echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

Seems Atom is popping up everywhere in my world at the moment, after a bit of a quiet period.

Chris J. Davis announced his plans to create an AtomPub client for iPhone. I had a discussion with Rick Cockrum about AtomPub and the metaweblog API, on his blog, which was raised again on the Habari developers list. And then Habari trunk was merged into the AtomPub development branch, because no-one has had a chance to do any work there recently. Well, no-one being me, and I got a poke from freakerz. Better start working on some of those AtomPub tickets.

The Habari developers have done a great job getting AtomPub implemented early on. The AtomPub implementation is now error free, according to the APE, but there are still warnings and it is still partially incomplete. As I see things, these are the outstanding issues that I know about, in no particular order. Each of these should probably be entered as a separate issue in the tracker. As I'm not super familiar with the spec, I've probably missed bits that Habari doesn't support. If any of this is wrong, or it's incomplete, or you think my solution is off, please ...

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• Write a mini AtomPub desktop client with a Shoes frontend
• Write a bibliographic tool (distributed?)
• Complete the AtomPub implementation in Habari (media and comments collections, content types, categories (tags), summary)
• Implement a templated workflow system
• Migrate to Habari
• ... um, finish my Phd, I guess
...

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freakerz asked an interesting question on the habari issues tracker.

How should we handle this kind of behavior? If the client does not use the APP properly, should we prevent the loss of information by catching/handling bad requests?

• Issue 56 - habari - Google Code
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Another suggestion was that we do away with the Atom autodiscovery <link> element and just use an HTTP header, because parsing HTML is perceived as being hard and parsing HTTP headers is perceived as being simple. This does not work for Bob either, because he has no way to set arbitrary HTTP headers. It also ignores the fact that the HTML specification explicitly states that all HTTP headers can be replicated at the document level with the <meta http-equiv="..."> element. So instead of requiring clients to parse HTML, we should just require them to parse HTTP headers… and HTML.

• dive ...

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I was excited to learn recently that the Nokia N73 can speak AtomPub, and that a friend of mine owns one. I thought I'd try to make it talk to the new AtomPub implementation in WordPress, but reading through the N73 documentation I found that it only supports WSSE authentication, and WordPress only speaks HTTP Basic Authentication. I'd never heard of WSSE, but Mark Pilgrim has a good write up on XML.com, and the Ape has the ability to speak WSSE, so I thought I'd implement it in WordPress. Bear in mind that I'm not writing this from a ...

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I mentioned previously that the AtomPub server in my WordPress installation wasn't successfully deleting entries. More specifically, I get a 403 Forbidden when trying to PUT or DELETE posts or media files. I posted to the wp-testers mailing list and Joseph Scott passed the question along to Sam Ruby, Tim Bray, Elias Torres, and Pete Lacey, and I basically eavesdropped on their conversation....

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I've posted a small WordPress AtomPub FAQ. It's a temporary home until I can find somewhere sensible to put it. If you have anything you'd like to add or correct or mock, comment here. If you can offer a sensible place to put it, let me know.

So, WordPress 2.3 beta adds support for AtomPub. All good. I installed it (separately to this blog, I'm just playing around), but all I could get out of the APE was a 401, even though I'd provided the correct authentication credentials. Looking at the code, with liberal use of the logging therein, I worked out that PHP_AUTH_* weren't being set, so I pulled out some auth code and tried it on it's own. No luck. Weird. I then grabbed a previously working snippet and tried that, but it was broken too. On both the servers to which I have ...

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