Technical Question about Delicious and LJ/DW

[charmian]

Is there a technical reason why the blog posting thing at Delicious (it will automatically crosspost a daily digest of your delicious links) doesn't work with Livejournal or DW without the usage of an external script?

(Asking for a friend who wants to cross-post a digest of daily Delicious links to Dreamwidth)

Comments

[murklins]

Yes, there is a technical reason! Most blogging services expose one or more interfaces that other software can use to programmatically make posts. The Delicious blog posting feature tries to talk to blogging software using the MetaWeblog interface, but LJ and Dw don't understand that one. That's where the external script comes in -- Delicious sends the MetaWeblog stuff to the script and the script converts it to an interface LJ/Dw understands.

[matgb]

But unless Delicious have updated, after the post hits DW through a script it's completely uneditable and will frequently have major encoding errors as it doesn't use Unicode, and DW doesn't support the ISO format actually used.

Which I discovered after redoing all my script to get it working here.

About a week before my server fell over...

So you can post to LJ with the script, but doing so to DW is problematic as the formatting is FUGLY and full of weird characters :-(

[charmian]

Thanks for the info also.

Hmm, I wonder if I should submit a suggestion that DW should support the metaweblog API, if someone hasn't done so already. I have another friend who would like to post from Posterous to Dreamwidth, but she can't unless DW supports the Metaweblog API.

[matgb]

I didn't know Posterous didn't work, friend of mine uses it on LJ.

So yes, that'd make sense, I've never used it, but I've heard it's good, and two major services using it is good, I know Mark wants to use one protocol well, but...

[charmian]

It works for LJ, but Dreamwidth is a separate service, so you'd have to enter it under "other blogs."

What do you mean by that? I don't know much about these protocols. Is it not possible to use more than one?

[matgb]

You can use as many as you like, but each requires dev time, and they frequently update specs.

From what I understand/recall, LJ supports several protocols very badly, Mark wants to make sure DW supports at least one fully and properly. I suspect supporting Meta as it is now wouldn't be a huge amount of work.

Keeping it supported over time might be. Beyond that you'd have to ask Mark, as a) I might be misremembering and b) he might've changed his mind or c) there might be technical issues beyond my ken.

[charmian]

I think I asked a long time ago about Posterous, and then they didn't definitely rule it out, but I think they were prioritizing another one. But now maybe it would be worth writing a suggestion to see if other people would be interested.

[murklins]

It's been so long since I worked with any scripts other than my own, I'm no longer sure what goes on when you just use Delicious Glue out of the box to hook Del up to Dw. Guess I'll take your word for it that it's not pretty! I mostly write scripts for people who run fandom newsletters, and all those scripts need to do a LOT of processing on the raw post data Del sends -- they parse the post html and then group links by tag, sort alphabetically, that kind of thing, and then reconstruct it into LJ or Dw specific html (cut tags, user tags, etc). They also convert all the text to use Unicode entities. I think my test Del account is still hooked up to the Dw comm temporary via a very basic script and it seems to produce OK posts.

[matgb]

Hmm, looks like the encoding display problem may've been fixed:
http://matgb.dreamwidth.org/362902.html

Can't actually edit the post for auto formatting though. I normally go through it afterwards, pretty ip up and retitle it like so:
http://matgb.dreamwidth.org/363780.html

Ah well. I guess when I've got my own server space again I can look into some sort of automation, in the meantime, no link posts, which doesn't make much difference currently.

[murklins]

Since your server's not up this isn't useful to you now, but for future reference you might want to check out wistfuljane's post "How to make delicious' Blog Posting work for Dreamwidth using the original Delicious Glue". Of especial interest is probably the comment thread with afuna, where she explains how to set up the script such that Dreamwidth lets you edit the resulting posts.

[matgb]

Ah, most excellent, I had indeed missed that completely. Danke.