Overview of BlogspotOnAppspot
BlogspotOnAppspot at first sight might appear to be just another blog engine in a very crowded market, but it is the first one that leverages the Google AppEngine infrastructure and the Google Blogger Data API. To clearly define it, it is a blog web app that runs on Google AppEngine and interacts with Google Blogger application via the Google Blogger data API. For the rest of this article and future articles, we will refer to end users as readers of the blogs. Blog authors are people with developers' skills who are interested in using and deploying BlogspotOnAppspot.
BlogspotOnAppspot is built on the following principles:
1. Competing against any of the Google services should always be avoided. Instead, what should be done is combining, leveraging and providing a way to complement these Google services.
2. Re-inventing the wheel is discouraged. There are hundreds of Blog engines out there, so it is a wasted effort to write another one just for the sake of writing one. There must be some value-vadded.
3. Always try to keep things simple, but without sacrificing any feature and performance. As a result, BlogspotOnAppspot includes all the major features that you would find in other blog engines.
So let's see how BlogspotOnAppspot works:
1. You must sign up for an account on AppEngine. You must also have an account on Blogger. Both are Google services, and they can be tied to your GMail account.
2. As a blog author, you would log in and use the Blogger interface to write, edit, and manage your posts, comments and domain settings, etc.
3. Once you publish a new post or make change to an existing post, you would log in to the BlogspotOnAppspot Admin page with your AppEngine account. AppEngine account is the account under which you register "BlogspotOnAppspot" as your web application.
4. Run a "Reload" command. The "Reload" function will use the Blogger Data API and pull down all meta data feeds and post feeds, and update the local datastore powered by BigTable on AppEngine.
5. When end users visit your blog powered by BlogspotAndSpot, they would see a site that has a unique look and feel and does not look anything like any of the provided Blogger templates.
6. Internally, when end users visit a blog, BlogspotOnAppspot does not need to interact with the Blogger Data API, but only to the local datastore on AppEngine. This helps improve performance.
7. End users can choose to leave a comment for a post. If they so choose, they would be taken to the Blogger Comment page. One of the strengths of Blogger is that Blogger supports many anti-spam features. So as a result, your blog will be almost perfectly free of spams.