The Developer's Corner Links Home Page

Contact me at :
fahimf@email.com

Sat, Sep 28 2002

Thank you to all of you who wished me well (both in the comments and privately ...) on my upcoming "secret" venture! I appreciate all of your good wishes and know that with so many people wishing me well, that things will indeed go smoothly :-)

I've also heard from several people on different matters. Jim Woods, who had written to me earlier about occasional FTP problems in Blog for no apparent reason, wrote in to tell me that he'd found that the culprit was ZoneAlarm. So if you're having sporadic FTP problems in Blog and do run ZoneAlarm, now you know where to look. Andreas Bucher wrote in and kindly volunteered to translate the Blog documentation to German. In fact, he went above and beyond and offered to do a WinHelp file but since Tyran is already doing one, I told him just a translation of the Blog.txt file would do for the moment and that he could always translate Tyran's help file once he's done. So thank you all for your kind contributions and for the information you provide that always helps make Blog better :-)

Nigel has been discussing a feature to strip all HTML code from Blog entries for digests and I sort of gave him the impression that I wanted to discuss this further - but I sneakily coded the feature in already :p At least, I started on it yesterday. I'm simply adding another per-journal setting which specifies whether the strip HTML or not for the digest version. I still haven't done the HTML stripping code itself though everything else is in place including the call from the digest generation code to the HTML stripping code. I am undecided as to whether to simply drop all text between angle brackets (< and >) or to look for specific keywords like A, IMG etc. The latter method would stop the possibility of an error in the case somebody just wanted to use a greater than or less than sign but will obviously leave in some stuff since I will not have a comprehensive list of HTML tags. At the moment, I'm leaning towards the use of dropping everything between a set of angle brackets - and I'll try to ensure as far as I can that errant less than or greater than signs are not dropped along with any text between them ... I guess the only way to test it is to code it :p
posted at 06:47:30 AM  link  comment

Fri, Sep 27 2002

I've received an offer to translate the Blog documentation to Italian by sOLTiCE. Thanks sOLSTiCE! And of course Tyran tells me that the help file he's doing will include 7.0 features as well and so we might actually be able to release the help files to coincide with the release of Blog 7.0 final. Actually, considering how slow progress has been recently, this is more than a likely possibility. I think I have fixed most of the bugs but there is one persistent bug which gives me trouble - the one dealing with the custom snippet buttons on the toolbar. I can always reproduce the problem but fixing it seems almost impossible due to the way the customization feature is coded. The Action toolbars in Delphi are fairly complex to begin with (I mean adding/removing buttons via code ...) and the stuff I'm doing is even worse. Ah well, persevere, persevere :p

Oh yes, except for the bugs, there are a few changes to be made or rather, additional features to be included since Nigel tells me that the digest feature is almost there but not quite :p I see his point about the changes he wants (he wants the ability to strip HTML code from entries for the digest ...) but I also feel bad about doing something arbitrarily without giving the user choice since another use may feel differently about the matter. So I'll probably include one option or a bunch of options for various tags, depending on how I want to implement it ...

There's a major change coming in my life on the real life front but I can't tell you what it is yet since there are a few people who need to be told about it first. But rest assured that all will be revealed in a matter of a couple of weeks ... Unfortunately, this change probably is going to affect the release of Blog 7.0 as well ... But c'est la vie!
posted at 06:02:50 AM  link  comment

Thu, Sep 26 2002

I haven't heard from anybody who would like to do any translations :-( But I have heard from Jim at .Net magazine who wants to put Blog on their cover disc and says that it will be part of an article in the magazine :-) Other than for DarkStep being included in a few (? not really sure if it was a few or one or none <g>) cover discs and being mentioned in passing in an article written in a trade magazine about skinning, I don't think my software has ever been highlighted in a magazine - online yes, but a magazine no. So I'm sort of gratified and excited. Of course, print media being what it is, I usually hold no hope till I actually see the thing in print but since I might have forgotten all about it by then, I decided to mention it here :-)

Tried to fix the second instance of Blog erasing data files problem yesterday and ended up with my complete Blog development directory being wiped out! It just seems to delete all data in the directory - I have no idea why! I hadn't backed up the Blog source in about a week and lost all the fixes I'd made after Beta 5 was released. I was upset but was able to recover all the documented fixes in next to no time since I already knew what had to be done. I think I also fixed the second instance problem but an irritating problem is that it will not restore the first instance of Blog if it is minimized. I can make it work but don't know if the trouble is worth it - probably is :p The new changes actually dropped the file size a bit - which at least is a good thing ...
posted at 06:07:04 AM  link  comment

Tue, Sep 24 2002

Nigel has been testing the digest features extensively (he's the one who asked for it in the first place :p) and has been coming up with a lot of bugs/errors and possible alterations to features. I'll probably implement at least some of them but due to the volatile nature of real-lief at the moment, I don't think I can give you a definite release date for the final or even for the next beta. One major problem that Nigel discovered though was that if you run two instances of Blog at the same time, your INI file gets wiped and that certain database files disappear as well - this is really not good, to say the least. I intend to fix that but in the meantime, keep daily backups. It happened to me as well yesterday and the only thing that I lost were the categorizations assigned to entries (I had no backup earlier than a week ...) but it might not be as easy for you to recover.

I have a request now. I've heard from a German user who would like a German version of the documentation. Yes, I realize that the documentation does not even begin to cover all the new features in the 7.0 release, but I'd like to get at least the older documentation translated so that a new user can make a beginning. So are there any German or German-speaking volunteers who'd like to do this and help out a fellow user? At the same time, I will take up any other offers to translate the documentation to other language as well.
posted at 07:01:32 AM  link  comment

Mon, Sep 23 2002

I was woken up in the middle of the night by a phone call - again! This whole sleepless thing is getting to be a bit too much ... I'm not so much sleep deprived anymore since I keep on waking up at around midnight or so but since I can't go back to sleep for a couple of hours more and since my sleep is pretty irregular after that, I'm becoming a bit worried about the whole thing. Maybe I'm missing winter in the US? :p I don't know ... but we'll see ... maybe it has more to do with other reasons that I haven't discussed here but then again, why discuss it at all if I can't discuss the reasons? <g>

Haven't done as much on Blog coding as I would have wished. I did fix a problem with the installer in that if you select a non-standard directory to install to, it would append "blog" to the end of the path. Tyran pointed this out and I have now fixed that. I've also fixed not being able to clear *all* categories once you've assigned categories to an entry. However, there is still an AV issue related to custom code snippets but this occurs only during the session when any customizations take place. I have to find the cause on that one and fix it.

I have received quite a few site submissions from people that I haven't yet added to the list of sites using Blog. I apologize for this but bear with me - I've been a bit busy and so it never got done. I will do it soon though ...
posted at 05:39:39 AM  link  comment



Forums and Chat
 
Solipsistic Meanderings
 
Mirror Sites
Tripod
Nortiq Web Services
Razor Systems
BetaNews - Blog
BetaNews - Scope
 
Applications
Scope
Blog
NewsHoard
BOB - Batch FTP
Cee
 
Latest Downloads
Note:Tripod sometimes has problems with file downloads. Use one of the mirror sites if you encounter problems.
Blog 7.0 (1.9MB)
Snipper 1.0 (680k)
MailCoder 1.0 (210k)
RenX 1.0 (357k)
Cee 2.0 (634k)
BOB 1.2 (733k)
Blog Conversion Utility (555k)
NewsHoard 2.0 Beta 1 (663k)
Scope 2.0 (414k)
PrayerTimeCE 1.0 (StrongARM)
 
Other Stuff
My Wish List
Books Wish List
Hall of Fame
Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee Hints
Online Stories
Scope Mailing List
RookSoft Mailing List
GroupHug Mailing List
 
Daily Favorites
User Friendly
Sluggy Freelance
The Whinery Behind the Beaded Curtain
The Red Ferret Journal
The G Spot
groovychick
 
Click Here To Join The BLOG Users Ring
- + > ? #
 
Fan Signs

 

Copyright (c) 2001 Fahim A. Farook