A month on the command line, Day 6: Blog posting without a GUI

By Steven Rosenberg on May 8, 2007 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) |

Blogging from the command line without a GUI -- and no e-mail gateway -- can be done ... almost.

Using the command-line, text-only Elinks browser to post blog entries -- or to complete Web forms in general -- is a lesson in trial, error and frustration. But disciplined use of keystrokes -- and a little dumb luck -- allows these browsers to post to Movable Type blogs such as this one.

The biggest obstacle to blogging in Movable Type with Elinks is that the Save button doesn't work. That's a big problem.

To get around the dead Save button, just go to the Authored On box and enter an appropriate time for your entry to have as its time stamp. Then press Enter.

When the browser asks whether or not you want to post the form, respond in the affirmative.

At that point, you may need to log in again. If so, do it, and your entry will be saved on the site.

But ...

For some reason, the entries from Elinks are marked "published," but they don't appear on the live site until, at some future point, other work on the blog is done. AND ... the picking of a catetory for the post doesn't seem to be sticking. The latter I can live with, the former remains puzzling.

Note: Testing was done in Elinks. This doesn't work in Lynx.

3 Comments

dbr said:

http://scott.yang.id.au/2002/12/mtsendpy/

"mtsend.py is a command line tool that utilise Movable Type’s XML-RPC interface. It allows its users to edit/post/view/list post entries on a Movable Type site. It takes input from the standard input, and sends output to the stdout, just like all the other well-behaved command line applications"

http://scott.yang.id.au/file/python/mtsend.zip

May be of some use to you :) I didn't write it, but it seems like a good way around the annoying links incompatibility - It'll work on pretty much any "modern" weblog'ing system that has an XML-RPC interface

May 9, 2007 3:10 PM

Steven Rosenberg said:

Thanks, DBR! I can't believe that such an app exists. I'm going to try it.

May 9, 2007 4:11 PM

Lawrence D'Oliveiro said:

"Text mode" is not the same thing as "command line". Want command-line access to your favourite GUI Web browser? Try the following command:

firefox &

May 11, 2007 1:11 AM

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