For a project I’m working on, I’ve been looking at a lot of web service authentication/verification APIs lately. I thought folks might be interested in the results. Here are the methods available for a variety of web services/applications online, with links to their appropriate docs:
With a little prompting from someone who needed to known what license the PHP Blogger API code was available under so he could develop something based on it, I’ve finally added a license in with all 3 downloads available. With confirmation from the other 2 authors involved, all 3 packages are now available under a BSD-style license. Enjoy.
You heard it here first – I predict that Google will soon release a wiki-based product of some kind. I don’t know what they will do, or how they will make it ‘simpler’ or ‘smarter’ than wikis are already, but that’s their problem I suppose.
I got my most recent copy of the ‘Google Friends‘ newsletter, and towards the end, completely unrelated to anything else in the newsletter, they offer a definition (sort of) of what a Wiki is. They provide a link to Wikipedia and then leave it at that.
Google have already delved into the world of blogs (they own Blogger.com and run their own GoogleBlog), so I guess it was only a matter of time before they got into wikis as well. I wonder where this is going to go… especially since Yahoo! is already an avid supporter of Wikipedia at least (hosting some of their servers).
I’ve finally figured out a bug in the current development version of webpad that meant once in a while I’d somehow overwrite a file I had previously been working on with a blank file.
Turns out that it was because I was reloading webpad in a window which I had previously used it, so the session (containing filenames etc) was still active. When webpad loaded, it was triggering the ‘save’ operation, and saving the now-empty main window as the file I was previously working on. All I’ve done is make it so that you can’t write a blank file now — if you want to delete something, you should be using the delete operation in the file dialog anyway.
One step closer to release! Blogs are still a sticking point tho… how/what to support on Blogger.com/MovableType is the thing holding me up. Complete blosxom support is already in there, and works wonderfully – I’m using it to maintain my blogs and website. The Blogger Atom API sounds really ugly and excessively complex, but I’ll let it stabilise a little more and then have a proper look at it I think…
Thanks to a suggestion from Bill, I found the problem that AvantBlog has been having when attempting to authenticate with the Blogger.com servers… basically they moved their servers!.
As Robert discovered in this post, the server that responds to API requests moved from plant.blogger.com to www.blogger.com, so basically I was posting authentication requests to a server that didn’t exist. This has been rectified now and it appears to be operating properly.
Enjoy your blogging folks 🙂
Something appears to be wrong with Blogger‘s API server, so AvantBlog authentication is very touch-and-go. I’ve modified the program slightly so that it reports properly when it can’t connect to their server, so at least you’ll know what’s going on. Also, on suggestion from Ron, I’ve added a ‘Try Again’ link so that you can log out/log back in again and see if their servers are responding properly.
This problem appears to have been happening for the last couple days at least, so let’s just hope that Blogger sort it out soon. I wonder if their fancy new Atom API is going to be any more reliable?
Looks like the Blogger.com API is back online (now running on a cluster of servers, according to Ev, in this message on the bloggerDev mailing list. This means that AvantBlog is now running properly, and from what I have seen in my tests, it’s more stable and a bit more reliable. I had to clean up a few things to allow it to interface with the new server(s), so please let me know if there’s anything wrong with it 🙂
Thanks to changes in the Blogger.com API, AvantBlog appears to be failing to post on all blogs now. I plan on re-writing the Blogger API code that I have available for download which will be used to upgrade AvantBlog and hopefully bring it up to speed with the recent changes.
In the meantime, sign up to the mailing list to be the first to find out when it’s available and working properly again.
Thanks to those who have emailed me to let me know that it wasn’t working 🙂