Motivation

For the task of blogging, you can generate Html file locally, then using metaWeblog API to upload them to your blog hosting site. This workflow has following benefits:

• There are many ways to generate Html documents, you can choose which you like. Especially, you can create clean and readable text file using markdown syntax and convert them to Html file.
• You can easily backup and reuse the content of your posts.
• You can use version control tool such as git to track down the history.

We deliver a Python script blog.py to upload local Html file to blog site using metaWeblog API.

configuration

To use this script, you need to configure it first, change the following two lines of config.py properly.

serviceUrl, appKey = 'http://www.cnblogs.com/ans42/services/metaweblog.aspx', 'ans42'
usr, passwd = 'ans42', 'xxxx'

Usages

After configuration. Now you can:

• list your recent posts:

./blog.py list 12

It will list recent 12 posts, you can omit the number, then it will list 10 posts.

• Upload or Update your post from local Html file:

./blog.py post your-blog.html

This will upload your-blog.html to your blog site as a new post, or update existing post if you have posted it before. blog.py will scan recent 10 posts, when it found a post whose title is the same as your-blog.html, then it will think your-blog.html has been posted already, and update this post instead of create a new one.

For convenience, you can post org-mode or asciidoc text file directly.

• Delete a post:

./blog.py delete <post-id>

Technical Details

There are actually two problems need to address:

• Access the metaWeblog API: blog.py use xmlrpclib for this task.
• Upload mediaObject(such as Image/Video) and replace their references in locally generated Html: blog.py will extract all local image references embed in Html file, then upload them to blog site, replace the local image references using the returned URL. Image files will not be uploaded again if they are not modified. blog.py think a file has not been modified if its MD5 has not been changed.