Following up on yesterday’s posting on blogging more, I looked at using the WordPress desktop and Android apps. This to see if using those apps makes it easier to blog something on the go (triggered by Peter’s comment that enabling mailing entries to his blog helped his workflow.)

It turns out that I can’t connect to this blog from those apps. WordPress is designed to build the connection using its own plugin Jetpack. I’ve been using Jetpack for visitor statistics already, and previously noticed how the statistics function was the only bit that ever worked. Jetpack needs the xmlrpc file that allows remote access to work. While that file exists in my install and responds as if its active when accessed (“XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only”), in practice it does not seem to be functional. Running the Jetpack debugger to test xmlrpc returns an error message.

None of the suggested fixes by Jetpack help, like disabling all plugins to see if there’s a conflict with Jetpack, and I already am running a default theme. As a final measure they suggest to disconnect Jetpack from the Jetpack settings, but that does not work…..as Jetpack says it can’t save settings. Which was the issue I started with, so I’ve come full circle without a solution.

[UPDATE: my hoster confirms they’ve disabled external calls to xmlrpc as they see it as an attack-vector]