Beware Free Hosting

The old adage "You get what you pay for" reared it's ugly head today. I've spent the better part of two days working with the Wordpress API and various XMLRPC Actionscript libraries. Having never worked with XMLRPC before I expected it to take a bit to get the hang of things. I was having a helluva time however and could not figure out why I couldn't even get a call to a simple "hello" method to work. It kept coming back with a "malformed XML" error. Wordpress comes with and xmlrpc.php file when you install the software so I couldn't believe there was something wrong with their code, after all, other people were able to make it work. Then, this morning when I was looking at the data being returned it hit me. GoDaddy's free hosting accounts have banner ads across the top of the page. The HTML for those adds was being returned with my request data and causing the XML to go all wonky. I tried a Wordpress account on a paid hosting plan and everything was fine...ugh.

Ribbit Amphibian

I'm sure by now most of you have heard of Ribbit and their Flex based VOIP service. There is a new article on TechCrunch today talking about their new service, Amphibian. Amphibian in a nutshell, is the “convergence of your personal mobile communications with your personal web experience.” One of it's main features is that it allows you to aggregate all of your different phone numbers into one rich dashboard experience. Another feature I found particularly interesting was the ability to gather a person's "feeds" (flickr, their blog rss, LinkedIn etc...) while your talking to them. Seemed to me like an interesting way to achieve a certain level of collaboration with the caller. The best part for us is that it's still Flash based so the developer community can build additional services and make them available through the Ribbit market space.

AS3 Wordpress Library

Anybody out there know where I can find some examples on how to use the AS3 Wordpress library from Orange Flash? I started messing around with it tonight but didn't get too far (I'm sure watching 300 at the same time didn't help...).

More on Parsing Feeds with Flex/AS3

Several days ago I posted a couple lines of code that came in quite handy while parsing an Atom feed. Mike Chambers has put together a more in depth post on parsing Atom/RSS feeds using the as3syndicationlib.

Check it out here

Re-Release: AIR Blogging Tool - "Catharticus" beta release

Okay, I'm an assbag. I forgot to re-test single blog accounts before I released the app. Thanks to Matt Wright for the feedback. Things should be working a little better now - give me another chance :)

--------------Original Post

A few weeks ago I thought I'd build a "quick, little AIR app" to post to my Blogger account. As I got into I realized that it was a little more involved than I thought but I also realized that it could be a much bigger, much "cooler" application if I extended it a bit.

Here is my first release of the application. There is still a long way to go but it's usable and actually has some useful functionality I think. Currently you can login to your Blogger account (plans to include WordPress later), select your blog if you have more than one. From there you can add and edit/view posts.



There is also a "Twitter Drawer" where you can keep track of the last 15 tweets in your timeline as well as post your own status updates.

You can download the application here.

You'll need the Adobe Integrated Runtime installed on your machine to run the app which can be downloaded here.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Parsing Atom Feeds with Flex/Actionscript

Very important, if you are trying to parse an atom feed, say from Blogger for example. Make sure you include the following lines of code. If not, you could spend several days trying to figure out how to "trick" the system to work. I'm not saying I did this, I'm just saying it could happen...

// Define and use atom namespace
private namespace atom = "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom";
use namespace atom;