Sorry: No dasBlog Support

From time to time I take a few minutes to troll around Technorati.com to keep an eye on who might be linking to my site, or more specifically, the SharpMT pages. Last week I found IdiotProof.org who tried to use Pocket SharpMT to post to his dasBlog hosted server and it failed on him. A little while back, I made a couple of changes that made my server calls more XML-RPC compliant; that request came in from someone using dasBlog, and since I never heard back, I had hoped it worked. It didn’t. And because of some incompatibilities, I don’t see dasBlog support in the future of SharpMT…

I wrote SharpMT to support MovableType. I’ve never hidden that fact nor have I changed my mind about it. If I wanted to use a generic offline writer, I would have used w.bloggar, but I need the extended fields that MT supports. Hell, if Zempt was out when I first started using MT, I probably wouldn’t have written SharpMT… I use MT, so the tools I write for blogging also use MT.

Since MT uses the BloggerAPI to allow third party access, one would hope that any blogging engine that uses the same API would be able to post from a compliant tool. What a fuckin’ pipe dream that is. Here’s some facts: for each new post MT returns a numeric string; dasBlog returns a GUID. Not a huge deal, actually… right now SharpMT converts the string to a number so that it could cut short a download of links, if a download isn’t required, but that can be worked with. Another hiccup: Blog ID. MT uses a numeric string again; dasBlog returns the URL of the site. Nothing major here, as it can be worked around. Text Filters are ignored on dasBlog I think – no biggie… categories seemed to be OK.

Then the big problem… posting. MT uses a specific structure that is radically different compared to what dasBlog uses. I would have thought that MT is the culprit, deviating from the specification by adding a bunch of different fields to the post structure, but dasBlog doesn’t seem to be all that generic either. The MT-specific fields that are part of the Post object don’t exist in the dasBlog version, but then again, the date/time format that’s required of dasBlog looks to be very .NET-formatted and MT uses an ISO format… and that can’t readily be worked around.

I don’t know who to blame for it, but it’s not the same API.

And so, that means no dasBlog support. Were I going to make this into a paid-for-project, I would dump the connection functionality into a DLL and then have different plug-ins for different engines… hook up some UI hooks that turned off certain fields, depending on engine. Stuff like that. But I don’t want this to be a paid-for application, so it’s not going to happen… why the Blogger API has a two versions running around, I don’t know, but there might even be more versions. If every engine has it’s own custom members to the objects being passed around… oi, what a damned mess it is.

And I have to say thanks to Dave at IdiotProof.org, for letting me test a post or two on his Blog, in an attempt to figure out what was going wrong when posting to dasBlog!


8 thoughts on “Sorry: No dasBlog Support”

  1. I was pointed to Pocket SharpMT as a potential PPC solution for blogging.

    It looks fanastic, and I love how you’ve got it working with many blogs. Trouble is, it doesn’t work with the one I use at the moment.

    This is bBlog – http://www.bblog.com/ – which uses the xmlrpc interface. After setting up all the options I get an XmlException:

    Application::Run+0xf

    Dialog_Main::Main+0xa

    Here are my options as set up:

    Web Server: http://www.kiwanonet.org

    CGI-BIN Path: /morpheus/bblog/xmlrpc.php

    Now these settings work with w.bloggar, which is nice, and it would be GREAT if it would work with bBlog. I have 0.6.x of bBlog installed, and there is a newer version available, but the upgrade paths aren’t quite sorted.

    If there is any way at all I can help you test this to get it working with bBlog, count me in!

  2. Actually, I don’t attempt to support many Blog engines – I wrote it to target one: MovableType. When I looked at w.bloggar it was neat that it supported multiple engines, but I needed the MT-particular fields that only MT-specific clients supported, which is why I wrote my own.

    Having said that, I can take a look at bBlog, but I make no promises…

  3. Well I checked their documentation site: sorta lacking in what is needed aside from just listing metaWeblog API, so a test account would be great if you can spare one – place email me the account details so ya don’t open up a hole in yer blog though :)

  4. I took a look at it, just now – that’s me with the guest “Testing” post up there. I have partial good news. It got the categories OK, but it chokes on the Text Filters, as they aren’t supported – it doesn’t crash but it does show the error box. It also allowed me to post (the Entry Body was used at the “single edit box post”) but the category wasn’t assigned to the post. After the post, when it tried to get the updated Blog Link, that too failed because that command isn’t supported.

    For non MT-servers, what ya see is what ya get, unfortunately… it behaves better than most servers I’ve tried, but it’s still a few doughnuts short of a dozen.


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