Saturday, June 19, 2010

Welcome googleCL

I am writing this blog post with Vim, my favorite editor, instead of using the online editor offered by blogger. And I am uploading this post to my Blogger account using Google CL a tool that lets you use Google services from the command line.
I am a command line geek, and as soon as I saw the announcement, I installed it in my laptop. The mere fact that you are reading this blog post shows that it works.

GoogleCL is an apparently simple application. If you install it on Mac using macports you realize how many dependencies it has and how much complexity it gives under the hood.
Using an easy to understand syntax, it allows you to access your blog, pictures, calendar, contacts, videos, and online documents at your fingertips.
For example, let's query my blog for partitioning:

$ google blogger --blog="The Data Charmer" --title=partitioning list "title,url"

Hmm. No results. The manual doesn't help much, but something happened during this query. The first thing ist that I was asked to authorize the script to access my blog, and that was done by activating a key that I got in the command line. So far, so good. The second thing was a message informing me that a default configuration file was created in my home directory. Looking at that file, I saw an option saying "regex = True". Aha! So the title supports regular expressions. Let's try:

$ google blogger --blog="The Data Charmer" --title=".*partitioning" list "title"
Holiday gift - A deep look at MySQL 5.5 partitioning enhancements
The partition helper - Improving usability with MySQL 5.1 partitioning
A quick usability hack with partitioning
MySQL 5.1 Improving ARCHIVE performance with partitioning

OK. This gives me everything with the word "partitioning" in the title. But I know that some titles are missing. Comparing with the results that I get online, I see that the titles where "partitioning" is capitalized are not reported. So the search is case sensitive. What I need to do is to tell the regular expression that I want a case insensitive search. Fortunately, I know how to speak regular expressions. Let's try again.

$ google blogger --blog="The Data Charmer" --title="(?i).*partitioning.*" list "title"
Holiday gift - A deep look at MySQL 5.5 partitioning enhancements
Partitioning with non integer values using triggers
Tutorial on Partitioning at the MySQL Users Conference 2009
The partition helper - Improving usability with MySQL 5.1 partitioning
A quick usability hack with partitioning
MySQL 5.1 Improving ARCHIVE performance with partitioning

Now I feel confident enough to do some changes to my online contents.
To create this blog post, I used some of googlecl capabilities. After I created an image, I uploaded it to my Picasa album using this command:

$google picasa post -n "Blogger Pictures" -t googlecl ~/Desktop/google_cl.png

Then I asked Picasa to give me the URL of the image:

$ google picasa list -n "Blogger Pictures" --query googlecl title,url_direct
google_cl.png,https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigTW09cp-kY2qB2l0zbiCMfM3LTN-ZbjlrhKH0wlxFgOqodQ_Mf5D8aSlq_w2Hv4A2aJiHgqbQR3J8gNiUmmWgTAAPO4AHvyHDHUx6GbCZBlIZQL7QYO6JBxepsk9XuDx8q3Q8/

And then I inserted that URL in this blog post. Finally, I uploaded the blog post with this command:

google blogger --blog="The Data Charmer" --draft --title "Welcome googleCL" --tags="google,mysql,partitioning,command line,blogging" post ~/blog/welcome_googlecl.html


(Now writing online) And after I checked that the post was looking as I wanted it, I hit the "PUBLISH POST" button.
Welcome, GoogleCL!

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