Programmer turns Gmail into blogging tool

A Mexican programmer has figured out how to turn Google's Gmail service into a blog. Jonathan Hernandez posted a demo of his software, called Gallina, together with the open-source code, on his employer's Web site.

Gallina uses Gmail messages as blog entries, and the email service's message star to signify the publish status. Email replies to conversations are posted as comments to an entry. Because Gmail provides 1GB of email storage space for free, Hernandez' software makes that space available for the blog.

On his site, Hernandez said the software uses XML and XSLT -- a language to specify how to transform an XML document of one type to another document type. Anyone wanting to take advantage of Gallina would need to install the application on a server, which would then use Gmail to store the posts.

However, it may not please Google: the company's terms and conditions explicitly disallow screen-scraping technology of the type used by Gallina.

Hernandez's work was highlighted on geek site Slashdot.org where one commentator noted that Google's existing free blogging service, Blogger.com, already allows users to post entries using email. Blogger also supports the Atom application programming interface for developers, allowing them to build their own blogging applications.

Neither Hernandez nor Google were immediately available for comment.