Contact me at :
fahimf@email.com

Blog 7.0 final is out :-) I have done all the fixes that I needed to do, added the last few features and even updated the documentation so that it is fairly up-to-date - though it might still be a bit arcane for a normal user to understand :p I will be here only for the next two days since I will be departing for the US on Saturday night (Saturday morning for the folks in the US ...) and I probably will not make anymore journal entries till my journey is complete but I will continue to check e-mail and so do let me know if you have any problems and I will try to provide support as usual. The download link is (as usual) on the sidebar so go on, download and enjoy :-)

Since the only area in Blog 7.0 that seems to have problems is the digest feature (and since not many people seem to want to use it yet :p), I decided to prepare to release 7.0 final and then tweak the digest feature as we go along. With that aim in mind, I added a few final touches to the current Blog build yesterday. One of these was a feature that I'd discussed before - converting double carriage returns to paragraphs and single carriage returns to line breaks, so that your entry will appear legible as you type and will still appear the same way you typed it when it is published. Of course, I realized that current entries might get broken if I do it this way since there might be people (like me ..) who explicitly used a line break tag to achieve line breaks and relied on a single carriage return to be a paragraph. So in order to maintain backward compatibility, I added in an option which would still do that - if you want Blog to. As an added bonus, I added a sub-option which lets you use two line break tags instead of a paragraph tag ... and I changed all internally generated Blog tags to be XHTML compliant - or at least I hope so since I am not completely sure about how far I have to go to be XHTML compliant :p

One of the data tables in Jen's installation of Blog corrupted yesterday. I had hoped that the new Repair option in Blog would fix the problem but when Jen tried, it didn't seem to do anything. So I got her to send me the data files and when I ran Blog at my end, I wouldn't even get the main screen due to the corrupted data file! So I added code which would detect data file corruption at the time of opening the main screen and fix the corrupted files automatically. Of course, this would work only for files needed by the main screen but since you can access the Repair option once you have the main screen open, you shouldn't have any problems with repairing all the other files if they do ever become corrupt. I ran the new code through it's paces and it seems to work fine but we'll see how it does in the field, so to speak :p
posted at 05:34:13 AM  link  comment

Over the weekend Edward McCain found several bugs in the latest build of Blog. Not only did he help eliminate (at least we think it eliminated it ...) that infuriating "list index out of bounds" error but he discovered several other problems which caused errors in Blog. Not cotent wiht that, he went on to discover a couple of more bugs in the Purge Entries dialog which has probably been there since that option was added - shows what a good tester I am :p Oh yeah, he also found a curious problem with the calendar control in that we can only go back to October 1752 - not sure about the year but it's somewhere around there. This of course seems to be either standard Delphi or standard MS behaviour but it was an interesting thing ...