inz's blog » blog-service

blog-service revisited

inz — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 13:37:18 +0000

Fooling around with dbus-glib, I decided to redesign the BlogService DBus API. The idea is the following; different blogs are available at different object paths, the default blog will be available as /org/MaemoHackers/BlogService/default or similar.

The API is somewhat described in maemo-hackers wiki; the .xml files in svn repository have not yet been updated. I'm doing this alone and in quite a slow pace, and will commit my code when it compiles again. The api may also live -- comments, suggestions etc. welcome.

Lunch meeting over maemo-blog

inz — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 11:47:18 +0000

We had a lunch meeting with bergie, tigert, rambo and mdk. Among other fun stuff, we talked about some ideas for maemo-blog:

make the "engine" a dbus service and separate UI
The DBus API should provide at least the following

getting a list of configure blogs
getting a list of posts in a blog
getting a list of categories in a blog (preferably with post counts, if possible)
creating categories (if supported by the blog API)
creating posts to a defined blog
creating posts to the default blog
upload media (preferably through gnome-vfs URI's in the post content to keep us indenpendent of network, cache network/bluetooth files locally?)

The UI should also have a DBus API for the following

Open a "prepared" item in editor for posting
Show a "choose blog" -dialog for posting

Finally implement the UI changes proposed by tigert
Clean up the editor (preferably as a widget in it's own library)
Replace category menu with tag cloud (needs tag cloud widget)

I was planning on making the post query/sending functions quite generic, so the user would list the fields they're insterested, something like this:

org.maemo_hackers.maemo_blog.get_posts(string:blog_id,string:field1[,string:field2...]);
org.maemo_hackers.maemo_blog.send_post(string:blog_id,string:field1,:field1_value[,string:field2,:field2_value...]);

The latter would require fields "title" and "description".

Suggestions, comments etc welcome.

Yarr, cursed be the wordpress.com xmlrpc API

inz — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 18:49:39 +0000

I've been doing some hacking on maemo-blog, and starting to get a asynchronous blog API's working. I'll release something soon. I've also added account manager and done some (not even nearly enough) code cleaning. I still need to make the blogger plugin comply to the new asynchronous API.

However, during testing the changes, I created two blogs on wordpress.com, and found their xmlrpc API to be quite PITA. Doing a metaWebLog.getUsersBlogs returns all users blogs, as one would except; but... The different blogs of a user require one to use different xmlrpc URLs (ie, http://.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php), and the blog name from the domain name is always used, even if there is a blogId defined in the method call, even when they're different; this is a bit of a problem. Trying to be as generic as I can, I wouldn't like to create separate plugins for each blog provider, and metaWebLog API does not support sending a new xmlrpc URL in a getUsersBlogs reply, there's just no generic way of working past the wordpress.com behavior. Found that at least some performancing user has run into the same problem, and a quick try with BloGTK yielded the same results.