When I re-launched my blog last year I mentioned that I made several changes to the XML-RPC code in order to make blogging from Windows Live Writer simpler. I didn't release the XML-RPC mods at the time, because I wanted to make sure they were nice and stable. Now that I've been using the mods for almost a year, I think their stable enough to share.
The changes I made most involved trying to simplify blog posting. My key objective was to try and avoid having to drop down to the "source code" mode altogether, but still be able to use the custom tags that BlogCFC supports such as the <more/>, <code> and <textblock> tags.
To solve this problem I build some parsing functions which look at the incoming HTML and look for these special tags written in escaped HTML. When it finds these tags, it then converts the escaped HTML into their unescaped format. This allows me to just cut-n-paste or type in my <code> blocks directly into Windows Live Writer and never have to go into "View Source" code. This means I can use the "Normal" (Design View) and just type into Live Writer:
<code>
<h1>Hello World!</h1>
</code>
To produce:
I can also just type in the <more/> tag into Live Writer in the place where I want to split text into two.
You may be wondering how I'm able to use the type in these special tags without the parsing functions picking them up. Since I knew I may want to actually blog these tags at some time, I build in some escape characters you can use to avoid processing and have the tags displayed correctly. In order to display one of the special tags, just write the tags with brackets (i.e. "[" and "]") just inside the < and > characters, for example: <[specialTag]>. This only works with the <code>, <more/> and <textblock> tags.
I have not tested this code with that latest BlogCFC code, but this should work with BlogCFC v5.9 (released Oct 12, 2007.) Either way, before implementing I recommend making a backup of your "xmlrpc" folder and even doing a diff on the folders to compare the changes.
The one change you'll need to make to your Live Writer setup, is you must add the query string "?parseMarkup=true" to your XML-RPC URL in order for BlogCFC to use the parsing functions. I did this to make it easy to toggle this functionality on or off on a per blog basis.
If you download my XML-RPC mods and use them, let me know how they work out for you! Perhaps if the mods are well received, I'll tidy them up even more to see if Raymond Camden wants to include them in the official release.
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