Contact me at :
fahimf@email.com

Nothing much in the way of new coding I'm afraid since I didn't get a chance to work on BlogMan (and yes, DeViLbOi I haven't forgotten PostMan :p) - I've been busy with a few other things but hope to get back to BlogMan soon since I want to be able to make offline posts to my MT blogs soon. As far as PostMan goes, it is actually useable but is missing quite a few features that people might want, is a bit buggy and slow. It's the slowness which actually halts me from going ahead with further development since I don't want an e-mail client which takes ages to check mail when Eudora does it faster. It probably is either something I'm missing (most probable) or the Indy component that I'm using to do POP3 access. Either way, I will get back to PostMan but I usually find I code better when I work on something I'm interested in and so at the moment, it's going to be BlogMan :p

Before I get anymore requests for this particular feature (suddenly, it has become very popular and I've received no less than three e-mails requesting it within about a week or two), the ability to have a different template for the archived entries is slated to be added in Blog 8.0 :-) Both Tyran and Darin asked for it as well as another user in a comment left on this journal. Since so many people seem to want it, it's going to be there in the next big release. But just have no idea as to when the next release (major or minor) is going to be since there seems to be enough coding projects to be divvied up between a whole team :p Ah well, I guess one at a time is the way to go ...

I am still working on BlogMan. Though I should have gone on to entry retrieval and posting after doing the blog information retrieval code, I decided to deviate a bit and add multiple user support :-) So I've been working on adding the retrieval of user information for a given blog. Of course, this part is a bit clunky in that the BloggerAPI needs a login and password to retrieve information for a user instead of allowing you to retrieve information about all users on a given blog if you are an administrator for that blog. And the UI is kind of cluttered because it is all on one tab called Servers. You define the information for a given server and on the same screen you have a list of blogs for that server and a list of users for any given blog. I just completed the user information retrieval but haven't tested it yet.

Once that is tested and is proven to be working, I will have to modify the UI so that you can select a given blog *and* a particular user from that blog. Then you should be able to use a synchronize option which allows you to retrieve either all the posts for that user and synchronize those with your local database or retrieve a certain number of recent posts. There are limitations here as well since I have read that Blogger only allows up to a maximum of 20 recent posts to be retrieved whereas B2 allows you to retrieve all posts by the user. I don't know how Movable Type behaves in this respect. So it's going to be a fine kettle of fish to sort out all this stuff.

I am well and truly in the throes of creating another app :p The BlogMan prototype is coming along pretty well and I was actually able to connect to my Movable Type server yesterday and retrieve information about my blogs there. Retrieving posts and making posts is still going to take about a week to finish but we're getting there. Of course, I'm already beginning to notice certain things such as the fact that I will probably need to either create a plug-in architecture or a separate API file since apart from the core Blogger API, Movable Type also seems to implement other access methods for features it has but Blogger doesn't - such as the category feature. A plug-in architecture probably is the best since then I can support almost any blog server with XML-RPC capabilities but for the moment, I'm too lazy to do that and will probably go with a straight API file but keep the plug-in idea in mind. I won't say more till I have actually gotten some of the other stuff to work since I have certain reservations but not sure if they are well founded or not.

I've also heard a few comments about Blog 7.0 linefeed conversion feature :-) Now, I had not even considered putting more than basic HTML formatting in my entries but I see that Rob has been using tables - sometimes I feel as if I am the person who least uses all the features/possibilities of Blog :p The easiest way not to have the linefeeds automatically insert line break tags into your tables is to have the table code and the contents in one complete line with no breaks at all. Yes, I realize that looks totally ugly and is hard to debug when a problem occurs but it will definitely keep the line break tags from appearing. The other thing I can think of is to use some sort of a new tag which will mark certain areas as non-parseable by Blog so that its completely bypassed by the Blog tag/linefeed parser. This might however, slow things down a bit and so there's going to be a bit of a tradeoff in speed for clarity of entry.

I've discovered that it should be pretty simple to implement an application that would allow somebody to post to both Blogger and Moveable Type (MT) using a client to compose the entry offline! This should work with Grey Matter as well since I believe that it supports the Blogger API as well. However, not all the blogging applications/servers support the Blogger API in the same way - for instance, MT does not allow you to edit templates since their template mechanism is different to Blogger's. However, this is a starting point and so I have decided to start work on a new app I'm calling BlogMan - short for Blog Manager :p It is basically using the existing Blog interface and code as a launching point - it will even have the 7.0 interface with comments display etc. even though I cannot currently support the extraction of comments ... but I'm hoping that I can at least add extensions to MT to do some of this. Not sure about the others since it'll depend on each implementation I guess. I will probably have a better understanding when I have a working prototype but that might not be for a week or so.

In the meantime, I have also been thinking about some of your suggestions and ideas for Blog. John mentioned that he liked the current separation of entry and HTML template and wanted it kept that way - with reference to a WYSIWYG entry option. This was just to do the entries, the template still would be separate. The reason for the WYSIWYG entry box would be so that you can get your entry exactly the way you want it to - especially for those who use a lot of HTML code in their entry. It personally wouldn't do much for me since I don't use images or lots of HTML code but there are some for whom it could be a great boon.

I like Moveable Type for a lot of reasons - I like the spiffy interface, I like the standard template which looks elegant and is yet simple, I like the fact that it can be accessed from anywhere and I like the fact that multiple users can post to the same blog. But there are also many things that I don't like about it - I don't like the fact that you have only a few HTML code snippet buttons (bold, italic and URL if I recall correctly) and there is no way to assign custom snippets so that I can add my own frequently used HTML code to buttons instead of typing it out all the time; I hate the fact that there is no spell-check or thesaurus; I don't like it that all my entries, site settings and templates are on a server and if the server goes down or is shut down, I lose all my entries and settings; I don't like the fact that I can't post the same journal to multiple sites and so the list goes on. I guess in choosing any software, you sometimes have to weigh the pros and the cons and decide what is really important to you to get a certain job done. But if you are a coder, you also have the option to write a new app of your own that has all the features you want or to code an enhancement for an existing app that will do what you want :p

Now, I already have a blogging application out there and I certainly don't want to write or maintain a server-side blogging utility like Moveable Type or Grey Matter. But ... what if it is possible to write an application which will connect to a Moveable Type, Grey Matter or Blogger blog and allow you to post entries and to retrieve existing entries to be stored offline? This will give you a system which will have quite a bit of the missing features that I talked about *and* give you the flexibility of posting from anywhere as long as you have web access. I have been giving this matter a lot of thought and I think the idea is worth exploring and so I intend to do some research to see if it is possible. I know it should be eminently possible with any blogging utility that supports the Blogger API but I am not even sure that Moveable Type or Grey Matter do support the Blogger API.

I'm going to make one of my very rare double-posts (OK, I'm obsessive compulsive about not making more than one post a day - so sue me :p) because I did put the idea I had in the morning about a second journal into action! I went into work (since otherwise I would have had to work on a dial-up connection), downloaded Moveable Type and then set it up and a couple of hours later, I have a new blog named Solipsistic Meanderings! There is only one entry and there is a lot of changes and additions to be made but for the moment I do have a new blog :p Of course, this reminds me why I coded Blog in the first place - now I can post from anywhere with web access but I have to be online to post from home and that's a pain on a dial-up connection :-( I guess I could write the entry beforehand and then quickly connect and post but even that doesn't really suit me and so I'll probably end up writing some sort of an app which can connect to a Moveable Type blog, upload entries and perhaps even synchronize other entries made from other places so that you have everything in one place. I know that's going to be a big job but it sounds pretty interesting and you know how I am about coding interesting projects :p In the meantime, you can get all the personal dope about me at Solipsistic Meanderings while I'll talk about coding stuff right here :-)
posted at 01:37:37 PM  link  comment

I don't understand people at all! They tell you that honesty is very important to them, that they never lie, that they always tell the truth no matter who gets hurt; they tell you that even omitting details or not revealing everything is lying and then they turn around and lie outright to you. Where are all their principles? Where are all the rules that are supposed to apply to you? I guess it is always alright when you are doing the lying but not when you think somebody else might be doing it. Ah well ... I know this makes no sense to any of you but I had to rant - sorry. I have never understood people and their talk of honesty. When you are honest, you get castigated for being honest and telling the truth and what you are told is it doesn't matter that you told the truth, you did whatever you did. And if you don't tell the whole truth or don't reveal something that wasn't specifically asked about, you are accused of lying. There is no winning is there? Again, I guess it comes to the whole moral dilemma thing - you do what you think is right and damn what others think. That's how I've always done it and I guess I'll continue to do so. Now that I've got that off my chest ...

I watched "XXX" and two Tamil movies yesterday. While I don't really care that much for Vin Diesel, I found "XXX" to be pretty interesting - maybe it was the combination of Diesel and Samuel L. Jackson or maybe it was all those stunts and gadgets but it was a pretty fun movie. The Tamil movies (as is usual for Tamil movies) were about love and the lengths people go to for love. In one, the guy thinks that the girl is in love with him and so falls in love with her but turns out that the girl actually comes around to see him and stuff only because he has the eyes of her dead love (the guy's eyes were damaged in the same accident that the girl's love died in and they gave the guy the girl's love's eyes - yeah that's how Tamil movies run :p). But since the guy is now in love with the girl, he tries to convince her that it's OK to fall in love again but she says she's going to live out her life remembering her love and so the guy decides to live out his life thinking of the girl. That's how the movie ended and I was entranced.