My friend Xiru mailed me this morning, asking if I had tested BloGTK with CMFWeblog. Well, I hadn’t yet, so it was about time to try it.

First thing that I noticed was that it wouldn’t connect, giving a strange error message (“An error occurred while connecting. Check your settings”). The first thing that I thought was that it could be a problem on the settings I entered, so I go to error_log to check if there was a traceback there. Everything looked OK, so it could be a problem on the client side, maybe caused by a failure on parsing the server response. So, I tried using Shane’s tcpwatch to intercept the communication and see if there was something strange there. Apparently nothing was wrong there either. So, time for a small session with pdb, after all, BloGTK is written in Python!

Stepping through the source revealed that the problem was caused by a KeyError: CMFWeblog was returning blogname in response to blogger.getUserBlogs, but the spec says it should return blogName. Error corrected, now CMFWeblog works with BloGTK too!

And it gets even nicer: If you choose the Movable Type API on the connection settings, you can see a list of available categories that you can post to. Amazing!

BloGTK is very nice, and even has a Preview Post tab that you can click to check how your post will look as HTML, and Spellcheck so you don’t look dumb. The only thing I missed are the tooltips on the toolbar icons. I wonder if they are just missing or broken.

Overall, I liked it though I still prefer my power combo: pyrite+emacs+restructured-text. I recommend BloGTK if you are a occasional blog poster that happens to use Linux and have pygtk2 installed. A bonus if you don’t mind looking through the source and fixing small bugs that may appear.