RavenPlus And Blogger's OAuth2 - My Work So Far

Hello! I'm Back

After working for something like 60 odd hours over some 20 odd days, I have finally managed to integrate Google's Blogger API Client for Python (version 3) into RavenPlus. Lots of pain; Lots of u-turns; Lots of challenges; And lots of stress along the way. This is something that I hope I will never have to do again.

I have to write 3 extra Python modules in all. These 3 modules are all to do with publishing to Google's Blogger with authentication via OAuth2, obviously. It is a good thing that Raven was well designed. Existing publishing modules (to Wordpress, for example) are not disturbed. It is a good thing too that there is a Python Client Libraries for Blogger API. Otherwise, there will be more work and complexity.

There is still a lot of rough edges in this work-in-progress version of RavenPlus. So it is not fit for release yet. For now, I only have 2 working functions - posting a 'new' post and 'updating' existing posts. There are still 6 more functions to write. And this does not include the picture upload capabilities to PicasaWeb.

Instead of using it as a Python library, I intend to integrate the Google API Python Client Libraries into RavenPlus for more control over error handling. At the moment, some error messages from this library are not caught by RavenPlus - they just go to the command prompt.

Some Knottiness

Although it works, there is a slight complication that I am still debating in my mind on what to do next. There is this problem of different attributes that is returned in Version 3 and in Version 2 (maybe even Version 1, I didn't check) of the Blogger API from the Blogger server. Zoundry has written Raven in such a way that these prior-to-Version-3 attributes are stored locally. But I am thinking of doing away with them. The big question is: Should I? Will it cause any problem later on down the road?

Note

1. I am still working with Python version 2.4. I managed to customised the Google's Blogger API Python Client Version 1.2 down to Python 2.4 - for the modules that I need only, anyway.

2. Working with Python version 2.7 is a no-go for the moment. There is a need for a Microsoft C/C++ compiler for building 2 RavenPlus Python extensions (those files with the .PYD extensions). I did find out later that the compiler is freely available for download from Microsoft. But I was concern over the numerous warning messages upon installation of some of the RavenPlus dependent libraries. Building RavenPlus with Python 2.7 is reserved as a future project for now.