Scott Yang's Playground

Well done. mtsend.py looks like exactly what I wanted for a command line client, and seems to be working well under Fedora Core.

Funny… I’m having some problems with it from OS X/Panther:

ornithopter:~ mph$ cat .blog.tmp|mtsend.py -N -vv
Parsing post entry from standard input…
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/Users/mph/bin/mtsend.py”, line 771, in ?
main(sys.argv[1:])
File “/Users/mph/bin/mtsend.py”, line 763, in main
mt.execute()
File “/Users/mph/bin/mtsend.py”, line 219, in execute
handler()
File “/Users/mph/bin/mtsend.py”, line 313, in execute_n
post, cts, publish = parsePost()
File “/Users/mph/bin/mtsend.py”, line 579, in parsePost
raise Exception, ‘Invalid field key: %s’ % key
Exception: Invalid field key: BODY

mph, this happened to me under Panther (btw. other unixes too) when i failed to insert the “” line before BODY: (and before EXTENDED BODY: too ).
I now just take care that the input looks very much the same like the output of a “./mtsend.py -G – ” and had no problems since then.

This was exactly the only “problem” I had.
( forgive me, I surely rtfm, but I found the line not really stated as a must :)
This great one-file-software saved my day. Thank you very much.

My search done before leaded me deep into the heart of XML-specs and
RPC-definitions, MT inner working stuff, it made sort of … you know :)

and this one just worked….

Howdy… thanks for writing this script, it’s exactly what I was looking for. I guess great minds think alike.

Just one nitpick: I do believe the “ALLOW COMMENTS” header is not a boolean, but a string (integer, really, but whatever). A value of 2 means comments should be published if they exist, but no further comments can be posted. This can come in handy if, say, one wants to use your script in an occasional cron job to disable comments to old posts, as I in fact was attempting and failing miserably to do until examining the code. Looks like just a couple of lines in obvious places need adjustment.

Thanks again!

Brad,

You are right. Some code is still stuck at the stage of Movable Type 2.5x. I’ll try to fix that. Thanks.

Thanks for this wonderful script. Please tell me one thing. I’m using ExtraFields plugin, and have 2 extra fields. Is it possible for me to post those entries as well using mtsend.py.
Any ideas will be appreciated, thanks.

No. Don’t think ExtraFields would be supported as it is not supported in MT’s XML-RPC interface.

Thanx for your response. I have a new problem. In order to solve the issue I asked u in my last comment, i wrote a php script, which
1. created a new MT entry,
2. filled up the required table for Extra fields
3. then i rebuild the entry taking the entry id from 1 above (using -R option of mtsend)

My problem is that this rebuild is not working. When i was testing it on my test server, it worked fine, but in the production server, it just does not rebuild. Can u pls help?? here is part of my code:


$blog = "bnaarticles";
$conf_file = "mtsend.conf";
$command_str = " cat $txtfilename | /var/www/mt/admin/mtsend.py -c $conf_file -N -a $blog";
$entry_id_added = `$command_str`;

When i echo out the commands, they seem to be ok. Can u please help me??

Hi again. I have a new problem now. Last week i installed XML::Parser and XML::Simple on my machine as i needed to get some plugin installed. After that, my mtsend.py is giving me the following error:
Error:
What could be the problem here?? Any ideas?

Sorry, the error didnt turn up in the previous comment

Error: <Fault Client: ‘Application failed during request deserialization: \nnot well-formed (invalid token) at line 50, column 62, byte 6788 at /usr/lib/perl5/XML/Parser.pm line 187\n’$gt;

Seems weird that you would get a Perl error from a PHP and python script

MT’s docs on the importexport format have moved to http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/docs/mtimport

Is there any chance to use mtsend.py with emacs to have a functionality equaly to TextMate on OS X:
writting in Emacs and publishing via mtsend.py to your wordpress-blog?

I can’t imagine, that I can’t use Emacs as a blogeditor for wordpress.
:-o

I’m not having much luck, I keep getting Error: ‘url’ although I’ve verified that the url is correct:

cfg reads:

[global]
default=domainname

[site-domainname]
url=http://www.domainname.com/xmlrpc.php
username=xxx
password=xxx

Dear Scott,
v1.1 is working like a charm on OS X Tiger. I am able to post and then retrieve.

However, when I try to retrieve an old post entered through the web interface, I get:

Error: 'ascii' codec can't encode character you'\u2014' in
position 72: ordinal not in range(128)


BTW, the AUTHOR field is not allowed. We have to remove it.

Thanks for the wonderful tool.

I am having the same problem as Jasper. Everything is giving me an error ‘url’. I am trying to access a wordpress blog.

Just thought I’d add a comment here that this great utility also works fine with Drupal.

In case anyone else thought to use this to export content from TypePad, it breaks in enough ways that I wouldn’t feel comfortable using it without thoroughly testing it.

The two issues I encountered before moving on to try other solutions are:
1st. xmlrpclib.DateTime(val) is not in ISO8601, it is like “2007-09-11T01:24:40Z”
2nd. cat in cts are a pair not a tuple, no ‘isPrimary’

hi — great script! could do with an update, though ;)

Recently, I’ve started getting this error with my WP 2.3.3 blog:

blogclient -v -L 2
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/home/jm/bin/blogclient”, line 906, in
main(sys.argv[1:])
File “/home/jm/bin/blogclient”, line 897, in main
mtsend.execute()
File “/home/jm/bin/blogclient”, line 231, in execute
handler()
File “/home/jm/bin/blogclient”, line 314, in execute_l
self.get_password(), num)
File “/usr/local/putplace/Python-2.5.1/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py”, line 1147, in __call__
return self.__send(self.__name, args)
File “/usr/local/putplace/Python-2.5.1/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py”, line 1437, in __request
verbose=self.__verbose
File “/usr/local/putplace/Python-2.5.1/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py”, line 1201, in request
return self._parse_response(h.getfile(), sock)
File “/usr/local/putplace/Python-2.5.1/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py”, line 1335, in _parse_response
p.feed(response)
File “/usr/local/putplace/Python-2.5.1/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py”, line 547, in feed
self._parser.Parse(data, 0)
xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: XML or text declaration not at start of entity: line 2, column 0

it appears the server is sending back an additional newline at the start of the XML-RPC response, I’m not sure why, or if this is valid.

I hacked around it by adding the re.sub() line below to xmlrpclib.py:

def _parse_response(self, file, sock):
# read response from input file/socket, and parse it

p, u = self.getparser()

while 1:
if sock:
response = sock.recv(1024)
else:
response = file.read(1024)
if not response:
break
if self.verbose:
print “body:”, repr(response)
response = re.sub(r’(?s)^\n’, ”, response) # jm fix
p.feed(response)

file.close()
p.close()

return u.close()

Hi,

I am interested in using this tool to post to LiveJournal as well. I am having very little success! Does anyone have any information on this?

I have tried both directly with LJ’s XMLRCP interace (no results), and indirectly using Delicious Glue, a script for forwarding del.icio.us’s daily blogposts to LJ via XMLRCP request. When I use delicious glue, I can get the body through, but not the subject and tags.

Any clue what I’m doing wrong?

Dear Scott,
Just a note to tell you that I still use mtsend.py both from Vim and the command line on Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.4), so it’s still chugging along great.

It inspired me to write a ruby blogger for Blogger (blogspot). I use mtsend.py for wordpress blogs.

I just wrote a little script so it decides on the alias based on the folder I am in (from vim, it’s a problem changing aliases)

if [ $# -eq 0 ]
then
echo "I got no filename"
exit 1
fi
alias=`basename $PWD`
echo "Using alias: $alias"
mtsend.py -N -a $alias < $*

–
rahul

Hi,

I’m trying mtsend.py on a drupal site, and I, too, can’t get past the “Error:url’ message. What is the reason? Did anybody find it out?

Another question: can mtsend.py today set or read fields in posts which have custom fields?

TIA,
Marco

I wanted to use this to create future-dated wordpress posts.. but.. it’s hard.

I have to manually offset for GMT. Fine. It’s not relaly 6:26PM, it’s 11:26PM. I know I’m GMT-5. That part is easy.

Now it successfully posts to wordpress — scheduled and everything! Except when the time comes, it doesn’t post. ARGH.

I literally will need to find another complete solution for blogging if that doesn’t work. It sucks, because I have been using mtsend for over a year! ):

I don’t know what you mean exactly, but I do use a shell script I wrote to pick up posts from a certain folder and post them using mtsend.py. The file names contain the date to be posted.
A cron job runs 2 times a day and checks.

mtsend.py follows the usual unix philosophy of one program doing one job.

okay… the timezone issue is due to not using date_created_gmt … but anyway… i’m just trying to do a normal post like the last 200+ posts i’ve used mtsend.py for, and all of a sudden i’m getting an error:

Parsing post entry from standard input…
Saving new post entry…
Error:

Of course, how can i know what isn’t well formed when it doesn’t tell me what it is? Frustrated.

Sorry, the error message didn’t come through. It was:
Fault -32700: ‘parse error. not well formed’

@clintJCL
I’ve had parse errors recently too. Seems like a server issue. I tried posting the next day and all was fine.
–rb