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My first attempt was an implementation of the then-brand-new “MetaWeblogAPI”, which was conceived as the successor to... the API of Blogger! Which was the biggest baddest most prevalent blogging system. This was back in 2004, mind you, right after Google bought Blogger, and way before Six Apart and Wordpress and so on. Anyway it didn’t work. Not only did the API not work, but even if it had done, there wouldn’t have been external tools with which to post. The blogging ecosystem never went that way. My second attempt was an implementation of my own email-based way to post. At that time, in 2011, I had just begun using my then-brand-new iPad, and began wanting to use it for blogging. There I was sitting in my family room, reading content on my iPad, and in order to post about it I had to go over to the PC in my office. Anyway it didn’t work. I built it, lots of goodness in the design, but abandoned it after a few months of not posting. My third attempt was more recent. At that time, in 2022, I switched from SharpReader to Feedly for daily reading of RSS feeds.. This corresponded with a nice new habit of having coffee with Shirley in the morning. We’d sit there, fire roaring (or windows open, depending on the time of year), and I’d be scanning my feeds for the news. Which now also included Twitter/X feeds. I’d read about something, and in order to post about it I had to go over to the PC in my office. And that was truly crummy.
This very post was composed and sent as an email. This likely spells the end for the oldest tool in my kit, a venerable desktop app named Citydesk. It predated my blog by about a year (2001!) and was built by Joel Spolsky’s Fog Creek Software. (They were known for FogBugz, an early and most-useful bug tracking tool, and Joel went on to co-create Stack Overflow...) Citydesk hasn’t been supported for years but it keeps working, and has been the only way for me to post to my blog in all this time. Does this mean more posting from me? Better posting? Or the end of times? Who knows.... Stay tuned!
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Way back in the dawn of time, way way back, I messed around with an API for my blog. The idea was that I could use (gasp!) external tools to post. It would make things easy. And in particular, Maybe I could post on any device from anywhere.
And so ... and so ... yes, I finally finished the email-based API to my blog. I could tell you how it works, and you could admire it, but you couldn’t use it because it is custom for me and my little blogging world (sorry). It is however pretty nice, I must tell you. I can post images (including auto-resizing-them), I can edit posts, I can embed links, do all the things, from *any* device which supports sending email, so any device at all. And of course I can do it from anywhere at all too.
