Linux Blogging Sucks no more

I want to apologize to you all.

I know I hurt some people with my post about how Linux blogging sucks. I apologize for that. At the time of writing that post, this was exactly how I felt, and all I could think of was letting things out. I was bitter that there's no good application for Linux that I could use for blogging in offline mode using the New Blogger platform.

But now its gone, I feel better and more objective (or even more subjective? You decide). I started to look around on what supports Blogger as a blogging platform, and then it had actually got me.

There are no good offline tools for posting on Blogger! At least I haven't found one. Even BlogJet (which is probably my favorite application now) does not support all the features.

Why is it so? Is it so hard to implement a simple feature? I'm sure the API is completely open, isn't it?

Fine, I thought, I would go the way of samurai open source, and create something of my own for a change. I would at least answer my own goals for how I would like this "blogging to Blogger" thing to work, then learn how to do it, and implement it.

And, in fact, that's exactly what I did. I started with Google API (because that's what Blogger is nowadays). I learned how to connect to Blogger. How to fetch blog titles, and posts. How to post as draft. All the stuff I needed. I downloaded a sample implementation written in Python, and though I don't know Python, it is pretty simple, and I have rewrote the whole thing to correspond to what I wanted.

So, now I was upgraded. I use Bluefish as my editor now. I added my own script into "external tools" menu, so I post now with 3 clicks of the mouse. Great! you might say, what is the problem then?

Well, until proven otherwise - Blogger.

I learned, that no matter how I try, no matter how clean an HTML code I post - it looks terrible in Blogger. And now I know why.

Blogger gets the content of the post (even in HTML) and parses it like it is written in its own webeditor. Which leads to lots of white spaces and brakes in text when shown as a post when uploaded in strict-HTML version.

To show you what I mean, here's an example: I went to a Wikipedia, took a definition of the word blog in English version. Here's an excerpt:

Other forms of journals kept online also existed. A notable example was game programmer John Carmack's widely read journal, published via the finger protocol. Some of the very earliest bloggers, like Steve Gibson of sCary's Quakeholio (now Shacknews) and Stephen Heaslip of Blue's News (still running since 1995 with online archives back to July 1996), evolved from the Quake scene and Carmack's .plan updates. Steve Gibson was hired to blog full-time by Ritual Entertainment on February 8, 1997 [7], possibly making him the first hired blogger.

Websites, including both corporate sites and personal homepages, had and still often have "What's New" or "News" sections, often on the index page and sorted by date. One example of a news based "weblog" is the Drudge Report founded by the self-styled maverick reporter Matt Drudge, though apparently Drudge dislikes this classification. Another is the Institute for Public Accuracy which began posting news releases featuring several news-pegged one-paragraph quotes several times a week beginning in 1998. One noteworthy early precursor to a blog was the tongue-in-cheek personal website that was frequently updated by Usenet legend Kibo.

Early weblogs were simply manually updated components of common websites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today. For instance, the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software, such as WordPress, Movable Type, blogger or LiveJournal, or on regular web hosting services.

Now, to post this as an entry, I used the following code:

It shows perfectly fine in the browser when I open the file. But to see the effect in Blogger, check this site. Do you see spaces in the latest post?

When I remove all the <> tags, then it shows fine, as you can see in the second post on the same site.

It all leads to the list of the following list of facts:

1. My script works, but the text I write should be just plain text. No HTML formatting. (that's even better and easier, right?)
2. I can't insert pictures, because then post gets screwed at formatting. I add pictures later in webeditor.
3. I can't yet post with labels using the script (I just haven't seen the API yet which would explain how to do it, so it is not yet implemented).
   

Which further leads me to the next thought: I would be probably leaving Blogger as soon as I get a good offer on webhosting with Wordpress; they may try and go fix their bugs while I'm searching. I then will write bad ass script which will move all the content off here to a new blog.

Note1: I am really angry on Blogger's "insert a picture" and "make it link" bugs:

• When inserting picture in the webeditor, it is always placed at the beginning of the post, and not where you meant to put it.
• When making a link out of some text, a link icon is got caught my the mouse and frequently got pasted instead of link.

Note2: I can post the script if anyone wants me to. It uses zenity, elementtree and Gdata API to get some info from the user, and at this point doesn't store any information locally.

Any suggestions? Feedback? Thanks a lot.

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