Introduction
This article will introduce how I improve the publish flow from OneNote to blog, and make it so easy with a single click.
The old flow is: collect material in OneNote -> write article in OneNote -> rewrite into Markdown and prepare images and other dependency -> uploaded all files into blog server.
The huge problem is that the article blog is written in Markdown. I have to rewrite my article in OneNote, and manually maintain the images.
The new flow is: collect material in OneNote -> write article in OneNote -> single click publish to blog and we are done.
I don't have to rewrite it and maintain the images. It really spark my enthusiasm into writing more blog with so fluent experience.
The fundamental here is metaweblog api.
Metaweblog API
The metaweblog api is an XML-RPC api developed back in 2002. It define a set of methods like metaweblog.newPost , metaweblog.getPost and metaweblog.editPost , so that the blog author could maintain their blog with the api.
I believe no much people know the existence of XML-RPC . It is a HTTP based api, and the content format is xml in a certain struct. I will give an example of XML-RPC request.
<methodCall><methodName>blogger.getUsersBlogs</methodName><params><param><value><string>1</string></value></param><param><value><string>2</string></value></param><param><value><string>3</string></value></param></params></methodCall> |
The method name for this request is blogger.getUsersBlogs and it passes three string params.
The metaweblog api is implement by famous CMS like WordPress.
And the good news is that MS Office also support metaweblog api.
You can choose the blog post template here.
And publish it to your blog account.
If you are using CMS listed here, you could post your OneNote by "Send to Blog" button.
Metaweblog Server
If you are not using CMS but using Hugo , Jekyll , or other ways to build blog by yourself. You can also leverage the metaweblog api by running your own metaweblog server.
I implement a metaweblog server using Golang , click here to check the detail.
You can download the binary in release and put it with a config.yaml file.
blogURL: https://chasemao.com # The URL of your blog. blogTitle: Chase Mao's blog # The title of your blog. blogDir: ../hugoblog/content/article/ # The directory where blog articles are saved. mediaDir: ../hugoblog/static/media/ # The directory where media files (images, videos) are stored. mediaRelDirForBlogHtml: /media/ # The relative path to the media directory, used in the blog HTML for links. userName: xxx # Your username for authentication. password: yyy # Your password for authentication. |
By default the server will listen in localhost:1314 , you could using Nginx to reverse proxy it or using -a flag to listen on other address.
To make sure the server run automatically, you could add a new system service.
sudo vim /etc/systemd/system/metaweblog.service |
And paste the following into it.
[Unit] Description=Metaweblog Server After=network.target
[Service] User=your-username Group=your-username WorkingDirectory=/path/to/your/binary/ ExecStart=metawebloggo Restart=always
[Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target |
And enable it.
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start metaweblog.service
sudo systemctl enable metaweblog.service |
With all setup, you could single click publish OneNote, and the article and images will be sent to the server. After the content is updated, you could setup an auto compile or file watcher to rebuild your blog.