Integrating Blogger into a Google App Engine App

Question

I use blogger for my blog and I am using Google App Engine for my site. I want to seamlessly embed my blog in my site. For example, I want the same nav-bar, footers and general ui that appear in my site to appear around my blog. I would also like to display links to my latest blog entries, perhaps with one sentence clips, on the front page of my site.

Below are links to an example of what I am trying to do. Notice how the UI and everything are identical, except the content on the blog-page is the posts:

• https://www.sugarsync.com/products/backup.html
• https://www.sugarsync.com/blog/

I know there are blogging apps for GAE, but I like the editing and posting features of blogger and I don't want to leave it.

How do I best integrate my blogger blog directly into my site? I don't need commenting in my site, although it would be nice.

I've tried editing blogger templates but it has a steep learning curve. Worse, every time I make a small change to my site, I'll have to separately change the blogger templates.

Should I use blogger provided RSS feeds? Is PubSubHubbup the right answer?

Gastrology

@speed are you aware of the Blogger API? – Rosenberg

Can you just use the same (or similar) template and put the blog on a subdomain? For example, your GAE app would be www.foobar.com, and your blog could be blog.foobar.com. That would be by far the easiest way to accomplish this. – Prosector

@Francl, that's what I'm doing now. It's alright, but the blogger templates are pretty hard to use. Worse, every time I make a small change to my site (e.g., changing fonts, sizes etc), I'll have to fix up the blogger template again. – Gastrology

@systemputoot I was not aware, thx. There's a python client too. – Gastrology

What exactly do you mean by "integrating"? That's a vague term, and it'd help if you stated what you actually want to accomplish. – Eran

@Gastrology Which solution did you choose at the end? Thanks. – Cecillececily

@Loe nevermind that previous comment. I ended up using gdata to fetch the blog posts, storing them in memcache, and then using the usual django templating engine to display them. Take a look at my code here: #5235496 – Gastrology

Answer 1

If you're trying to host everything on GAE and display your posts in pages there, you should look at the Blogger API - it's pretty simple to fetch posts.

If you just want to add some extra scripts but mostly leave the Blogger stuff as it is, I would just export your HTML template and adjust it to fit your App-Engine pages, and create links between the two. If you don't like people seeing the Blogger URL, you can add a custom domain so that the visitors only switch between yourcoolwebsite.com and blog.yourcoolwebsite.com.

Upbear