For a while now I’ve been using a product called Kung-Log to write up my Rants remotely. See, MovableType (MT) – the software that I’ve been using to manage this site for a bit now – has been great for posting Rants, while online. It offers a web page that I can post the Rants to – from PC or Mac which was a new requirement for me – but that only works while I’m connected to the ‘net. For writing while offline, I’ve been using Kung-Log. Kung-Log has been allowing me to write up “Drafts” while offline, complete with inline spell checking and tag management. Ideally, Kung-Log would allow you to sync and upload changes to the server that’s running MT, but I haven’t been able to do that… until now.

It seems that there’s been a bug with the version of SOAP that comes with MT, that causes problems when it is hosted on an IIS server; since this server is IIS based, I suffered from this bug, which is what stopped Kung-Log from working. Neither MT nor Kung-Log were to blame for this bug, but it was still out there and prevented me from uploading Rants without some grunt work. Well, thanks to a posting from else where on the ‘net and a single line file change to an MT module, Kung-Log now works!

In the MT\ExtLib\XMLRPC\Transport directory, open the HTTP.pm file. Add the following line:

undef $ENV{SERVER_SOFTWARE};

before this line:

@XMLRPC::Transport::HTTP::CGI::ISA = qw(SOAP::Transport::HTTP::CGI);

and that’s it! Kung-Log was able to connect to the site and pull down Categories and Recent Entries. In fact, if all things go well, and this post gets to the server, I’ll then know that everything is working!

I love technology when it works and makes my life easier – I just hate it when you have to work harder to get the technology to work in the first place! At least neither of the tools that I love to use are responsible for my troubles – was a completely hidden bug that did that to me.