EasyBlogger 0.9.5

A (very) easy CLI interface to Blogger blogs

EasyBlogger

Blog to blogger from the command line.

Why not googlecl?

I tried. Didn’t work. googlecl is just too rough and isn’t easy to script. For ex:

1. No way to update a post

2. Doesn’t work with blog and post ids.

3. and others…

So what does this do?

1. Provides a command line tool and create, update or delete posts on Blogger hosted blogs.

2. Post content can be piped in - so you can use your favourite way to generate html markup

3. Pandoc goodness - so that you can write your doc in any of the input formats that Pandoc supports

4. You can also export your existing posts to your favourite lightweight markup format like markdown etc as individual files. Then edit them in a real editor, and publish them back! All pandoc output formats!

5. Understands specially marked comments - so you can just hand it a file and it’ll figure out what to do - great for posting from vim etc.

Installation, Configuration and Usage

Installation

# Now live on PyPI
sudo pip install EasyBlogger

This installs EasyBlogger and its dependencies. It also installs the easyblogger script

Pandoc

Install pandoc If you’re on cygwin, you can just install the windows dl and put pandoc.exe somewhere on path

OAuth2 API Authentication and Authorization

The tool needs to be granted access to manage the blog. Google APIs use OAuth2.

1. First, get your blog id. You can find the blog id by viewing the source. For ex. on my blog, I have the following lines near the top:

   <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Nifty Tidbits - Atom" href="http://blog.rraghur.in/feeds/posts/default" />
   <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Nifty Tidbits - RSS" href="http://blog.rraghur.in/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" />
   <link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="Nifty Tidbits - Atom" href="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/7642453/posts/default" />

   On the last link, the number 7642453 is the blogId

2. Authorize

   On Linux

   # run through OAuth2 hoops... following needs to be run as root
   # First find your blog Id
   
   sudo easyblogger --blogid <yourblogid> get
   
   # This will first open a browser and ask you to sign in and
   # approve access to your blog

   This will open a browser. You may see a chrome warning that it can’t be run as root - but you can ignore that. Once you authorize, ~/.easyblogger.credentials is created with your OAuth2 token

   Since the file is created as root, you will need to change ownership of the ~/.easyblogger.credentials file.

    # Change ownership
   sudo chown <youruser>:<youruser> ~/.easyblogger.credentials

   On Windows

   If your PATH variable has the python Scripts folder, then you should just be able to run easyblogger --blogid <id> get in a command window. If not, then open a cmd window and navigate to <python install folder>\Scripts and run python easyblogger --blogid <yourblogid> get

3. All set!

   That’s it - you’re all set!

   You will need to repeat the OAuth2 authorization process if you ever change the blog, or revoke permissions or if the auth token expires.

Usage

Getting posts

1. Get a list of posts post Id, title and url are output by default.

   # get a list of posts
   # param : Blog Id - look at your blog's atom pub url - its the number in the url.
   easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get
   
   4424091495287409038,Moving from Wordpress.com to Blogger,http://blog.rraghur.in/2013/08/moving-from-wordpresscom-to-blogger.html
   ...
   ...
   # 10 rows shown

2. Filter by labels or search; specify max results to be returned.

   # get only the last 5 with tag 'vim'
   # you can specify multiple tags - separate them with commas
   easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get -l vim -c 5
   
   # search for all posts with 'vim'
   easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get -q vim -c 5

3. Get a specific post by its id

   # get a specific post by id
   easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get -p 3728334747597998671

4. Control which fields are printed out.

   # output field control
   easyblogger  get -p 3728334747597998671 -f "id,title,url,labels"
   3728334747597998671,Rewriting history with Git,http://blog.rraghur.in/2012/12/rewriting-history-with-git.html,[u'git', u'HOWTO', u'Tips']

5. Output in (lightweight) markup - very good for updates.

   • If its a single post, then its printed to console.

     easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get -p 3728334747597998671 -d markdown

     It also includes a header that will allow you to edit the file and update the post back with the file subcommand below

   • if more than one post, then each post is written to a file (name derived from the title)

     easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get -l vim -d markdown

   • If you’d like to get a single post as a file, specific -w or --write-files

     easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get -p 3728334747597998671 -d markdown --write-files

   • Supports all mark up formats supported by pandoc

     # Output formats: native, json, docx, odt, epub, epub3, fb2, html, html5, s5,
              slidy, slideous, dzslides, docbook, opendocument, latex, beamer,
              context, texinfo, man, markdown, markdown_strict,
              markdown_phpextra, markdown_github, markdown_mmd, plain, rst,
              mediawiki, textile, rtf, org, asciidoc

Default Args file

Specifying –blogid each time is just painful. You can set a default blogId by creating a default args file ~/.easyblogger as follows:

cat > ~/.easyblogger
--blogid
234567

And now you can type the command as:

easyblogger get

You can override the args from file by providing the argument on the command line

Create a new blog post

Note: Blogger API v3 does not support/expose API for creating posts as drafts. Please ask for this feature on Google’s blogger dev group - I’ll add that capability once/if it becomes available.

 # create a post from stdin with title and labels
easyblogger post -t "Hello World" -l "python,hello"  -f -
Hello world!!!
4345108299270352601

Pipe out from any HTML generation mechanism

pandoc -f markdown -  | easyblogger   --blogid 6136696198547817747 post -t 'Hello from Pandoc' -f -
 # Hello from Pandoc
this is a nice long post

3295765957555899963

Or just tell easyblogger to convert from markdown with the –format arg

 # --format supports
 #                native,json,markdown,
 #                markdown_strict,markdown_phpextra,
 #                markdown_mmd,rst,mediawiki,
 #                docbook,textile,html,latex
easyblogger   --blogid 6136696198547817747 post -t 'Hello from Pandoc' --format markdown -f -
Type anything in markdown

2342323423423423423

Update posts

Update works with a patch request - only specify what you need changed Blogger API does not allow the blog permalink to be updated - so in case you want to change that you’ll need to delete and create another post (though you will probably lose comments etc - so only viable if you’ve just published it)

easyblogger update -t 'A new title' -l "new,labels" 3295765957555899963

You can also update the contents by passing in the –file argument. Piping it in works too - use –file -; like so

pandoc -f markdown -  | easyblogger  update -t 'Hello from Pandoc' --file - 3295765957555899963
# This is h1
## this is h2

Some para text
[EOF]

Posting or Updating from a file

I wrote easyblogger script primarily so I can blog from Vim. If your file has properly formatted comments, then EasyBlogger will figure out what to do (insert or update) based on the metadata.

So, you can author a post like so:

cat MyBlogPost.md
<!--
Title: This is your title
PostId:
Labels: a,b,c
format: markdown
-->
# This is my content

And post it to your blog like so:

easyblogger file MyBlogPost.md

And easyblogger will update your post doc back with the postId of the generated post. Now, if you edit the doc and publish again with the same command, your post will be updated.

Deleting posts

To delete posts, you need to specify the post id

easyblogger delete 234546720561632959

Using EasyBlogger as a library

Using EasyBlogger class

Feel free to use the EasyBlogger class in your own tool/utility whatever else. Just remember:

1. Use your own API client id (see below)

2. Include an attribution and a link to EasyBlogger - not mandatory - but just be nice:)

Client API ids

If you’re using EasyBlogger class in your tool/utility, please then register for API access at Google’s API console. Create a client id and secret key at the API access page and request for Blogger API access. Once you have API access authorized, you’re good to get started. Just create the EasyBlogger constructor with your client id and secret

If you’re integrating by shelling out, then stick the API key and client id in the command line with --clientid and --secret args. You can also stick them in the ~/.easyblogger file to avoid specifying them each time