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I take back whatever I said about Delphi 7.0 the other day :p While there might not be that many visible improvements from a general coding standpoint, the web development area has been vastly improved with the inclusion of IntraWeb controls. Now you can build a web-based front-end for a corporate database using Delphi controls (or rather their web equivalents) and utilizing Delphi code! I found it to be much simpler than working with Visual Studio .NET to do the same task since the data access controls in Delphi seemed much easier to use (at least to me) than their Visual Studio .NET equivalents. Of course, there is the Delphi for .NET preview included with the Delphi 7.0 release but since I really don't do that much with .NET, I've decided not to look into that for the moment.

Oh yes, while I did complain about GExperts not being available in Delphi 7.0, that was not exactly right :p I went over to the GExperts mailing list on Yahoo and discovered that there is actually a pre-release build of the next version which supports Delphi 7.0. I installed it and it seems to work fine on my machine and so my UI is back to being usable in Delphi :p Now if DBISAM would just release a Delphi 7.0 version of their database components, I can simply switch over to Delphi 7.0 for all my development work. But till then, I guess I'll stick with 6.0 :-)

I've added a bunch of sites to the list of sites using Blog this week. It looks as if suddenly Blog is being discovered by a lot of people and I have no idea why this should be happening at the moment. In fact, I've even been discovering older sites that used Blog but are no longer being maintained, now :p I've decided not to add those sites to the list since I see little point to it but then again by the same token, I probably should remove some of the sites at the bottom of the list since they are no longer maintained either. Ah well ... call me quirky - I just like to keep some of the early adopters of Blog around :-) Of course, that's not to say that all the early adopters are now inactive since Phil, Tyran and Jason (among a lot more, of course - sorry I can't mention you all by name ...) are still very much active. BUt I hardly seem to find the time to read other people's Blogs these days except in passing :-(

I've been meaning to write about this for the past few days but keep on forgetting - I've finally got access to Delphi 7 but it left me fairly unimpressed on installation :p The UI has been spiffed up and it now supports Windows XP styles and I know there are many internal changes but there aren't that many changes that are useful on a day-to-day basis. For instance, the component palette still cannot be displayed in multiple lines natively and since the tool that I use to do this, GExperts, has not caught up to the latest version change, I won't be able to do so for a while. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things that I do want to try out in the new release but for the moment, I don't think it'll be my development environment yet. However, I want to try the new web development features sometime soon to see if they are better than Visual Studio .NET and if so, I might do one of the company projects using Delphi 7 ...

From one 7.0 release to another :p Blog 7.0 actually got over the temporary delay with categorizations and is now back on the development path :-) You can now assign and remove categorizations for entries easily and I'm in the process of adding a whole host of new tags to handle archiving by category and to allow better customization of the archive table of contents. Since the current archive tag simply returns a table of archival links, it's almost impossible to customize it or to display these links in any innovative manner - like a drop down list or something. So, I've come up with a two new tags (which I will not write out fully here since future processing of these entries can get messed up :p) called BlogArchives and /BlogArchives. These two tags can go anywhere in a template and will be processed separately as code for an archival table of contents. Of course, what is actually displayed and what type of archive it will be is decided by the tags inside these two tags.

Here is where I started hitting snags. I thought of using BlogArchiveFile and BlogArchiveName as two new tags to display existing monthly or weekly archives - the first will return the archive file's name while the second will return a name for the file, perhaps some form of a formatted date as is currently done by Blog. However, I couldn't figure out how to maintain consistency for categorized archives. I can have two tags called BlogArcCatFile and BlogArcCatName and they would return links to appropriately named files which contain all the entries for each category. However, when I thought about it, I realized that if you had only a few categories and assigned a category to each entry, after about a year, you're going to end up with several huge HTML pages that are going to take ages to load! Then I thought that each categorized archive page could lead to another table of contents page for that category which either gives a date based link or at least a link giving the first sentence (or the first few words) from each entry for that category and these links in turn will point to the normal archival entries.

There are problems with that approach as well :-( For one thing, if you have auto-archiving turned off and don't generate monthly/weekly archives, but create a categorized archive link, it will be pointing to files that don't exist. Plus, I don't think it's wise to generate the actual category archives automatically (if I have one file for each category that is...) since that'll mean uploading all category archives each time you publish - and that could kill a dial-up connection! Oh yeah if I follow the category links leading to a table of contents for each category approach, then we'll have to define a separate template for that particular table of contents and that means even more settings to be added on a per journal basis! It looks complicated whichever way I look at it and I'm not sure how to proceed.

Work is turning in to Meetingsville these days :p We had three meetings yesterday, I have three more scheduled for today and another for tomorrow! Now I have nothing against meetings as long as they are quick, to-the-point and efficient but unfortunately, the ones at work are anything but. Usually, we ramble on about stuff, everybody talks at once on different things and after a while, the meeting degenerates into a gossip session - and mind you, I'm talking about high-level managerial meetings here. Two of my meetings yesterday were kind of like that but fortunately, the ones today shouldn't be so bad since I'm holding them :p The reason for all the meetings is that they're restructuring things at the company since my team has finally completed the project we were on - so, now they have split my team up in to several different teams and put me in charge of all of them :p Now, I handle three teams doing weekly newspaper pages in three different languages, a team in charge of the company web site, a team to produce promos and trailers and a team to come up with a pilot for a new program - and I'm holding meetings with almost all these teams today :-(

But on to coding news - though the news isn't much better there :p After a blazing start on Blog 7.0, things have sort of bogged down. I did manage to complete the new UI to accommodate the entry categorization feature and also snuck in a little grid to display any comments (only remote of course ...) for that particular entry. The categorization feature allows multiple categories per entry and to make things easier, I added the category management in to the same UI - now it's a real mix of things and looks a bit clumsy and crowded but hopefully it should work. But work is what it doesn't do at the moment :p At least, the multiple category selection and saving of the selections wasn't working yesterday but I'd just completed the initial code and so I'll probably be able to get it going today.

Alfred is an antithesis to the people that I ranted about yesterday :-) He first wrote to me with a problem with getting Blog to FTP out correctly and he told me that he'd read all the documentation and the FAQ. We exchanged e-mails but the problem suddenly disappeared by itself. He then wanted some help with templates and I simply told him that he needed to know HTML and that if he wanted to use skins from BlogSkins, that he'd need to convert them from Blogger format to Blog. That's all he needed since he's managed to get his site up and running on his own after teaching himself HTML. You can see his site here. Way to go Alfred :-)

Something that Phil mentioned in a comment was the remote template feature. Now this is something that even I forget about most of the time since I have not changed the look of my site ever since I started it :p But if you are somebody who is constantly changing the look of your site, then you probably find the template editing features in Blog pretty limiting - especially in this day and age of WYSIWYG HTML editors :p If you prefer to do your page layout in an external editor, you can use the remote template feature and simply link to the remote file and while the Blog tags might look strange in your editor (or they might even be tagged as non-HTML), you'll be able to do the page layout much better. Of course, I now don't remember whether any changes you make in the Template editor are merged back to the remote file but that should be simple enough to discover, right? :p

I believe that there is a point in the life-cycle of any software application when instead of just interested people using it, anybody tries to use it just because it is there. Blog seems to have reached that point since I get a lot of e-mails these days along the lines of "I don't like the default look of my site using Blog. How do I change it?" Now to me, it looks as if these people haven't even bothered to go through the different dialogs in the app let alone read the documentation since otherwise they should at least know about templates.

It irritates me that people get a free application, don't bother to do any groundwork and expect to get better support than they would from Microsoft for something they'd paid hundreds of dollars for. (And yes, I'm in full rant mode and this does not refer to all the innocents out there who are truly stuck and write to me with genuine problems :p) I believe in providing support and I believe in helping others - that is one of the basic principles on which the whole idea of careware is based. But I hate freeloaders who won't even bother to go through the app or read the documentation and the FAQ before they write to me and ask me to help them. I believe that you should do some work too if you want to be helped.