Started Blogger Tools Project

Tools for private blogs on Blogger.

I have a private blog that is shared with only a few friends. I wanted the ability to automate sending emails to the blog subscribers when I post an update. The only tools I found to do this are available only for public blogs. I decided to solve my problem, learn new things, and try my skills by building a set of tools to use with private blogs on Blogger.

I'm starting with an automated email but plan to develop other tools as I have need and time.

Github
https://github.com/wesdean/blogger-tools

This project is by no means production ready, but you are welcome to take a look at what I have so far.

Programming Language: Go
User Interface: Command Line

Challenges so far

My first challenge, of course, was finding the API I needed to work with Blogger and learning how to use it. 
There is a Go API for the Google API located here. 
I had some trouble figuring out how to use it and the documentation wasn't very helpful. I decided to write my own API, since I need some of my own code for my portfolio anyway. 
I found a getting started guide for the Google Blogger REST API here. 
This was helpful for getting me started.

I was going okay getting my API set up and running requests against the Google API on a public blog. I ran into a problem when I tried to access a private blog using an API key. It turns out that Google's Blogger API requires oAuth and doesn't work with an API key. Now I had to figure out how to do oAuth on the command line.
I found a nifty oAuth tool here that is written in Go.
So far I have only run it as a separate tool and put the resulting access token in my API's config file. My plan is to integrate this functionality into my app.

The Google Blogger API getting started guide doesn't cover how to use an access token in requests. It took me some time to find out how to do this. Turns out it was quite simple. Just pass the access token as a GET parameter called "access_token" instead of "key".

Now I am getting successful responses from a private blog! Yeah!

Well, that's where I am so far. Stay tuned for more updates!

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