As I mentioned yesterday, I'm playing around with Blogger, trying to post all my old use.perl posts there from a script.

Blogger has an old API which is based on XML-RPC, and is too weak to be anywhere near useful. It doesn't allow setting post titles and dates, for instance.

Fortunately, they also have a new Atom API, which has these features. However, it is much more difficult to use, and the information about programming Atom clients is still too scarse. Anyway, I found a Perl script that manages to access Blogger via Atom, using LWP::UserAgent and HTTP::Request (with authentication over Crypt::SSL). I made some changes to it to fit my needs and now I'm finally able to post entries with titles and dates.

I already dropped all my use.perl entries into xml files on my PC using WWW::UsePerl::Journal, now all that's left for the transition is to upload all these posts to Blogger.

Typically, though, I have just the idea to make my life more difficult. Since I'm now feverishly learning Ruby, I decided it would be symbolic to use Ruby instead of Perl to port my entries away from use.perl :-)

So, I started porting the Atom-access script from Perl to Ruby. LWP::UserAgent and HTTP::Request are replaced by Net::NTTP and its subclasses and mixin modules (a wonderful Ruby feature), and the SSL is handled seamlessly since Ruby comes with OpenSSL preinstalled. I managed to port almost everything, and now just have one little problem left before my Ruby script is fully functional to do its job.

When I'll finally finish it, I'll post a how-to on my new Blogger blog.