EasyBlogger

Blog to blogger from the command line.

Why not googlecl?

I tried. Didn't work. googlecl is just too rough and isn't easy to script. For ex:

No way to update a post
Doesn't work with blog and post ids.
and others...

So what does this do?

Provides a command line tool and create, update or delete posts on Blogger hosted blogs.
Post content can be piped in - so you can use your favourite way to generate html markup
Pandoc goodness - so that you can write your doc in any of the input formats that Pandoc supports
More Pandoc goodness - supports pandoc filters so you can do nice things like create diagrams with mermaid-filter
AsciiDoc support - Supports asciidoc as a source format as well using asciidoctor & asciidoctor-diagram
You can also export your existing posts to your favourite lightweight markup format like markdown etc as individual files. Then edit them in a real editor, and publish them back! All pandoc output formats!
Understands specially marked comments - so you can just hand it a file and it'll figure out what to do - great for posting from vim etc.

Installation, Configuration and Usage

Installation

# Now live on PyPI
sudo pip install EasyBlogger

This installs EasyBlogger and its dependencies. It also installs the easyblogger script

Pandoc

Install pandoc If you're on cygwin, you can just install the windows dl and put pandoc.exe somewhere on path

OAuth2 API Authentication and Authorization

The tool needs to be granted access to manage the blog. Google APIs use OAuth2.

First, get your blog id. You can find the blog id by viewing the source. For ex. on my blog, I have the following lines near the top:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Nifty Tidbits - Atom" href="http://blog.rraghur.in/feeds/posts/default" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Nifty Tidbits - RSS" href="http://blog.rraghur.in/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" />
<link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="Nifty Tidbits - Atom" href="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/7642453/posts/default" />

On the last link, the number 7642453 is the blogId

Authorize

On Linux
```
# run through OAuth2 hoops... following needs to be run as root
# First find your blog Id

easyblogger --blogid <yourblogid> get

# This will first open a browser and ask you to sign in and
# approve access to your blog
```
This will open a browser. You may see a chrome warning that it can't be run as root - but you can ignore that. Once you authorize, ~/.easyblogger.credentials is created with your OAuth2 token

On Windows

If your PATH variable has the python Scripts folder, then you should just be able to run easyblogger --blogid <id> get in a command window. If not, then open a cmd window and navigate to <python install folder>\Scripts and run python easyblogger --blogid <yourblogid> get
All set!

That's it - you're all set!

You will need to repeat the OAuth2 authorization process if you ever change the blog, or revoke permissions or if the auth token expires.

VIM Configuration

Stick the following in your ~/.vimrc

func! s:systemwrapper(cmd)
    echom a:cmd
    let output=system(a:cmd)
    return output
endfunction
func! BlogSave(file)
    " to debug, replace with
    " exec "!easyblogger file " . a:file
    let output=s:systemwrapper("easyblogger file ". a:file)
    echom output
endfunction
command! BlogSave call BlogSave(expand("%:p"))

Start writing a post - create a markdown file (.md) with frontmatter in a comment

<!--
id:
title    : title
tags   : [any, comma, separated, labels]
format	 : markdown
published: true
filters: <path to your filter>
-->

Note that as of Easyblogger 3.0, the preferred frontmatter format is borrowed from Hugo. The original frontmatter header in earlier versions is deprecated. However, if easyblogger finds header using the older keys, then it will use them. While there should be no reason to prefer the old format, if you need that for whatever reason, you must specify --legacy-frontmatter flag in the get subcommand. For more details, refer to the Frontmatter section

LEGACY FRONTMATTER FORMAT still supported but you're encouraged to use the new format

<!--
PostId:
Title    : title
Labels   : any, comma, separated, labels
Format	 : markdown
Published: true
filters: <path to your filter>
-->

If you prefer using asciidoc, then use the following comment header:

+++
id:
title    : title
tags   : [any, comma, separated, labels]
format	 : asciidoc
published: true
+++

LEGACY FRONTMATTER FORMAT still supported but you're encouraged to use the new format

////
PostId:
Title    : title
Labels   : any, comma, separated, labels
Format	 : asciidoc
Published: true
////

Asciidoc does not require filters - it has a better system of plugins. Just ensure that you have installed asciidoctor and asciidoctor-diagram gems

When done, call :BlogSave and your blog will be published

Usage

Getting posts

Get a list of posts post Id, title and url are output by default.

# get a list of posts
# param : Blog Id - look at your blog's atom pub url - its the number in the url.
easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get

4424091495287409038,Moving from Wordpress.com to Blogger,http://blog.rraghur.in/2013/08/moving-from-wordpresscom-to-blogger.html
...
...
# 10 rows shown

Filter by labels or search; specify max results to be returned.

# get only the last 5 with tag 'vim'
# you can specify multiple tags - separate them with commas
easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get -l vim -c 5

# search for all posts with 'vim'
easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get -q vim -c 5

Get a specific post by its id

# get a specific post by id
easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get -p 3728334747597998671

Get a specific post by its url

# get a specific post by url
easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get -u https://blog.rraghur.in/2015/06/js-development-2015.html

Control which fields are printed out.

# output field control
easyblogger  get -p 3728334747597998671 -f "id,title,url,labels"
3728334747597998671,Rewriting history with Git,http://blog.rraghur.in/2012/12/rewriting-history-with-git.html,[u'git', u'HOWTO', u'Tips']

Output in (lightweight) markup - very good for updates.

If its a single post, then its printed to console.
```
easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get -p 3728334747597998671 -d markdown
```
It also includes a header that will allow you to edit the file and update the post back with the file subcommand below
if more than one post, then each post is written to a file (name derived from the title)
```
easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get -l vim -d markdown
```

If you'd like to get a single post as a file, specific -w or --write-files

easyblogger --blogid 7642453 get -p 3728334747597998671 -d markdown --write-files

Supports all mark up formats supported by pandoc

# Output formats: native, json, docx, odt, epub, epub3, fb2, html, html5, s5,
         slidy, slideous, dzslides, docbook, opendocument, latex, beamer,
         context, texinfo, man, markdown, markdown_strict,
         markdown_phpextra, markdown_github, markdown_mmd, plain, rst,
         mediawiki, textile, rtf, org, asciidoc

Default Args file

Specifying --blogid each time is just painful. You can set a default blogId by creating a default args file ~/.easyblogger as follows:

cat > ~/.easyblogger
--blogid
234567

And now you can type the command as:

easyblogger get

You can override the args from file by providing the argument on the command line

Create a new blog post

Note: ~~Blogger API v3 does not support/expose API for creating posts as drafts. Please ask for this feature on Google's blogger dev group - I'll add that capability once/if it becomes available.~~

Blogs are created as drafts by default now. You can override this with the --publish flag which will post the blog directly (current behavior)

# create a post from stdin with title and labels


easyblogger post -t "Hello World" -l "python,hello" -c "Hello world!!!" --date 2018-01-01T10:00:00

Pipe out from any HTML generation mechanism

pandoc -f markdown -  | easyblogger   --blogid 6136696198547817747 post -t 'Hello from Pandoc' -f -
 # Hello from Pandoc
this is a nice long post

3295765957555899963

Or just tell easyblogger to convert from markdown with the --format arg

# --format supports
#                native,json,markdown,
#                markdown_strict,markdown_phpextra,
#                markdown_mmd,rst,mediawiki,
#                docbook,textile,html,latex

easyblogger post -t 'Hello from Pandoc' --format markdown -c "##heading2"

2342323423423423423

Update posts

Update works with a patch request - only specify what you need changed Blogger API does not allow the blog permalink to be updated - so in case you want to change that you'll need to delete and create another post (though you will probably lose comments etc - so only viable if you've just published it)

easyblogger update -t 'A new title' -l "new,labels" 3295765957555899963 --date 2018-01-01T10:00:00

You can also update the contents by passing in the --file argument. Piping it in works too - use --file -; like so

pandoc -f markdown -  | easyblogger  update -t 'Hello from Pandoc' --file - 3295765957555899963
# This is h1
## this is h2

Some para text
[EOF]

Posting or Updating from a file

I wrote easyblogger script primarily so I can blog from Vim. If your file has properly formatted comments, then EasyBlogger will figure out what to do (insert or update) based on the metadata.

So, you can author a post like so:

cat MyBlogPost.md
<!--
Title: This is your title
PostId:
Labels: a,b,c
format: markdown
published: false
PublishDate: 2018-01-01T10:00:00
filters: <path to your installed filter>
-->
# This is my content

The example above uses legacy frontmatter format. You're encouraged to use the new format which allows for additional metadata.

And post it to your blog like so:

easyblogger file MyBlogPost.md

And easyblogger will update your post doc back with the postId of the generated post. Now, if you edit the doc and publish again with the same command, your post will be updated.

Deleting posts

To delete posts, you need to specify the post id

easyblogger delete 234546720561632959

Frontmatter

As you've seen, easyblogger relies on a comment header with specific keys for metadata about the post as well as to drive the behavior of the program. When EasyBlogger started, I had come up with my own set of (minimal) keys. Somewhere in the 2.x days, I built support for the frontmatter format as defined in Hugo project(along with some specific keys used for Blogger) - this is especially useful if you want to migrate off Blogger to Hugo.

The header format can be either TOML or YAML. The new frontmatter keys are the default both for input and output.

Output Rules

When writing to output files with get, easyblogger will write the header in

Document format - asciidoc: Header in TOML enclosed by +++
Legacy header keys - only if the command line specifies the --legacy-frontmatter flag

Input Rules

Header enclosed with +++ - parse as TOML
Header encosed with HTML comment or //// - parse as YAML
If doc is TOML, then default format is supposed to be 'asciidoc' if not specified.
If doc is YAML, then default format is supposed to be 'markdown' if not specified.

If any of the legacy frontmatter keys (Title, PostId etc) are present, then the legacy keys are expected. Otherwise the new style Hugo compliant headers are expected.

Frontmatter keys

New style (Hugo)

+++
title = "Proxy PAC file for work"
id = "293493242234"
tags = [ "Rants", "Tips", "Utilities",]
aliases = [ "http://niftybytes.blogspot.com/2018/04/proxy-pac-file-for-work_30.html",]
publishdate = 2018-04-30T12:42:00+05:30
draft = false
date = 2018-04-30T12:42:00+05:30
lastmod = 2018-04-30T12:47:37+05:30
+++

Old style (Easyblogger)

<!--
Labels: [Rants, Tips, Utilities]
PostId: '8010087245053438499'
Published: true
PublishDate: 2018-04-30T12:42:00
Title: Proxy PAC file for work
-->

Using EasyBlogger as a library

Using EasyBlogger class

Feel free to use the EasyBlogger class in your own tool/utility whatever else. Just remember:

Use your own API client id (see below)
Include an attribution and a link to EasyBlogger - not mandatory -but just be nice:)

Client API ids

If you're using EasyBlogger class in your tool/utility, please then register for API access at Google's API console. Create a client id and secret key at the API access page and request for Blogger API access. Once you have API access authorized, you're good to get started. Just create the EasyBlogger constructor with your client id and secret

If you're integrating by shelling out, then stick the API key and client id in the command line with --clientid and --secret args. You can also stick them in the ~/.easyblogger file to avoid specifying them each time

Dev Guide

Clone the repo
Start a virtualenv - virtualenv .dev
Activate it - .dev\Scripts\activate
Install dependencies - pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -e .

Running tests

Exit out of any virtualenvs
Run tox

vmomo/easyblogger