We are well into our summer cruise in Aremiti now, today at the pretty island of Sark in the Channel Islands. Cruising last year we had quite good internet access via Vodaphone Mobile Connect, but that has petered out now and we are back to sneaking WiFi access in pubs. However we also have an ICOM M802 shortwave transceiver, and with an an account with the cruiser-operated Sailmail and a Pactor modem, we have email (very slow) access aboard ship. This allows me to send updates like this to posterous which provide an email interface but most applications do not. I searched around for an email-to-HTTP post service and found one, smtp2web.com set up by a guy for Google, but emails to the service I set up just bounced and the developer ignored all my pleas. His code is in googlecode but it was not possible to set it up at UWE but I discovered Patrick Quinn-Graham's service at s2w.m.ac.nz. He was most helpful and I now have a means to email updates to the cruise log and map. It's a tortuous route: from Airmail, the Sailmail email client on my laptop, encoded in Pactor II, transmitted to a station in Belgium on a 6 Meg frequency, to the Sailmail client, to Patrick's service and hence to an XQuery script running on eXist to an XML database, and onwards to Twitter via the API. see aremiti.co.uk for links to the cruise log. Now that's working I can think up more email-based services. There are already a number of these provided for cruisers, for example to get GRIB files (digital weather maps) but there is scope for more.