I've written a routine that submits a comment to a Typepad blog via the Perl Mechanize routine. The comment is actually generated in an iphone app and the perl script acts just as a relay taking the comment/username/url from the iphone using form POST. The perl script then goes to the blog post, generates the comment and presses 'submit'.

The problem is that it works *sometimes*. This I do not understand. Why does it work sometimes? Is it my script or is it Typepad? Here is the script below. Sometimes the post does not go through but I still get a status of '200' back from Typepad. Alternatively, anyone know any API's or other methods for posting a comment on Typepad? I've looked at their APIs and they do not have anything that will post a comment....the APIs are only able to add a blog post. 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

require "../cgi-lib.pl";

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

&ReadParse(*F);

my $error = '';

$author = $F{'author'};   # username of the person posting
$email = $F{'email'};     # users email address
$comment = $F{'comment'}; # comment to submit
$comment =~ s/\%([A-Fa-f0-9]{2})/pack('C', hex($1))/seg;;
$url = $F{'url'};         # the url of the blog post
$url =~ s/\/comments\/atom.*/\.html/;
chomp($url);

if ($author eq '') { $author = 'Anonymous'; }
if ($email eq '' ) { $error .= 'Email was blank. Comment not posted'; 
+}
if ($comment eq '' ) { $error .= 'Error: Comment was blank.'; }

if ($error ne '' )
{ print $error; exit; }

use LWP::Simple;
use WWW::Mechanize;
use HTTP::Cookies;

my $m = WWW::Mechanize->new( autocheck=>1);
$m->get($url);


    print $m->response->status_line;

        if ($m->success)
        {
           $m->form('comment-form');
           $m->field('author',$author);
           $m->field('email',$email);
           $m->field('url','');
           $m->field('text',$comment);
           $m->click('post');
           print "Your comment has been posted.";
           print $m->response->status_line;
        } else  {
            print "Was not able to connect to website.";
        }

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In reply to Trying to submit a comment to Typepad Blog using Perl Mechanize by Anonymous Monk

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