Blogger API: I'm impressed

Well, I'm impressed.

I've managed to figure out the blogger A.P.I. sufficiently to write a little command-line app that lets me type up my posts in an editor (vi) and then post them to blogger. Why would I want this? Well, my laptops are weedy things that I got for free, and which date from the 1990's. Full-featured modern browsers run painfully slowly on them. I normally use 'links' as my preferred web-browser. Now, you look at links, and yes it's clunky, and yes, the pages don't render as they 'should', but it *mostly* works. It's small and fast. Then you look at firefox, opera, konqueror and co. They work on many more sites, and have more features, but to get this extra 10% of functionality, they are utterly huge and slow with masses of dependancies. Something isn't quite right with this picture, I feel. But this is a rant for another day.

For me, writing my posts in 'vi', and then sending them later, is the ideal solution. It's quick and easy, and 'vi' recovers it's data effectively after a power-cut or what-have-you. However, most things these days, are hideously overengineered, and if a company decides to let others 'hook into' their systems, it usually involves downloading and using libraries, and before long your system is littered with libraries that you use for one app.

So, finding documentation that tells you 'connect to this address, send this HTTP transaction, you have now posted to your blog', is damn impressive. This is the way it should be, open, and fairly simple. Took me about an hour to get it working. All hail google.

Colum