mrshl | blog

Finally.

At last I’ve managed to get Windows Live Writer to work with Life is a Thrill. I’ve been using it to post to my LiveJournal and Blogger blogs, but something about the Wordpress install here at LIAT was breaking it down. This annoyed me because, I kid you not, Live Writer is the best, most flexible blog client I’ve ever used. I’ll have to tell you why in a separate post.

For now, what follows is a boring technical post about how I got it work (mostly so that others searching for a solution can find it here). Regular readers, do not read on unless you want to be BORED.

Now, after much searching on various blogs and support forums I’ve managed to figure out the problem. The trick was checking with my host’s support folks. Here’s the whole text of my request to them:

I’m trying to use an external blogging client to post to my Wordpress Blog at mrshl.net. No matter which client or service I try to use, I’m getting errors that prevent me from posting to the blog. In all other respects, my Wordpress Install is working perfectly. 

The forums at Wordpress.com lead me to believe one of two problems (or both) may be the culprit(s). First, [my host] may be using mod_security to restrict access to my XMLRPC file. For this problem it’s recommended that I alter my .htaccess file with the following code:

<Files xmlrpc.php>
SecFilterInheritance Off
</Files>

See the following links:

http://wlwplugins.com/how-to-fix-invalid-bloggergetusersblogs-method-response.php
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/130095?replies=5
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/83603?replies=10

The first link above recommends that I contact you to ask you to turn off mod_security with respect to the xmlrpc file. So I’m doing that.

The second problem is that PHP 5 might be breaking the XML file. See here:
http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4248#comment:8
http://whocares.de/2007/05/08/php-522-breaks-xmlrpc/

Unfortunately, I’ve carefully implemented each of the fixes. And I’ve tried various alternates. Nothing has resulted in any fixes.

Got any ideas?

Turns out I had a couple of problems the above links had not addressed:

1. My server host actually has a custom mod_security setting that isn’t disabled by the SecFilterInheritance workaround above. My host folks gave me a different bit of mod_security code that solved the problem. For security reasons, I’m not posting it here, and anyway it’s likely different for different hosts. If you have the same problem I had, try contacting your host.
2. I had tried fixing the PHP 5 problem by altering my  xmlrpc.php file. But the Wordpress 2.2.2 download already addresses this problem. Any additional changes or fixes you make to the xmlrpc file will likely produce the following error: “Invalid Server Response - The response to the blogger.getUsersBlogs method received from the weblog server was invalid.” When I restored the original xmlrpc file, everything worked perfectly.

Anyhow, if you’re here because you were having a similar issue, I hope this information has helped you out.

UPDATE: I should note that Wordpress released version 2.2.3 today and that the “original” xmlrpc file I downloaded was, in fact, the revised 2.2.3 version. It could have been the new iteration of xmlrpc.php that fixed my problem in #2 above. But it might not have been.