Cross-posting from WordPress to LiveJournal woes

I hate to do this, but I’m finally fed up with something that’s been bothering me for a while …

I’ve used a series of various WordPress plugins that mirror posts to LiveJournal, and for the most part, they work great. However, there’s been an issue: whenever I edit a post, it appears to delete the LJ post and post it as new. Not a huge problem, except for the fact that any comments left on the old LJ post are lost, which is a real drag.

I’m starting to wonder if it’s not WordPress or the plugins that are causing the problem, but the blog post authoring app that I use: MarsEdit. I don’t think so, but I haven’t ruled it out yet.

So, I’m posting this entry and will be using it as a test entry in which I’ll try to get to the bottom of things, either fixing the plugin that I’m currently using or otherwise figuring out what the problem is. Therefore …

Don’t post comments on this entry, or at least expect them to disappear suddenly as I test.

Thanks.

Update: This post originally was posted to LJ as http://dossy.livejournal.com/68169.html. Here’s the first edit using the WP web interface directly.

Update #2: Great, WP updated the post and updated the LJ post without changing the post ID. Now, I’m editing the post and adding this update using MarsEdit. Let’s see what happens …

Update #3: Aha! After posting the last edit using MarsEdit, the post on LiveJournal disappeared. A new post on LJ was created, with the latest post content, though: http://dossy.livejournal.com/68462.html. Not sure if it’s really MarsEdit’s fault, or a bug in the WordPress XML-RPC interface that MarsEdit uses, or the way that MarsEdit uses it. For completeness, I’m going to note that the WordPress post_id hasn’t changed regardless of how the post is edited.

Update #4: This reminds me, I need to submit an enhancement request for MarsEdit, to refresh an individual post from the server. Having to refresh all posts and pages just to pick up the edits within MarsEdit that I make in the WP interface is quite cumbersome.

Update #5: I’ve also posted a thread on the Red Sweater MarsEdit forum about this issue, to see if I can get any troubleshooting help there.

Update #6: I posted detailed troubleshooting information to the forum, but the summary is that MarsEdit invokes the WP XML-RPC in a way that marks the blog post as unpublished, then published again, and that causes the WP plugin to delete the LJ post and then re-post it. I’ve gone and made some adjustments to the plugin to NOT do this, so hopefully folks commenting on LJ won’t have their comments so unceremoniously deleted. Ideally, MarsEdit shouldn’t be marking posts as unpublished then republished (seriously, what?) but since I can’t fix that, I can fix the plugin to not delete LJ posts in response.