In an earlier post I introduced a new web service workaround I put together to allow me (and you) to post messages to an MSN spaces blog via a MetaWeblogAPI. The web service intercepts the post and then sends it as an smtp mail through the MSN spaces email publishing feature.

The whole purpose behind creating all of this was so that I could use one tool – BlogJet – to be able to post to both my personal and my technical blogs. Here’s how I hooked everything together:

1. Install the web service – I installed the web service on some space I own on webhost4life, and configured the smtp server and from email address configuration details in the web.config.

2. Configuring BlogJet to support Post To Spaces API –  I opened the BlogJet api type definition file at c:\Program Files\BlogJet\apitypes.xml and added the following:

    <API>
      <Id>27</Id>
      <Title>Post To Spaces</Title>
      <APIName>MetaWeblog</APIName>
      <DefaultHost>WWW.YOURHOST.COM</DefaultHost>
      <DefaultPort>80</DefaultPort>
      <DefaultEndPoint>/PostToSpaces/Service/blogger.aspx</DefaultEndPoint>
      <ShowSubject>True</ShowSubject>
      <MultipleBlogs>False</MultipleBlogs>
      <PublishEnabled>True</PublishEnabled>
      <FileSupport>False</FileSupport>
      <HasCategories>False</HasCategories>
      <EnableDates>False</EnableDates>
      <EnableExcerpt>False</EnableExcerpt>
      <EnableKeywords>False</EnableKeywords>
      <EnableComments>False</EnableComments>
      <EnableTrackbacks>False</EnableTrackbacks>
      <EnablePings>False</EnablePings>
      <UseSSL>False</UseSSL>
    </API>

(Note, the Id = 27 was arbitrary, the main thing is that it needs to not conflict with the ids used for the other types in the file).

3. Creating the BlogJet account – After saving the file, I opened BlogJet and chose to create a new account, selecting Post To Spaces as the provider type.

4. Username & password – The username should be your space name and password should be your secret word as configured in your space email publishing settings.  

5. FTP Settings for uploading images - I could not figure out how to post pictures directly to MSN Spaces (if you figure this out, let me know). But, you can (optionally) configure an ftp server to use to upload pictures to if you have space elsewhere. All of your image links will point to the appropriate file at the configured base url.

That’s it! If you have questions let me know.