Contact me at :
fahimf@email.com

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 :-)

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 ...

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 :-)

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 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.