Today I was playing with my our public website, enkelmedia.se, where I host this blog. It’s built with Umbraco, some custom document types and some event handlers that takes care of the sorting and stuff.
One of the features that I’ve been playing with is the MetaWeblog API which makes it possible to post content to Umbraco using almost any device. You can use Windows Live Writer (like I’m doing right now), an iPhone app or any other software that supports the MetaWeblog API.
Some stuff did not work
What I found was that the implementation in Umbraco sometimes lacks in it’s handling of exceptions. I.e. clicking yes in this dialog made my blog root node disappear and I hade to consult this post by Alan Donnelly to solve it. I removed the last entries in cmsContentVersion and republished the node using the direct url /umbraco/editContent.aspx?id=yada.
Even more annoying
Was the fact that the Umbraco implementation of MetaWeblog API returns your sites url whithout scheme or ports:
yadadomain.com/blog.aspx
Window Live Writer expects something like this:
http://www.yadadomain.com/blog.aspx
And the crazy party is that there is no way to change it in the Windows Live Writer UI, the textbox is disabled:
The only way is to open “regedit” and look for this key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Writer\Weblogs\ where you can change the settings of Live Writer.
Contribution to the core?
We’ll to be honest, until now I haven’t really taking the time to clone the repository from CodePlex before, I’ve played around with the source and used is as a reference and for documentation – but never really change any thing.
But today I read though the instructions on how to contribute and actually performed my first pull request!