I have been wanting to find a better way to write blogs rather than using the Plone interface. I was happy to find that MarsEdit and Quills both implement several blog APIs. Though it seems the implementation for both the BloggerAPI and the MetaWeblogAPI are not complete, MarsEdit can still be used to post articles using the BloggerAPI.

I'll put up screen shots later, but here are examples of necessary configuration:

Name: MyBlogHome URL: http://www.davidmccuskey.com/weblogSoftware: Other Blogger-compatibleRPC URL: http://www.davidmccuskey.com/weblogBlog ID: weblog.2006-01-10.2395214781

The tricky part is the Blog ID. Plone uses an immutable identifier for all objects so that they can be found even after renaming them.

Quills uses this ID to get at your weblog object. To get this ID you'll need to login to your Zope Management Interface (ZMI) and go digging through the uid_catalog in Plone. When you have clicked on the catalog, click on the tab labeled Catalog. In the list of results, find your blog object and click on its link. On the popup page, look for the key UID. The value of this key is what you will need to use for the Blog ID.

Because of errors in the implementation of the MetaWeblog API, you will see a Zope error after posting.