Broken xmlrpc on wordpress.com

I use the python xmlrpclib library and a customized version of vimpress to blog on wordpress.com. I recently started getting errors like this

[code lang=text]
ProtocolError for mypersonalblog1984.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php: 301 Moved Permanently
[/code]

However the issue is not peculiar to python, its xmlrpclib implementation or vimpress. It has to do with a minor change implemented by wordpress.com; they only allow https connections to xmlrpc. One must send a plaintext password, and this is bad security. So all I had to do was change the xmlrpc.php url to

[code lang=text]
https://mypersonalblog1984.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php
[/code]

and it started working again.