Notes on Writing a Blog Tool from Scratch

January 31, 2008
12:24 PM

  • At least on the Mac, there don't seem to be any good Atom-enabled publishing clients at this point. On Windows you have Microsoft's Windows Live Writer, which comes with good AtomPub support, and actually seems to be pretty nice.

    Wish I'd be using MarsEditI really hope MarsEdit will catch up in this space soon. The 2.1 version released today doesn't include generic AtomPub support, but hopefully an upcoming version will. In the meantime, I'm using Joe Gregorio's apexer command-line tool to post here, as I don't feel like adding either an HTML interface or an implementation of the MetaWeblog API.

  • Is XML-RPC really the most solid option to support some kind of linkback these days? Hey, 1999 called and wants its technology back. Can't we just use a plain HTTP POST, something like:

    POST /ping/ HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Referer: http://mysite.com/source-uri/
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 30

http://example.com/target-uri/

    That is, the body of the request contains the URI of the resource that's being pinged, and the Referer header contains the URI of the resource that's, well, referring to it. Respond with 202 Accepted if the target URI exists and allows pingbacks, otherwise response with 404 Not Found or 403 Forbidden, respectively. Or 409 Conflict if that referrer has already been registered. Or something along those lines.

  • Being tracked by a couple of planets really makes you watch your steps when changing things around.