I’ve decided to quit my job! Relax, I’m not nuts :p I’ve been here for over a year now and my review has been due for several months now but so far nothing – all I get are promises that it will be “any day now”. To me this sounds as if the company doesn’t really care about it’s employees generally and that they aren’t that appreciative of the work that I do specifically. So I’ve thought about this for a while and it occurred to me yesterday that if I continued to stay here, it would be an admission that the company’s estimate of me is true. So I thought I’d talk to my boss today and tell her that I was quitting …
On other news <g>, while Quester is generally working fine, I ran into a major stumbling block – I discovered that when a search engine has only one field to be filled in, it works fine but if there are multiple fields, I can’t get it to work because the Delphi XML Mapper does not seem to pick up the extra input fields from the XML file. I was hoping that I might be able to do something like a master-detail relationship with two different XML definitions but it doesn’t seem to work that way … Or maybe it’s just the fact that I am not all that conversant with the XML Mapper utility – guess I’ll have to look into that some more today … if I’m not out hunting for a new job that is :p
Phil came up with a great idea for Blog today – he suggested that if Blog was able to monitor an e-mail account and simply use incoming e-mails to create entries, that Blog would have multi-user capabilities (as well as remote update capability) without there being a need for a client server version! I think this is a great idea and intend to work on this whenever I can. Of course this does bring up other problems – such as the fact that most users will probably want Blog to monitor a web based e-mail account and not one that supports POP and that is going to create problems … Ah well, what’s life without a little challenge, huh?
Wouldn’t this Blog idea cause a security issue at some point in time with people outside the site making posts? I like the idea, but I think it may end up being more of a hassle than it is worth.
Well … it would be a security issue if the e-mail address was your normal one but I wasn’t planning on whoever who used this feature to use their normal e-mail address :p The hassles in sorting through all your junkmail to figure out what are actual Blog posts would be too much … so the way I was envisioning it was that Blog would be set up to monitor a special e-mail account that would be set aside just for Blog and obviously the author should not make that account public unless they do want mass-scale public postings … sort of like the Bits and Bytes page on LockerGnome now that I come to think of it … In fact, I think Chris Pirillo did ask for something like this but I hadn’t really thought it through at that time and thought it couldn’t be done (or it was too much hassle :p)
Even if you were to use a normal account, filtering for subject lines with a Blog precursor (with the rest of the subject line perhaps forming the title of the entry) would avoid the junk mail problems :
Blog:JournalName:My journal heading
would get picked up by Blog due to the presence of ‘Blog’ and form an entry title of :
My journal heading
in the journal defined by ‘JournalName’. If the journal doesn’t exist, the message would simply be dropped (to avoid nasty effects of auto-creating journals & security problems with targetted abuse).
In any case, I leave it to Fahim to see what he can do with it. I would like to see the subject line filter in place, though, to provide more flexibility….
The other way I thought it would be nice to be able to have Blog set up on both work and home machines and be able to post to the same blog. You might be able to do this by keeping a copy of the database ftp’d onto the site which is then synched with the one on each machine before a new entry is published. I suppose this could also allow multiple people to post to the same blog. This wouldn’t allow all the flexibility of posting to email. Of course I have none of the technical expertise to know how feasible this actually is. In any case I’m always glad to hear that you’re thinking of ways to extend Blog.
BTW, another little addition to extend Blog would be to have the option to have weblogs.com or another such service pinged each time a new entry is published. This could be done along with publishing a simple RSS feed. The only thing that’s really missing for a fuller RSS feed would be the description field which doesn’t seem to like html tags to be there and so can’t reliably use the entry text.
There are issues with that kind of solution when many people are handling the same journal database; email is a safer bet in these situations. How would you handle publishing events? You’d have to check for any obsolesence in either Blog & if the local copy is obsolete you would have to update it and then import the new entries. All this time you’d need to lock the central one from access, update that file & then publish. It’s a lot of work and for those trying to publish to any other journal held in the database, access would be denied. They would all have to synchronise their Blogs & so the bandwidth issues also become a headache in these situations.
How the lock would be handled remotely if the updating process broke down (or worst case, the central version gets corrupted by a bad download!) is also a concern. Restoring from a remote location would be very painful.
With email, Blog could potentially (although I forgot to ask for it – Fahim, you reading this? =b) check the account for new entries every x minutes/hours/days and automatically handle the journal updates. All this should be relatively safe – the only thing you would not be able to do (although I imagine it’s not impossible if Fahim gets really into the whole thing) is remote editing/deletion of entries.
I’m actually looking forward to this immensely. Given the amount of work going on here, it would be great to have this kind of tool available to us – the flexibility should be fantastic!
Note that there are programs out there (although they may be shareware, etc.) such as ViceVersa or Synchromagic that will take UNC (unsure of FTP) paths and synchronise folders and files. If you want to synchronise Blogs across multiple machines, they might be your best bet.
Of course I’m reading all this, what do you think? :p Actually, I wouldn’t have gone with remote database synchronization option – too messy. But a client server option with the database on a central server updated by remote (or local for that matter) Blog clients would work – in fact, I do have the Blog CS beta which proves it works <vbg> But then you’d need to download the client wherever you are before you can update your journal – plus there might be a few speed issues since data needs to go both ways – to the client so that you know what journals are there etc. and from the client with your entries. The upside is that editing and deleting existing entries would be simple.
And yes, I was intending Blog to check the account at a given frequency and initiate and automatic Publish if it found any entries. And to follow up on a previous comment, yes it is possible to use even a standard account (and I might implement that too) but I hate subject filtering because that’s … umm … subjective <vbg> For instance, somebody might write to me about Blog and given the proper circumstances, that entry might end up in my journal :p Plus, Blog would handle the deleting of e-mails as well and there is the possibility of Blog deleting something it shouldn’t … so to me it seems safer to go with a dedicated e-mail address …
Heh….just checking =)
The filtering option could be made to be user defined and that way you would have BlogIsCool in Blog as your filter & it would not interfere with regular mail, for example. I just think it might be a way to help find the maximum user base for such a useful feature…. The security advantages in being able to change the filter string at any time (although locally) also seem to make for a strong argument.
This is going to be great, whatever way you choose to do it!
(Excuse any occurences of ‘yy’ – playing with Scope and it’s suffering at the moment)
This does sound pretty interesting … unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a bit till I get done with the current Scope and Quester stuff :p Oh yeah, since you seem to like Scope so much, I put up a new build with the Y and ENTER bugs fixed :p It’s at http://fahim.razorsys.com/Scope.zip
Instead of adding all of this email functionality to Blog, how about simply adding command-line options to Blog?
Most email clients can be set up to have a filter notify an application.If you don’t like that idea for this specific task, command-line options would still be a useful feature. Think of what advanced users could do with them.To clarify, I’m thinking something along the lines of
Blog -journal MyJournal -date 12052001 -time 1800 -title Blog is cool -entry It really is!