Mark Wang's Xanga blog mirror script

What is this? Why is it useful?

Xanga is the most popular blogging site out there used by millions, but its closed, proprietary hosted system, and lack of many features standard in other blog-management software as well as total ability to tinker with the source code and customize settings to one's heart's content has made it to be looked down upon amongst the "hard-core" bloggers.

Xanga is hard to ignore because of it's user community. In particular, I found that many of my friends only bothered to read other Xanga sites through its built-in aggregator, and rarely if ever read non-Xanga sites like mine hosted using Movable Type. So, for a while, I was manually mirroring my MT entries onto Xanga via cutting and pasting. However, being the lazy nerd I am, I decided to come up with something better.

Presenting the Xanga mirror script, written in Perl. It automates logging in and posting to Xanga, and is designed to be called from content-management software such as Movable Type. In all fairness, the idea isn't totally mine, although this implementation is. I first saw this technique on a friend of a friend's site, and was intrigued. However, he was apparently using some other CMS, and not MT, so I decided to implement my own solution.

The requirements are simple: MT or some other blog/content management software written in Perl, a host that you have access to, and some basic knowledge of editing text files on UNIX. Oh, and of course, a Xanga account, which you can freely sign up for if you don't have one already. The basic one will do -- no need for Premium.

Usage
Xanga.pm -- the Xanga posting script. Download this, edit the user setting variables in the file itself, and save it to somewhere in your Perl @INC path, probably PATH_TO_YOUR_BLOG_SOFTWARE/lib/. For Moveable Type using the default installation paths, it's the same directory that MT.pm is in.