Jazz Up the Web: The Making Of

Gartner: Web 2.0 to make waves in enterprise caught my attention because I hope that the “jazzing up the web” work I’m doing to help individuals and small groups of individuals will also be of value to the enterprise, enabling me to work for fun and for profit:

Technologies under the Web 2.0 umbrella predicted to have a high impact on businesses are AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML development techniques for enhancing the responsiveness and usability of Web applications), and mashups, the joining together of multiple online applications to create a new service). These are also expected to reach maturity in less than two years.

As I work on extracting information from my weblog for migration, I am working on properly dealing with time zones. Some months ago, I worked out how to use time zones correctly in Python, work that I’d like to come back to document. For now, I note the
libraries I’m using:

• python-dateutil – Labix
• pytz – World Timezone Definitions for Python (to get a set of time zone definitions)

mxDateTime – Date/time types for Python, which I have yet to use, seems worthwhile to explore.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out how to migrate all the data (my writings, my images) from the IU Technology Architecture Lodge, a weblog that I have run since March 2000. Although this transfer of data is not directly relevant to the setup of JazzUpTheWeb, doing so will move me towards maximal data flexibility for all of my websites. Once I have the script written, I will document my work and share the script.

Last year, I wrote a script that copies the content of the the system clipboard to a weblog. Since I use my wikis as an important writing spot, automating the flow of content from my wiki to other writing places, such as my weblogs, increases the fluidity of my writing. I adapted my script to work with WordPress blogs now. (Specifically, I used the Blogger API: blogger.newPost via XML-RPC interface.)

As I gear up to figure out general mechanisms for moving data from one weblog to another, I can quickly demonstrate that WordPress.com is indeed offering some sort of XML-RPC transport mechanism by using the Flickr blogging feature. Through this feature, I write a blog post that includes a Flickr photo from within Flickr itself and then have that post published directly to my WordPress blog (without having to type in WordPress.com at all). For the setup, I do need to know a few parameters:

• that I’m dealing with a WordPress blog (and not, say, a Movable Type blog)
• that the “API endpoint” for this blog is http://jazzuptheweb.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php — that is, the URL of my weblog plug “/xmlprc.php”
• the username and password for my weblog.

When I finish the setup procedure, I learn a little technical detail: that Flickr is using the MetaWeblog API to support blogging to WordPress. (one of the three APIs supported by WordPress).

Does it work? It does indeed.