Question

You might be familiar with Google Docs’ (and presumably also the other ‘office’ apps) ability to communicate with a blog server to publish a post directly from its interface. (It’s located in Share > Publish as a web page).

I’m interested in knowing the standard for the data transmission that this system uses. Of course, I can always reverse-engineer the code for one of the blog applications supported, but a formal specification would be more useful.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It seems to support three types of API :

• Blogger API
• MovableType API
• and MetawebBlog API

Those (at the the two last ones) seem to be based upon some kind of XML-RPC protocol (see also) ; so, the ability to use them has to be linked to what API (classes/methods) they export — for blogging-software, those will be methods to get/create posts, most probably ; and only a few methods, I guess, so that using those API is not too complicated…

The first one seems to use some kind of ATOM-based format (see, for instance, what has to be used to create a new post)

Still, using that kind of “half-standard” API means you’ll have to code some stuff each time you want your application to support a new API ; happily, there are not that many blogging-software related APIs : many blogging software tend to use the same ones, which is great : it allows you (or google docs, btw 😉 ) to publish to many different kind of software with only implementing the 2 or 3 most important / most used APIs.

For instance, the well-know platform WordPress supports both Metaweb, Blogger, and MovableType APIs — even if those were created for other software, at first — coincidence (or not ^^ ) those are the same as Google Docs supports : the most used, I suppose 😉