July 31, 2003
Blog This! your own way
Hmmm, I've hacked the google blogthis toolbar to post to my own weblog. It's a hack but a workable one until google offers a way to configure it manually. On a Windows 2000 or XP box one can edit %WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and add a line that points new.blogger.com to a local host. I've an apache box that's up to the task (a bit of virtual host jiggery-pokery) and now it answers instead of the actual blogger site. The next step is a cgi program that captures the incoming parameters the google toolbar sends it. The trick is rearranging the params and pushing the same params into your own weblogging software.
There's another way to do this but would involve hacking into the GoogleActivate.dll binary file. Searching for hex "6E 00 65 00 77 00 2E 00 62 00 6C 00 6F 00 67 00 67 00 65 00 72 00 2E 00 63 00 6F 00 6D" as in "new.blogger.com" delimited by hex 00, shows that the address is hard-coded directly into the toolbar itself. The trick is making sure the hostname you want to use it exactly the same number of characters. I hacked it up to use one here and it worked well enough.
The trick now is to make an input screen that effectively mimics the one it uses.
