grahambinns.com

When I first started thinking about re-writing grahambinns.com in Python using the Django framework, one of the things that I knew I wanted to be able to do was make blog posts (amongst other things) using the MetaWeblog API, which is one of the many zillion XML-RPC blog posting APIs that exist out there in the intartubes.

XML-RPC isn't one of the features that Django supports out-of-the-box for fairly obvious reasons; whilst it's not exactly a niche market it is something that needs to be specifically tailored to the sites that use it, so implementing it would exactly be the first priority for the Django cadre.

Because Python already offers some pretty kick-ass XML-RPC library code in the form of xmlrpclib (Python rocks, by the way), which made it easy to implement a simple XML-RPC server myself, I did. And now you can use it, if you want to.

django_xmlrpc (as I've unimaginatively called it) offers a Django app that allows you to expose your functions through XML-RPC. At present it doesn't support introspection, but that's the next aim for it.

You can find django_xmlrpc, along with instructions about how to use it, at its Google Code site (n.b., I'd like to use Launchpad exclusively for this, but for the time being I'm using Google code until I can get round to setting up a wiki and what have you). If you've got any issues, please report them using either Google Code's bug tracker or (for preference) the project's Launchpad bug tracker.

I'm working on making my MetaWeblog implementation a little more generic; more news on that as and when.

#!/usr/bin/python
from base64 import b64decode
print b64decode('MDkgRjkgMTEgMDIgOUQgNzQgRTMgNUIgRDggNDEgNTYgQzUgNjMgNTYgODggQzA=')

That'll be all.

Looks like we're up-and-running. Bon. The DNS propogation took longer than I expected, partly because the update didn't go out until 9:30 GMT, which I'd managed to not notice. Anyway, seems like everything works (for the time being at least), so I'll call it a win.

There are still a couple of tweaks that I need to make, but they're mostly on the back end, so you won't see them. For the most part though, Django handles things admirably, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Doing the development work for this site - and in turn learning how to use Django - has been a lot of fun, so I'm going to keep playing with it; you might find you see a lot more tech-oriented posts on here now as a result.

That's not to say, however, that I'm not still making things up; on the contrary, I'm steeling myself to start on Novel-the-second in the very near future (probably next week or the week after). It's just a case of getting all if my creative ducks in a row (it's the shooting them part that worries me). I've got plenty of ideas and plenty more to come but I can't help feeling that if I don't start now one of two things is going to happen:

1. I'll spend all my time world-building and writing down ideas and not actually write any prose or
2. Someone else will write the story before I do.

And now I need to fiddle with my Python.

[Edit]

Before I forget, props must go to Simon Willison , whose blog introduced me to Django (he co-created it) and whose django_openidconsumer library I used as a replacement my own, less comprehensive OpenID consumer implementation. Many thanks Simon.