Contact me at :
fahimf@email.com

First off, I'd like to thank Raymond over at Electro-Concept Mauricie - their support is phenomenal! I am not even a registered PlusMemo user but I told him of a problem that I had with using PlusMemo for Blog and he sent me a fix today! It is refreshing to see companies and people like Raymond and Glenn Crouch over at Addictive Software and to know that there still are people who take customer support seriously :-)

As far as Blog 5.0 goes, I have got the cookie (and I meant fortune cookies - not the other variety <vbg>) support in and things seem to work great and there isn't even an appreciable increase in the Blog file size after adding the cookie support because most of the cookie management is done by a different app that I've created. It's called Cee ... because Cee is for cookie <vbg> Currently it's a very rudimentary app which just allows you to enter new cookies one by one or import them at one blow from a text file which is formatted in a specific way. Eventually, I'm hoping to make it a full-fledged signature generator so that you can use the same cookies for your e-mail signatures and for your blog. So why aren't I still releasing Blog 5.0? Because there is this one annoyance that I'd still like to sort out before I do a release so hang in there just a little bit longer ...

Well ... Tyran pointed out a few more bugs and certain things that could be improved in Blog yesterday and so there's lots for me to do :p Plus, I've decided to merge the Blog and BlogPlus source code since it is going to get harder and harder to maintain two different sets of sources. Of course, this will mean that I will have to go to a two distro format - a full install and an upgrade - so as to keep the download size minimal for existing users but I think that's worth it :-) This means that I will not be doing a release of BlogPlus but be doing something along the lines of Blog 5.0 beta 1 or Blog 5.0 PR1 as soon as I get the last few features that I want to add in and get the bugs sorted out.

Have you ever had a dream where you dreamt that you were dreaming? Boy, that sounds confusing :p What I meant was that you dreamt that you were sleeping and while you were sleeping (in your dream) you have another dream? I had that happen to me last night and boy was it confusing! I woke up (in my dream) and said "Oh I was dreaming" and then I woke up for real and said "Ah, I was dreaming!" <vbg> Now I know exactly how Morpheus feels like but then again, that's why I started writing that story in the first place - because I sometimes wonder about my own dreams :-) Speaking of Morpheus and my story, I know I haven't been writing it - again (as Tyran pointed out to me yesterday <g>) but I will get back to it soon, I promise!

I have to say that Glenn Crouch over at Addictive Software is the fastest support I've ever got from anybody! I wrote to them yesterday asking them about how to get Addict (their spell checker component) working with one of the memo components I was testing out and I got a response back in less than an hour and that is fast!! I highly recommend Addictive Software to anybody who wants a spell checking component for Delphi (not just because they gave me a copy for free <vbg>) because it's a great component and their support is top notch!

Speaking of great support, I did hear from the PlusMemo people in the form of an e-mail from Raymond Courteau - turns out that they had responded to me earlier but my e-mail server had bounced the e-mail back. (Wonder how many other people can't get a hold of me for the same reason? Maybe it's time to change e-mail addys ...) They didn't want to provide me with a free copy of their component but they did say that I could use the demo one with the nag screen in Blog. So that's what I've decided to do since I really don't see a point to paying money to get a component that I'll use in an app that I will give away for free :p But Raymond has been really helpful with figuring out a problem that I had with PlusMemo and Addict even though I am not a registered user! Now that's service :-)

Tyran and Phil both have written glowing reviews for Blog at BetaNews :-) If I had just one or two users like Phil or Tyran for Blog, I would be coding that app for ever but fortunately, I seem to have a lot of users like them who are just interested in improving the app and are always ready to help me out with beta testing, bug hunting etc. For that, I am thankful to all of you :-) Of course this is not to say that the users of my other apps are inferior in any way <vbg> Actually, I often wonder what makes me work so much on Blog and neglect Scope and I can't come up with a really good answer but the closest is probably the fact that I get more feedback with Blog - when somebody uses Blog, I know they are using it because I can see their site and that is gratifying ... maybe that's it or maybe not :p

Since I kvetch all the time about how bad, selfish or callous people are, for a change I'm going to talk about how good and generous people are :-) As I mentioned yesterday, I was looking into adding spellchecker and thesaurus support to Blog. This meant that I needed to have two Delphi components - a spellchecker/thesaurus component and a memo component which supported syntax highlighting (the latter not necessarily for the spellchecking but for another feature that I wanted to implement ...). So I looked around and the first spellchecking component I looked at was Addictive Software's Addict. I liked it so much that I didn't even bother to look around for any others :p I e-mailed the people at Addictive Software and told them that I was doing a freeware app and whether they'd consider giving me a free copy of Addict. Glen Crouch at Addict wrote back almost immediately (on a Sunday!) and told me that they'd be happy to give me a copy of Addict as long as it was used for freeware! I am just bowled over by such generosity! I can only say thank you Glen and all the other folks at Addictive Software!!!

Now I'm pissed off ... again :p Some guy went over to BetaNews and said something along the lines of "why should I use Blog when there is Blogger? I give it 3 instead of 1 (out of 5) only because it is nicely done ..." What has Blogger got to do with Blog? One is a web based app and the other is not! Plus, there are many reasons why people prefer to use Blog instead of Blogger (and I did list some of them there though technically I shouldn't be rating my own app <vbg>) I'm proud of Blog and I do try hard to ensure that the users get a very good app and it really gets my goat when somebody disses an app (whether it is mine or somebody elses) just because there is an alternative and they prefer it. Review something based on merit not based on the fact that you like something better!!