November 12, 2002

I’m ticked off! There is a group calling itself BOS (Bellingham Opensource Developers) who want to develop a blogging application. Now that’s not what pissed me off :p They talk about several blogging utilities like GreyMatter and say that they are OK but that *they* could do better and then they point to my site and say that it’s an “inept attempt” (at a web logging program I assume). Now if they were talking about my blog, I would probably agree with them <g> since this is probably not a very good blog but to call my app inept when they have no app of their own (for all I could see, they have no other projects of their own either) makes me see red! Ok, well maybe I’m not that steamed up :p But it does irritate me when somebody runs something down and says “Oh it’s no big deal” or “It’s crap!” but don’t have anything better to show themselves. I hope they put their code where their mouth is and do a better blogging tool but till then, they should just shut up :p

OK, now that I’ve got that out of my system <g>, BlogMan is coming along great 🙂 In fact, I hope to be able to release the first beta some time this week! I have coded most of the metablog API so that it can handle both the simple Blogger API and the more complex metablog API. I still need to add the Movable Type extensions though some of that is already there. I basically hope to have one big API which will allow for the inconsistencies/variances from the standard for each new blogging tool that I add. At the moment I only have Blogger and MT since those are the two that I can directly test. If you have any other blogging tool that you want added/tested you can: a) send me a link to their API documentation b) set up a separate account for me so that I can test stuff :p Actually it should be both of the above or at least (a) and then volunteer to beta test 🙂

As far as actual work goes, I added post synchronization and it seems to work though not completely tested. BlogMan will retrieve any number of posts from the server and then update your local copy only if the date and time of the post are different – hmm .. I just realized that that won’t do since the post date and time are set at the time of entry and not changed afterwards :p I’ll have to compare text to see if it is different. Oh well, I can fix that today! I’ve also added post publishing and successfully published an edited post from my desktop! All that needs to be done is to add remote saving of posts (not publishing – just saving to server) and remote deletion of entries. Then I should be ready for the first beta release.

Oh yes, there is one other piece that needs to be done – or rather, redone. I had set things up so that you can display all the authors for the posts. Of course, to do so, you need to retrieve information about all users from the server. Since the API does not allow you to get user information en masse (you need to provide login/password info to retrieve user info) I added a system where you can provide the login and password and update a user record. However, I had set things up in such a way where under a given server, you can have multiple blogs and under each blog, you’d have multiple users. I realized yesterday that this wasn’t accurate. The multiple users actually should be under the server since (as far as I know from the limited knowledge I have about other blogging tools) there is only one set of users – they are just assigned permissions as to which blog they can post to and which they can’t. So I have to change some of the stuff to work in this new framework. But we are getting there …

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Posted by Fahim at 5:49 am  |  9 Comments