Faking Blog Integration With XMLRPC and Ruby

I’m rebuilding indiecraftshows.com in RoR, but the blog will stay on WordPress. The rails app will be hosted on Heroku, and the blog will stay where it is at NearlyFreeSpeech.net. There’s one catch: I want the latest blog post to appear on the home page, which is part of the rails app.

To do this I’m using ruby’s included XMLRPC library to grab the latest post from WordPress and shove it into a YAML file named with the date and post ID. This happens in a cron job run daily. Since I only care about showing the most recent post, I don’t bother to check to see if there are other posts I don’t have.

I created a really simple object called (creatively) BlogPost, and chucked it in with the rest of my models in app/models. Note that BlogPost doesn’t inherit from ActiveRecord.

require 'xmlrpc/client'

class BlogPost
  def self.latest
    Dir.chdir(Rails.root.join('blog'))
    post_files = Dir["*.yaml"]
    most_recent_file = post_files.sort.last
    YAML::load(File.open(most_recent_file))
  end

  def self.fetch
    server = XMLRPC::Client.new2('http://www.kellbot.com/xmlrpc.php')

    blog_post = result = server.call("metaWeblog.getRecentPosts",1,YOUR USERNAME HERE,YOUR PASSWORD HERE,1)
    File.open(Rails.root.join('blog',"#{blog_post[0]["dateCreated"].to_time.to_i}-#{blog_post[0]["postid"]}.yaml"),'w') do |io|
      #we only want the published ones
      YAML.dump(blog_post[0], io) if blog_post[0]["post_status"] == "publish"
    end
  end
end

When the home page is called, the controller grabs the most recent yaml file (by name, not by time of creation, since WordPress allows you to lie about time). I just use the XMLRPC object as-is, but if I wanted to I could get fancy and do some post-processing to make it a little more friendly.