The Blogger APIs

I took a look at the APIs for accessing Blogger (and a large range of Google's other data services). I am a Google fanboy. No surprise there. Android is just the logical next step on that journey. They seem to provide so much more than the companies that I used to rely on. People like Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. Its a while since I used MS technologies professionally, so maybe their offering has come along, but Sun - now Oracle - is still stodgy fare compared to the nice things that Google lets us do. 
So what can you do with the blogger APIs - well pretty much anything you can do with a blogger account. Create posts, edit existing posts, delete posts and add comments. A range of client languages are provided for in this - php, JavaScript and for my liking Java. 
In essence the Blogger API is just a layer sitting on top of a common data access API provided by Google for most of their services (Analytics being another interesting example). So the client bit just puts together chunks of XML which it fires at the server using your provided credentials. If you do everything right, the server responds with an appropriate chunk of XML. The client libraries hides the xml from you directly and does all of the marshalling. So far so good. 
So what did I do today? Well I modified one of the sample programmes to count the words in a blog post. This idea came from reading a post on a web site where someone said a target of 1000 words per day blogging is a good place to try to hit. Based on the idea that just doing it is a good way to improve your skill at it. Bit of Malcolm Gladwell's idea of 10,000 hours in there and a bit of Seth Godin - just telling me to get on with it as a way to prevent writers block. Nobody gets talkers block after all. 
So here I am - putting in a few of those words for today. My plan is to make up the 1000 per day across by blogs rather than aiming for some herculean 1000 on each blog - I have a few - some deader than others. 
Next up I am going to modify the program to count the words in all of my blogs and save this on Google AppEngine (see there I go again). Next day the program will compare what I had the day before and tell me if I have hit my 1000. Pretty straightforward stuff, but App Engine is something that always throws me, so doing something simple on that seems like as good an idea as any. Also just executing something to its logical conclusion is a healthy activity for anybody. 

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