I have some ideas for how I want to spruce up my blog, and some of those ideas require me to be able to post to this space from other applications that I write. I knew that Movable Type supported the metaWeblog API, so yesterday I sat down to figure out just how it works. I was surprised to find, after a good amount of Googling, that Six Apart didn't have any decent documentation about Moveable Type's API support. I found Dave Winer's original document about the metaWeblog API - and while this document is very good, it is generic, and doesn't cover the specifics of Movable Type's implementation.

So, I had do a bit more detective work here than I had originally envisioned. What really helped me out is Red Sweater Software's excellent MarsEdit. MarsEdit has a "Network Log" window, which shows you all of the messages that exchanged between the MarsEdit client and the blog server:

The Network Log window in MarsEdit 2.0.5

Seeing the RAW XML that was exchanged between a working client and server helped me immensely in writing my own client. Right now, what I have is just a proof-of-concept, but I hope to flesh this out in the future to do some interesting things. And in case anyone else out there wants to do something similar, I have posted my sample code.

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: MarsEdit, Movable Type, metaWeblog API, Dave Winer, Python