First I’d like to start off with this excellent TED talk by my favorite MythBuster, Adam Savage:

Here’s the Chinese YouKu version: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNDE1NTM1NDY0.html

Living in China has it benefits, and its retractions. One of the biggest disadvantages, for me at least, is the censoring done on Web sites. Google is heavily blocked, facebook, wordpress.com, and twitter, youtube, as well as many others. (correct: I’ve embedded a YouTube that I can directly view from China…)

For quite a while now, I’ve wanted to post quick little mini-blogs about things I see/experience from time to time. Things that are not ‘big’ enough to deserve an entire blob post, but stuff I’d like to mention/point out briefly. Twitter would be perfect for this. And wordpress.org (not blocked) has many Twitter plugins to pull tweets from a Twitter account and display them on a page. Of course, my problem is that Twitter is blocked in China.

So I’ve been looking, and looking, and looking for a WordPress plugin that would read emails messages from an POP3 mailbox and display those on a page as it finds them. Then, all I need to do is send a short email to that mailbox and it would get picked up and displayed. Problem is, there seems to be no such animal in the WordPress plugin world.

This leads right into Adam Savage’s TED talk above. This plugin became my Dodo bird. And like Adam, I decided the only way to get what I wanted was to build one myself.

Thus it became the “POP3 Barks” plugin. Birds Tweet, and Dogs Bark. And I had no idea how to do this, so I guessed it was time I learned how to. Lucky for me, WordPress plugins are written in PHP, one of my favorite programming languages – so I least I had a start.

So after learning a lot about WordPress Plugins and its API, Ajax and WordPress Ajax, and a little more MySQL, I have a first draft of what I wanted.

Right now, my plugin is in Release Candidate state. I’ve added a new page to the menu at the top called ‘Barks’ and I’ll be posting to it from time-to-time as I find things of interest.

Please leave a comment if you find any issues.

Once its stable, and I’ve cleaned up the code, I’ll probably add it to the WordPress plugin repository for other to use.

I hope you enjoy it.