June 17, 2001

Oops, first bug :p My new header code seems to be stripping out extra entries for a given day – only the last entry appears. I’ve found the bug and have fixed it and hopefully this post should show that it works 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 8:54 pm  |  No Comments

I sat down soon after I got up in the morning and began coding. It was a good thing that I’d thought things through yesterday because unlike my normal coding sessions where I sat down and start coding things any which way, I actually had a plan that would help me make all my Net apps firewall-compatible pretty easily. Again it all boiled down to the fact that Delphi makes reusing code such a simple thing and even has tools built into the IDE to make this task easier. I simply created a generic firewall options dialog for the FTP component I was using and then saved the dialog into the Delphi repository before I started making Blog specific changes to it. That way, I can reuse that dialog in my other apps and won’t have to do all of the initial set up work that I had already done 🙂

I had initially intended to do only enough to get Blog firewall-compatible and perhaps do a point release (1.8 was what I had in mind …) but then I decided that I might as well go the distance and do a complete 2.0 release. And so that’s what I did! I cleaned out my to-do list for Blog and also added a few features that I had intended to add to the to-do list but had forgotten <g> In fact, there is only one bug-fix in this release – all the rest are new features (though you may argue that some of the “features” should actually qualify as bug fixes :p)

One of the biggest changes (as far as I am concerned) is a new Blog tag which allows you to specify an entry header which is repeated only once per each date – no matter how many entries there are for that particular date. This overcame a major problem with the old < $BlogDate> tag because initially it would only be displayed once and so it was perfectly suited to the way that *I* used that particular tag but it wouldn’t work for a different purpose. This also allowed me to have nice entry headers as you should see from today onwards.

Another change was the ability to specify local folders as well as FTP sites (though you define a local folder as a site too) for those of you who have your own web server and work from it 🙂 This was actually suggested by my friend jugg the very first time he used Blog but I didn’t get around to implementing it till now :p This feature actually came in pretty useful when I needed to test the new changes because I didn’t have to get connected to the Net at all – I could simply copy the test journal to a local directory.Thanks jugg!!

So when can you expect to get your sweaty little hands on the new version? :p (I know, I know, you really aren’t that interested <vbg>) I guess it really depends on how soon I get the documentation updated but hopefully it will be soon – so keep watching this space 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 8:21 pm  |  No Comments