Developing an API [or more accurately, 'protocol'] for Tabulas has been an ongoing frustration of mine for the past few months. Everytime I feel the inspiration to finally delve into developing a proper XML-RPC API for Tabulas, I run into some huge problem and I give up. But today I told myself that I would *finally* sit through and complete the API, even if it kills me!

But what is an API? It stands for application programming interface. An API is a method of allowing the innards of Tabulas to be accessible to any programmer. For example, a programmer could write a program that would make a request to a special Tabulas URL, and Tabulas would spit back the data in a specially formatted manner.

The crossposting feature for Tabulas makes use of Livejournal and Blogger APIs which allow Tabulas to send those "Post Entry" requests to those services.

APIs are how other websites can access your site. APIs are also how other developers can make client-side programs work with your services. Livejournal has a great client called Semagic which allows you to pretty much access your LJ account from a desktop application.

An overview of the current APIs available:

• Blogger API - Very rudimentary, but also incredibly common
• metaWeblog API - An expansion of the Blogger API
• Livejournal API - Very specific to Livejournal features
• Atom API - A new "built from the ground up" awesome API that's supposed to do everything ... except it's not officially 'stable.'
• Movable Type also has their own API, but it was of no interest to me, as all the ones above seemed to do everything already

So what am I to do? There are so many competing standards! Unfortunately, I'm going to follow convention and follow programs that are already built for specific APIs - meaning I paid extra attention to the Blogger API and the Livejournal API. By supporting the LJ API, Tabulas users could (in theory) use Semagic to update their Tabulas. And I really like Semagic. A lot.

But before I even begin with that, I decided implementation of the Blogger API would be easier. So I downloaded a copy of w.bloggar, which is a popular Win32 client that works with a ton of XML-RPC APIs.

One problem with w.bloggar is the formatting of each entry - it uses the standard "mark up your own HTML" instead of using a WYSIWYG editor. That seems to really defeat the purpose of downloading a client to begin with. Maybe once I get a Mac, I can try and see how well ecto works.

But progress goes slowly. I'm starting to slowly get a grasp of how XML-RPC works. Hopefully by sometime later this week, I'll have the API working so you guys can download a client and not have to use a browser to update your site [har har].

I should also get to work on that confounded post via e-mail feature.

So much to do, so little time.

Update at 452 AM: I've added support for the basic Blogger API XML-RPC calls: blogger.getUsersBlogs, blogger.getUserInfo, blogger.getPost, blogger.getRecentPosts, blogger.newPost, blogger.editPost and blogger.deletePost.

If you're really adventurous, go download w.bloggar, and set-up a "Custom" blog tool with the host of api.tabulas.com and path of /xmlrpc/. Use your Tabulas username/password to use this feature.

Note: none of the templating features on w.bloggar will work.