The Atom 1.0, the Atom Publishing Protocol and Me
I've been looking on with interest at the developments in the Atom world. You may have noticed that things in that arena are changing. The feed format has left version 0.3 behind for a 1.0 edition. In addition, there's been quite a bit of work on the Atom Publishing Protocol. Given that Atom provides (with these develpments) an end-to-end scheme for managing content, I took some time on Friday night to dig a little deeper.
I'm still not done exploring, but am liking what I'm finding. First, I wanted to upgrade this site's Atom feed to the 1.0 standard. A quick application of the Wordpress publishing plugin and I was up and running with a shiny new Atom 1.0 feed. You can verify the validated feed as well as see other sites that have made the switch.
That accomplished, I turned to the publishing end of things. Given how the Metaweblog API pisses me off (including how there's no way to work with draft posts and how this is NOT an API document, while this is), I'd been contemplating using Atom as my drafting and writing format for new posts and in my prototype C# client.
So, when I found the plugin for Wordpress to enable Atom Publishing, I figured that it was an ideal way to handle the publishing end of things in building my client. I'm working with the author to figure out why it doesn't work out of the box on my server, but it's definitely promising.
With Atom from end-to-end, posts can be drafted anywhere, stored in something like Amazon's S3 and eventually published anywhere that supports it. Given that eventually, I'd like to be able to work on a pool of posts, independent of where they'll end up and independent of which machine I'm working on (I'm sick of tools like Performancing for Firefox that do drafting locally because I rarely spend an entire day on the same machine.
Since it looks like this is a realistic path, I think I'm going to keep working on this approach and eventually the Wordpress Atom Publishing Protocol bit will work itself out.
September 26th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
nice photo
!
go creative commons go!
October 3rd, 2006 at 7:53 pm
Hi,
Have you tried WriteToMyBlog (http://writetomyblog.com), it's a free web based Blog client which supports the Atom protocol.
Regard,
Mark - WriteToMyBlog.
October 4th, 2006 at 8:38 am
I haven't tried that, but it really doesn't suit what I'm looking for in a client. I actually have no intention of even a WYSIWYG editor in mine.
Most of what I'm after is tools for gathering and assembling content: topic research, finding good photos and illustrations, keyword analysis and tagging tools, etc. I prefer to do all of my post editing in straight HTML, so most of the tools being released don't suit how I work.
I want to be able to easily compose a post, pulling in related articles, link to stuff I've written previously, etc. without having to roam far from the editing tool.
However, it's good to see other tools that support Atom publishing as I think that it's definitely a much more cohesive method for publishing than the Frankenstein's monster that the Metaweblog API.