New Code!
For lack of an actual working program that can post articles via xml, I've had to reinvent the wheel a couple of times. I did one for work, because I first needed to build a program to automatically post to a weblog at work, and then I had to do it again because my corporate masters, not surprisingly, don't want to give away all of the code I write for them (This is not as much of a "of course!" as you'd think, because I worked on pretty much exclusively GPLed code at work and we have to give that away) and I wanted to be able to compose posts to TSFR offline.
Thus Atompost (version 001), which is written mainly in C++ (as a change from my usual routine of writing code only in The One True Language), then linked together like a C program. A C++ purist would not approve, but it works for me(tm).
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I can’t get them to work! I grabbed one of the shareware python-based offline editor programs for Windows and stuffed it onto windows 2000 machine at home, and it just didn’t work (dumped core and fell over dead); there’s a plugin for Mozilla Firefox that does offline editing, but it annoyingly requires Firefox 1.5, which is badly broken as far as backwards compatability goes (I complained about it earler, but I don’t think it’s possible to describe just how frustrating it was that every single usable keybinding no longer worked the way every other windows web browser, to say nothing of my finger memory, works.)
There are a few offline editors for Linux, but if you think that Windows is sometimes a maze of twisty library incompatabilities, you’ve not compared it with the world of modern Linux desktops.
And once I got the server side of the xml code working, doing the clientside was fairly trivial; I’m laid up at home today with a really nasty chest cold/possible pneumonia, and I could still pick up my rusty c++ programming skills and hack out a command-line client.
One advantage of a command-line client (once I get tls in so I can talk to the blogspot atom server) is that it lets me use vi to write my posts, which is a much more pleasant experience than using the fairly rudimentary editor that Annotations uses.
(I didn’t fully answer the question in the post above, so I’ll continue here)
On the weblog software side, I did look at the open source packages that were out there, but they all required software that I did not have on Pell. The version of perl that runs on pell is fairly elderly, so programs like blosxom wouldn’t run without a bunch of upgrades. Ditto for the python-based solutions (pell predates python, and the only python on the machine is from when I was evaluating mailman about a decade ago). The php weblog programs also don’t work, because php requires support from the http server, and thttpd isn’t really set up for that support. And finally, most if not all of the professional products require a database (the M part of LAMP) to store the contents of the weblog in, and I wanted to have a version where all of the content was easily accessable to Unix command-line tools.
Thanks for the info… I figured there had to be some constraints, and there were.
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I’m curious why you’re reinventing the wheel, rather than using one of the several blog software packages out there (many of which are open source)? What features don’t they have that you need?