Lonely Lion: Under the Covers

What's the big deal with the Lion, McAvoy? Why do you get all giddy every time you start ranting about the site?

The Lonely Lion is a collaborative publishing environment. There's a bunch of software pieces that all interlock in order to make it happen. This is a high level explanation of what these pieces are, how they interact, and why this shit's so cool.

Let's follow the path of a post, from my desktop, to the Lonely Lion. I run Radio 8.02 on my desktop. Radio is a news aggregator, and content management system. Radio grabs headlines from a variety of sources, and presents them on my desktop. If I like something that Radio presents to me, I can comment on it, and publish it to my Public Radio site. Radio, being the robust power house that it is, also publishes my post to my public RSS page. RSS is a XML based standard for presenting news stories. Most major news agencies, and many minor ones (like Lonely Lion), have an RSS feed. It allows guys like me to easily syndicate their content.

In addition to all that fun stuff, Radio also takes my post, and publishes it to my Blogger site. The post is passed between Radio and Blogger via the Blogger API. The API speaks XML-RPC, an independent standard for http based client-server communication. XML-RPC is a glue that allows a Java program to talk to a Perl program, a C program to talk to a Java program, or Radio to talk to Blogger.

Now Blogger has the post. Blogger updates the Lonely Lion through normal FTP. Blogger also allows the other Lonely Lion webloggers to post to the site using Blogger's web based editing tool. Theoretically, each of those guys could also run Radio on their desktops, or any other kind of XML-RPC aware publishing tool. In fact, the ever-popular McAvoyRobot, a ALICE chatbot that I run from home, publishes his logs to it's own Blogger site with a Perl script that I wrote. The Perl script packages McAvoyRobot's log file into a XML-RPC packet, and sends it to the Blogger API. Like my Radio posts, Blogger grabs it, and posts it to McAvoyRobot's site.

This is what it looks like:

My Desktop ==XML-RPC==> Blogger API ==> Blogger ==FTP==> www.lonelylion.com
(Radio)          |                          |
             Public Radio                   |
                                            |
                             My buddies =>__/

So why don't I just do what my buddies do, and post via the Blogger interface? Why do those Ham Radio guys put 50 foot high antennas in their backyards? Because they're crazy.