So, I routinely use XPost to update all of the various copies of my crossposted blog (myspace has been broken for many months and I haven't had the inclination to start doing Wireshark dumps again). This is usually a straightforward endevour, but sometime over the last few weeks google decided to change the data that they return in response to requests. This caused XPost to break for blogger blogs because it was no longer able to properly parse the blogid which is associated with each blog in the blog listing for a user. The irritating thing is that they haven't updated the API reference documentation to reflect this change. The root cause is their lack of inclusion of the "self" link-rel. This had previously been one of the easier parts of a blog entry specification from which one could parse a blogid and was the one that I had been using. Now, I'm being forced to use the "id" field (which despite what it says contains significantly more than the id) which produces information that doesn't match the specification that is in the damn reference documentation. I hate wasting time to redo working code because someone else updates the interface without bothering to tell anyone. Moreover, google should fix their api so that they have a few extra fields so that each part of the "id" field is a single unique part rather than several disjointed parts which happen to go together.

Published by XPost