WLW Cross-Post with Ping.fm posts - Details

Robbie Coleman — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:52:28 GMT

This is a follow-up post that I had promised regarding these two previous posts:

So... first and foremost, I only extended an existing WLW plugin developed by Daniel Cazzulino called Cross-Post (CodePlex source here). I found his implementation very easy to follow and well suited to boot-strap my idea for posting to Ping.fm's REST API. I also used (but modified to my liking) the C# Wrapper Class written by Adam Duffy (a developer at ping.fm) located here.

Now for the details of each component (Cross-Post plugin & Ping.fm API)...

Cross-Post plugin

The Cross-Post plugin was designed to take a just published blog post in Windows Live Writer (WLW), and then post it (optionally summarized) to all the other weblogs configured in WLW. For a full and complete description, please check the author's blog post that describes it:
How to cross post entries across blogs from Windows Live Writer

Ping.fm REST API

Ping.fm did a wonderful job keeping their REST API clean and simple. If you are not familiar with their site or service, they describe themselves in the following way.

"Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap."

They allow you to post to 22 (at the time of this post) different social/bloglike sites (listed here in no particular order): twitter, jaiku, facebook, myspace, bebo, tumblr, pownce, friends, message, mashable, brightkite, xanga, plurk, plaxo pulse, identi.ca, friendfeed, blogger, hi5, kwippy, wordpress, livejournal

As far as their REST API, it is well documented here. The two methods my implementation uses are:

user.validate: Validates the given user’s application key. This is how authentication/authorization works on their calls. The combination of the developer's API Key and the user's Application Key. I call this method when a user enters their key into the plugin's Option Dialog within WLW.
user.post: Posts a message to the user’s Ping.fm services. This allows 3 basic methods, blog, microblog, and status. I make two of these calls for the cross-post.

The first as a blog post with title intact yet the body is optionally summarized with the link back to the source post. This uses that optional "title" parameter of the "user.post" method.
The second is a microblog post that states:
"New Blog - " [title]:[permalink]
The best part about this is that Ping.fm automatically shortens all links greater than 20 characters long.

So what does it look like when it posts...?

Well... this post that I am writing now and you must be reading sometime later was posted using WLW and this Cross-Post plug-in. So it got posted as a full blog post here, and a summarized (200 characters) to the following blogs:

It was also posted as a announcement link on the following Micro-Blogs of mine:

Now all I need to do is complete me testing and fine tuning, then I can submit it first to Ping.fm for approval (that will allow for users other than me to use my API Key to post). Once that is done I can submit the plugin to the WLW Gallery.

Robbie Coleman : applications, cross-post

WLW Cross-Post with Ping.fm posts - Details

Cross-Post plugin

Ping.fm REST API

So what does it look like when it posts...?