Simon Willison’s Weblog

Meta weblog API

14th June 2002

I’m itching to get an XML-RPC interface to this blog up and running so I can start playing with blogging tools (or roll my own in PythonCard). It looks like Dave Winer’s MetaWeblog API is just what I need. It describes an XML-RPC interface with 3 methods: metaWeblog.newPost, metaWeblog.editPost and metaWeblog.getPost. More importantly, the standard supports complete flexibility in the data that is sent along with the request. My entries consist of a body, an optional permalink (one is generated if none is specified), optional categories and an optional search string for a “Google It!” link if one is required. The MetaWeblog API looks ideally suited to handling this, and is fully extensible should I change the format of my entries in the future.