One of the most annoying things about this whole weblog business is having to write your posts in the browser. I can't stand entering any more than a few sentences in a web browser text area. Not only because web browsers are so unstable, prone to crashing, or that its so easy to press the wrong key and kill the window or go back in the history and lose what you've written - but that you are forced to use the crummy browser text field component. I use Vi for most of my editing these days, and I have grown very fond of the movement keys (hjlk). Using these means I don't have to move my hands from the keyboard to move the cursor, which reduces strain and increases speed. Of course I miss many other features, such as on-the-fly spell-checking (although Firefox 2+ has this), word completion, auto-save, auto-format, syntax highlighting, and bracket matching also.
I initially assumed that WordPress is too poorly thought-out to have something clever like an XML-RPC interface. Well, thankfully, I was wrong. WordPress in fact supports the Blogger, Moveable Type and a bunch of other XML-RPC interfaces. This meant I wasn't going to have to screen-scrape and hack together some horrible and brittle HTTP client.
I do a fair bit of work in Python for my job, and I've come to rather like the language for whipping together smallish programs. Especially tasks involving processing files or URLS, Python particularly excels for these. While it would not be a big deal to use the Python XML-RPC library directly myself (its in the Python standard library since version 2.2), I figured I would use someone else's code if at all possible. After a bit of searching, I found wordpresslib. This little .py file is available under the LGPL license and makes it trivial to perform a variety of Word Press operations from Python.
My rather trivial program simply allows you to submit a post in draft or published form from the shell. It accepts input either on STDIN or a specified file. You can also set a post title. For the hell of it, I've put it under a BSD license and packaged it up in a little tarball with wordress.py available for download here. Before using it, you need to set three variables in main.py - the URL of your Word Press install, your user and your password. Sample run:
$ echo this is a post | ./main.py -t 'a test post'
If you are seeing this post, that is proof that it works. There are many more features which could be implemented of course. Maybe I'll bother maybe I won't. I'll see if I get the itch! Feel free to send me patches of course ;-)
Niall O'Higgins is an author and software developer. He wrote the O'Reilly book MongoDB and Python. He is the co-founder of BeyondFog, Inc which makes Strider Brilliant Continuous Deployment. Strider is a hosted Continuous Integration & Deployment service for Node.JS and Python.
