Why blogging from Word 2007 to Dasblog does not work.
I was really excited by the Blogging feature Word 2007 – It looked really good, easy to use and some of the formats you can do to a picture are pretty cool.
As soon as I found it I tried to set it up with this dasBlog account – Word 2007 is supposed to support the metaWebLog API (which dasBlog supports from v1.9), so in theory it should have worked – however it didn’t work fully.
I could upload new blog posts but it didn’t like the posting of images – in returned a message saying it was not supported and I should use FTP upload instead.
I wasn’t happy with this as the metaWebLog API has a newMediaObject method which allows for uploading of images etc and I know it is implemented in dasBlog (I think Omar Shahine added it).
Anyway, I emailed Joe Friend (the MS guy who originally posted about this feature of Word) – he has since moved on so couldn’t help (in fact I think my email to him was the catalyst for his Email is now off post – oops)…
The annoying thing is that Windows Live Writer supports the metaWebLog API implemented by dasBlog and can upload images fine….
Mmmmm, something not right here – taking things into my own hands, I cracked open Fiddler and compared the HTTP request / responses between a Writer posting and a Word posting. The Word postings always fail on the newMediaObject calls – here is a screenshot of the request / response from Word.
Looks like Word is trying to pass the blogid parameter as an int and not as a string as the spec dictates…
As far as I know, Word works correctly with MySpaces, Blogger and a few other blogging engines – maybe they are not as strict as dasBlog when checking the parameter types passed ??
I suppose I could write an HTTPHandler or something to convert that type description from an ‘int’ to a ‘string’.