Primordial Ooze

(Warning, very dry entry to follow!)

For a long while, I’ve seen the EditURL header property in my blog web pages and I had no idea what it meant or what it was for. it always pointed to a file called rsd.xml. What the heck is RSD?

I often removed this field it thinking it was another kind of feed. I wanted to cut the concept out of my mind because I didn’t understand it.

I tried using Google to find out, but I was surprised by the lack of quality in the returned links. So, I instead looked at the rsd.xml file and it’s purpose started to get clearer.  

<rsd version="1.0">
    <service>
        <engineName>Movable Type 3.2</engineName>
        <engineLink>http://www.movabletype.org/</engineLink>
        <homePageLink>http://www.primordia.com/blog/</homePageLink>
        <apis>
            <api name="MetaWeblog" preferred="true" apiLink="http://www.primordia.com/blog/mt-xmlrpc.cgi" blogID="1"/>
            <api name="Blogger" preferred="false" apiLink="http://www.primordia.com/blog/mt-xmlrpc.cgi" blogID="1"/>
        </apis>
    </service>
</rsd>

This still doesn’t help me although it seems pretty clear that a program t hat sucks in this information would get an idea on the Web API’s that will likely work with the blog. In this case, the Blogger and MetaWeblog API.

If you’ve delved into the inner workings of BlogJet (my blog posting software of choice) you’ll notice that you don’t necessarily have to choose "Movable Type" as your blog access API. There are other choices such as, well, Blogger and MetaWeblog in the Blog Type dropdown found in the New Blog wizard.

Still, I wanted to learn more. What other capabilities can be exposed in this file? So, I viewed source and saw the namespace used by the RSD XML file: http://archipelago.phrasewise.com/rsd. Going to that URL revealed what looks like a permalink to the RSD spec, here: http://media-cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/gems/tech/rsd.html.

After reading that, I see the purpose of RSD is to allow editing software to automatically configure itself. It’s a shame that BlogJet seems to ignore the RSD file! In fact, the BlogJet "New Account Wizard" has been designed to ignore this file. Currently, BlogJet asks you to specify the location of the xml-rpc URI and the type of blog you’re connecting (Movable Type, Blogger, etc.). This initial dialog can be simplified to a single question, where is the main page for your blog? If BlogJet doesn’t find an RSD, then the existing dialog is probably necessary. Then, BlogJet asks you which blog you want to connect to on a single server. A single xml-rpc URL for Movable Type might support dozens of blogs. Again, this step is unnecessary since the blogID is contained in the RSD! In the above example,  this is 1 for Primordial Ooze.