June 13, 2002

I dreamt of two friends who’d figured prominently in my life a while back. I had considered their family to be a second family since I’d stayed with them a lot as a child. But some friendships fall by the side of the way of life when they are one sided – I’ve been back for a while in Sri Lanka and these friends of mine have no effort to contact me and then I realized that it had been always so … I’d gone to them instead of them coming to me ever. Is that true friendship? I don’t know … I used to think dreaming of somebody might mean that they were thinking of you or needed you but now I guess I’m more realistic since I think it just means that you are hoping for something that might be or could have been – nothing less and nothing more :p Of course, I guess a tiny part of me still hopes that the more mystical interpretation is true, but then again, that’s the beauty of life, isn’t it? The fact that we can never be certain of anything …

But enough of these introspections! I worked on the problem of why Blog doesn’t dial out properly and was able to figure out the cause and a solution. I will need to do some modifications to the component that I use (which I intend to do before I leave for work today …) and then a little bit more testing and I should be almost set for the final release of Blog 6.0 🙂

But why *almost*? Because Nigel came up with a twist to something that I’d already noticed while updating the Blog documentation. If anybody had bothered to read it <g>, you’d notice that the Blog.txt file now has a new section about the Client and Server modes of Blog. In this section I mentioned that the Client can do almost anything that you can do with the Standard mode except for a few things like linking to older entries (it’s not blocked but will have unpredictable results – maybe I should block it …) and linking to images and expecting the images to be uploaded as well. When I wrote that, I thought “why shouldn’t I simply attach the images to the e-mail that I’m sending out and let the Server handle the uploading when it retrieves teh e-mail and attachments?” Now Nigel suggested the same thing but he also pointed out that this would work really well with the latest cellular phones which can send e-mail and have cameras (like the Nokia 7650 which has it built-in or the Ericsson T68 for which it comes as an accessory) and that might result in a new phenomena – Phlogs or Phone blogs :p

I really like the concept and since I’d already been considering the whole attachment business, I decided to sit down and think things through as to how best to implement it. Blog currently supports two modes of file uploads: one as images in case you have a separate folder for images and the rest as simple files which go in the same location as your journal. I really wanted to make the distinction in e-mail attachments as well and while I could have done that easily enough by utilizing the extra-headers or by adding some sort of a special footer to the message sent by Blog, it would mean that you have to always use the Blog Client for it to work. This would certainly rule out Phlogs 🙁 So I decided that I’d handle attachments but they’d always be treated as images and if you have a special images folder defined, they’d go there. You’ll just have to be careful about how you do the linking … Hopefully, this should work – let’s see if it does once I get the functionality working …

Tags: General
Posted by Fahim at 5:30 am   Comments (3)

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#1
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Greg 13 June 2002 at 4:07 am

You could just detect the file type from the extension – upload jpg, gif, png etc. to the images folder, everything else to the “root”

Just a suggestion…

#2
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NP 13 June 2002 at 10:37 am

Yes, and you could have a function to select whether the image goes at the top of the text or at the bottom of the text.

#3
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Fahim 13 June 2002 at 3:31 pm

Umm … why would I want a function like that (to specify the location of the image) when the image is supposed to be linked to in the text itself? Or am I missing something here?

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