructure: Get Form Data from Google Docs in an Email Message [Video Tutorial].

So all I had to do was create a form for my bloggers to fill out and then have the script run by their submission format and send an email to posterous to post.

Here's my modified version of the form script:

function sendFormByEmail(e) {
  // create a draft post - posterous will send you an email
  // when the draft is created.  var email = "draft@YOURBLOGNAMEHERE.posterous.com";
  // e.namedValues is a dictionary where the keys
  // are the names of your form's questions. So you can pick
  // them out and combine them as you wish.
  //
  // My form contained five questions:
  // 1. 'Title of your blog as you want it to appear'
  // 2. 'The URL of your blog as you type it in your browser'
  // 3. 'Title of your article'
  // 4. 'The URL of your article copied from your browser'
  // 5. 'Short description/teaser about your article'
  var v = e.namedValues;
  var subject = v['Title of your article'].toString();
  subject += "((tag: attitude))"; // add tags as you wish
  var message = '<a href="' + v['The URL of your blog as you type it in your browser'].toString() + '">';
  message += v['Title of your blog as you want it to appear'].toString();
  message += '</a > wrote:';
  message += "nn";
  message += v['Short description/teaser about your article'].toString();
  message += '< a href="' + v['The URL of your article copied from your browser'].toString();
  message += '"> Read the full article < /a >nn';
  message += "n#end"; // so your email signature won't cause a problem
  // This is the MailApp service of Google Apps Script
  // that sends the email. You can also use GmailApp here.
  MailApp.sendEmail(email, subject, message);
  // Watch the following video for details   // http://youtu.be/z6klwUxRwQI
  // By Amit Agarwal - www.labnol.org
}

In the script you can see how I've accessed the form fields by the full name and woven them into an email with links embedded - just have to watch the use of double quotes within single quotes. Which produces blog entries similar to this one I created manually.

So now I can just send the link to the Google form to participants and they'll create drafts that I can tweak and/or just submit. It took longer to write this post than it took to modify and test the script!

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