Blogging Roller

A couple of bloggers at BSC have asked about Performancing for Firefox, so I've been trying to get it working with Roller. Since Roller is not on Performancing's  list of Blogging Service options, I tried "custom blog," specified "MetaWeblog API," and entered my blog server settings. No dice. So, I turned on Roller debugging and watched what Performancing is sending over the wire. Here's what Performancing sends for the MetaWeblog API newPost() method:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodCall>
  <methodName>metaWeblog.newPost</methodName>
  <params>
    <param> <value> <string>t</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>t</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>p</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>:</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>/</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>/</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>l</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>o</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>c</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>a</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>l</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>h</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>o</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>s</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>t</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>:</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>8</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>0</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>8</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>0</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>/</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>r</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>o</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>l</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>l</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>e</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>r</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>/</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>x</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>m</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>l</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>r</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>p</string> </value> </param>
    <param> <value> <string>c</string> </value> </param>
  </params>
</methodCall>

My post had the title "test" and the content "test" and as you can see, neither of those words appears in the XML above. Obviously something is horribly broken. I've offered to help the Peformancing folks get Roller support going, but I'm not sure I can really do anything to help. Looks like the problem is on their side.

Assuming that Performancing's other options (Blogger.com, WordPress.com, TypePad.com, LiveJournal.com and MSN Spaces) work fine, this is pretty depressing. Plain old unadorned MetaWeblog API is the one that's broken, the one that's tested last and the one nobody cares about. Is that really true? Did the Performancing developers really have to write custom code for each and every blog server?

Tags: topic:[Performancing], topic:[MetaWeblog API], topic:[XML-RPC], topic:[Blog client]