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Sunday, April 14, 2002

MacOS and Office Posting
Pointing at alternate ways of posting to weblogs from Microsoft Office running MacOS.
Dave is up after midnight pointing at work Simon Fell is doing with SOAP, the Blogger API, the Google API and Microsoft Word. My heart sinks a bit knowing that the stuff he's done will only work on Windows. (Please correct me if I'm wrong on that. ;-) [Jakes Brainpan]
Well, this specific case is Windows only, but there's no reason for it to be, I thought XML-RPC & SOAP support was baked into Mac's these days, and I guess the Mac version of Office is similarly scriptable.[Simon Fell]
Well, while it's not on my current to-do list (still struggling with javascript and browser compatibility), I'll point to a few possible ways of doing the same thing when running MacOS X:
Microsoft Office X fully supports Visual Basic, some of Simon;s code is probably directly re-usable.
Better yet, Office is also fully scriptable with AppleScript.
Starting with MacOs X 10.1, AppleScript comes with SOAP support.
If you're allergic to AppleScript, you can always rely on Paul Kulchenko's SOAP::Lite Perl module, since Darwin comes with a fully functionnal Perl 5.6 distribution. All you need is a little VB glue.
If I were to use the blogger and metaBlogger APIs to post to s l a m, I think I'd rather do it from the the Calendar window of Microsoft Entourage.
Calendar Events have titles, descriptions, and categories as well as date/time stamps. Office's spelling checker works from the description part of the event window. Events are easy to track by date and category, approximating the Radio interface.

10:23:10 AM comments: Google It!