The Blogger API in Radio
Now here's one you have to work hard to wrap your mind around.First there was Manila RPC, a huge scripting interface for Manila. It's a big big thing to swallow. Every time I write a script against that interface I have to do a small research project.
Then came the Blogger API, a very small set of interfaces for reading, posting, changing and deleting Blogger posts (it has a few other things, but that's the core). What's cool about the Blogger API is that it's so small and easy to understand. Legions of scripting people have adapted the Blogger API for all kinds of neat tools, and the flow shows no sign of abating.
Of course we immediately supported the Blogger API for Manila, so that all those tools would work with our centralized Web publishing system too. We had to bend a little to do that, the concepts of Blogger don't map perfectly on Manila, but it's pretty close and most of the tools, including our own Manila-Blogger Bridge Tool support both Manila and Blogger.
OK, now what about the weblog inside Radio? Why not wire that up to the Blogger API too? Why not indeed. And that's exactly what we've done.
How the Blogger API maps onto Radio weblogs
The Blogger API defines certain concepts, like blogid, postid, a user's name, etc. This is how we map those concepts on to the Radio weblog.
appkey is ignored. (In our sample code we pass the empty string for the appkey, but it's ignored by the handlers.)
blogid is ignored. (Radio only manages one weblog, but something interesting could be done here with categories. In your code you must pass Home, all other blogid's cause an error.)
username and password are ones you set on the Remote Access and Security Prefs page in Radio. The code respects your preferences on that page. For example, if you've turned off posts, then you can't post through the Blogger API.
postid is a number, it's the name of the sub-table of weblogdata.posts, converted to a number.
Fixes -- 1/29/02
We made a mistake, the correct name for the API that gets the users blogs is called blogger.getUsersBlogs. We've released an update that deletes the incorrect script and create the correct one.
On blogger.newPost we're supposed to return a string but we were returning a number. Fixed.
Fixes -- 1/24/02 DW
In blogger.getRecentPosts, don't fail if there aren't numberOfPosts posts.
Implement blogger.getUserBlogs.
Wrote glue script for blogger.getUserBlogs. (Released for Frontier and Radio.)
Updated test script, radio.weblog.bloggerApi.test, to call blogger.getUserBlogs.
