What is the Atom API?

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  mikecane · Member · May 9, 2008 at 1:27 pm

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  Matt mentions it here:

  April Wrap-up and Monotone Photoblogger Theme

  >>>There were 475 posts made via the Atom API (234,831 with XML-RPC).

  I didn’t know about XML-RPC until raincoaster educated me (I now use BlogDesk for longer posts with many photos, bypassing the web method).

  What is Atom and how is it used and what software uses it?

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  josephscott · Staff · May 9, 2008 at 2:38 pm

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  The specific part of Atom that is used is called AtomPub, short for the the Atom Publishing Protocol. There’s a good short description from the AtomPub RFC:

  The Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) is an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources.

  It attempts to solve the same sort of problems that the blog APIs in XML-RPC do.

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  mikecane · Member · May 11, 2008 at 8:30 pm

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  Are there offline blog composition tools (for free!) that do that? Is there any advantage to using it intead of XML-RPC?

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  josephscott · Staff · May 13, 2008 at 4:06 pm

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  Windows Live Writer has some AtomPub support. I haven’t looked in detail to find out if there are any others.

  In the case of WordPress, there are more features exposed via XML-RPC than there are AtomPub, so that gives XML-RPC a definite advantage.