My development partner, Adriaan, suggested that I join the Atom community and suggest improvement to the Atom API to resolve the issue I have. Sure that would work, if I am so inclined to spend the time and effort in pushing through changes in a project managed by committees! Me, I am the equivalent of regular computer user who is dissatisfied with Windows (and let’s say the Mac as well for sake of argument) and switch to Linux. Would I join the Linux OSS community just because I’ve found a bug in the OS? No, I just want to use the OS, possibly one that works.

Put it in another way, I have a day job developing software for corporation. I then spend my evening time developing my own software for sale. Now, do I really want to spend more time pushing proposal for new features or changes in the Atom API? No.

Put it one more way. How about I concentrate on doing my job which is to develop application, and Atom API developers and service providers (Blogger and TypePad) do their job which is to develop a working API? Yes please…

SixApart and TypePad may be trying to boast MT/TP plug-in developer base. But what about desktop client developer like myself? For the last week, David Stewart and I had been trying to find out more information regarding Atom API implementation and neither of us have heard a word from TypePad or Six Apart.

Problem #1: Right now it is possible to set a post’s category using the Atom API, but has not way of retrieving this category when retrieving the post from the server. Does that make any sense at all?

Problem #2: TypePad’s Atom API documentation contains a very brief mention of file upload but no example on how to use the API. We, developers, need to know what data to put into the XML document. Is it base-64? Is it some other format? We are not psychics, you know!

Before you ask me to open a help ticket with TypePad, I’ve done that last Tuesday and it is still “Awaiting Staff Response”. David Stewart has someone to pose the question to Anil Dash, and that seems to be disappeared into a black hole.

If Six Apart is committed to bring Atom API to the masses and encourages developers to migrate away from blogger/metaWeblog/MT API, they need to provide much better support! Right now, I am very reluctant to declare my ecto application as supporting Atom API when it can’t even retrieve a post category or uploading a file, let alone modifying TypeList or Photo Album.