the blog4j project

Hi there. Thanks for checking out blog4j. You may also want to look at the sourceforge project page.

UPDATE: Development of blogMate has stalled due to the fact that w.bloggar now fully supports all the features of all the major blogging tools. Development of blog4j will continue, but there will be no new releases of blogMate unless other developers want to continue enhancing it.

*** All blog4j projects are developed using JDK 1.4. You will need Java 1.4 to run them. ***

new - Version 0.1 of the blog4j API released.
new - Version 0.4 of blogMate released.

projects

The goal of the blog4j project is to build some good tools (in Java, of course) on top of the various weblogging APIs such as Blogger and metaWeblog. The following sub-projects have thus far been started:

• blog4j API - a powerful API for accessing blogging tools via their XML-RPC interfaces
• blogmate - a full-featured desktop client application for managing weblogs

The blog4j API allows you to easily access blogging tools from your Java program. The API provides various levels of wrappering around the RPC APIs, from very rudimentary to tool-specific implementations that use specialized objects for the parameters and return values of their methods.

The ultimate goal of this subproject is to provide an API that evolves with the RPC APIs and fully supports all operations defined by the RPC APIs.

The blog4j API desperately needs testers. It has thus far only been tested on Blogger and MovableType. If you run Radio 8, B2, or any of the other tools that provide RPC APIs, we would greatly appreciate your help. The next version of the API will include a suite of JUnit tests that will make testing much easier.

blogMate

blogMate is a desktop client for managing weblogs. It has a number of cool features, such as:

• Supports all major blogging tools
• Adapts to the features provided by the blogging tool being accessed (e.g. when accessing MovableType, you are able to enter a title and category for each post)
• Able to save posts and templates locally for offline editing
• Spell checking of posts
• Preview tab that shows what a post will look like on your blog
• Able to maintain blogs on multiple accounts
• Proxy support
• Skinnable using both pluggable look-and-feels and MetalThemes

Planned Enhancements:

There are a number of enhancements we are currently working on. Please check this list before posting a feature request.

• Improve start-up time
• General code clean up - improve error handling, logging output, documentation *
• Implement support for categories for Cafelog/B2
• Add font and alignment actions to the format menu
• Pretty up this web page

blogMate needs one or two good hackers, at least one of whom should have significant Swing experience. If you're interested, please e-mail John Didion.

blogMate also desperately needs testers - especially those using blogging tools other than MovableType and Blogger, and those running on platforms other than Windows. We realize that blogMate is in alpha phase and probably has a few bugs, but we promise to work hard to improve it if you'll help us find the things that are wrong with it. Right now, our priorities are (in order):

1. The XML-RPC interface - making sure we're sending the correct data to the interface and getting back the data we expect
2. Application bugs
3. Cross-platform compatibility
4. Performance
5. Look and Feel