Back on March 2, I posted that org2blog was suddenly not working. I
was certain that it was something my host provider was doing but that
turned out to (probably) not be right.
In order to push posts to WordPress, org2blog uses XML-RPC to talk
to the WordPress server at the Irreal site. Any attempt to access the
server through XML-RPC returned a 400 (Bad Request) error. I was
pretty sure that the hosting provider was blocking XML-RPC for some
reason but they swore they weren’t. I threw together a bit of Python
to make a test post using XML-RPC and that did work so my provider
was provisionally off the hook. In the meantime, my provider got
acquired and the new owners are blocking XML-RPC so now I have to
argue with them about not doing that.
I’ve been able to continue posting by converting the Org mode source
for a post to HTML and manually pasting it into the WordPress editor.
That’s a pain but it does get the job done except that the formatting
of the posts is wonky. In the last two or three days, I’ve received
email from a couple of readers complaining about line break tags in the
posts. It turns out that the line breaks are what makes the formatting
look bad. It’s annoying enough that they make the posts look funny in a
browser but, as you can imagine, it causes real headaches for those
trying to read Irreal on a small screen such as a mobile device.
I checked the HTML that gets generated when I convert from the Org
mode source and it looks OK. It’s also OK when I display it locally
(without going through WordPress) so apparently WordPress is adding
the breaks when it displays the post. I don’t know why this happens
and I can’t find any solution in the documentation. If you know a
workaround for this please leave a comment.
So the TL;DR in all of this is that yes, I know about the line breaks,
and no, I’m not inserting them just to be perverse. In fact, I’m not
inserting them at all: WordPress is. I am trying to resolve these
problems and hope I can get things back to normal soon. In the
meantime, thanks for your patience and I’m sorry about the lousy
formatting.