First of all, here is the link to Ampersand’s blog called Alas, A Blog (sorry if I mangled the name, Ampersand :p) This was the cartoonist’s blog I was talking about yesterday but didn’t know the link to. I still haven’t e-mailed myself the link from work but Ampersand wrote to me today since I wrote to him yesterday in response to a comment about how he found it amusing that I used MT for my personal blog instead of Blog :p Now, I couldn’t let that pass, could I? <vbg>
Of course, that brings us to the reason for me using MT for Solipsistic Meanderings, BlogMan. I spent most of yesterday trying to figure out the reason why proxy support was not working in BlogMan. I installed FreeProxy (sorry forget the link), which is an excellent free proxy server, on my machine and tried to publish an entry to SM (which incidentally has still not been published) about the troubles that Jen’s been having recently but no go. The proxy server would refuse to authenticate BlogMan and it looked as if BlogMan was not sending the correct login name for the proxy. Since I am using a freeware XMLRPC client library, I took a look at the source and discovered that it was using the Indy HTTP component as I had suspected. I realized that the component automatically set the authentication to non-basic and so assumed (which is always a bad thing :p) that basic authentication did not take login/password and so spent most of the day trying to get digest authentication (another authentication scheme which Indy supports) working but had no luck.
While I had been engaged in my wild goose chase <g>, Greg had also downloaded a demo copy of Delphi 7.0 and had been checking out the Indy proxy authentication stuff. He wrote to me today (at least, I received the e-mail today) and said that when he set the HTTP component to use basic authentication and set a login and password, it connected fine! So there you have it :p That was the solution and it was right in front of me – color me chagrined :p Anyway, thanks to Greg (who has gone to lengths above and beyond those of a beta tester – thanks a bunch Greg!) I should be able to put out a new build of BlogMan today which actually works with proxies. So, onwards and upwards! 🙂
I also had another great adventure with Duane yesterday :p Remember the Blog comments problem that Duane had yesterday, well we set to try and discover the cause yesterday and after a flurry of e-mails back and forth it turns out that the problem appears only on Duane’s browser and mine is fine! I was dumbfounded at first because I had thought a browser faithfully reproduced the contents of an HTML file and did not do any insertions, additions of it’s own but in Duane’s case, it seemed to be doing so. He and I were both using IE 6.0 but he had SP1 installed whereas I didn’t. So it looks as if IE 6.0 SP1 might be the culprit but I’ve already heard a few stories about problems with SP1 and am wary of installing SP1 to see if it is indeed the culprit. If anybody is interested, you can go here and if you hover your mouse pointer over the comments link, the e-mail address to send the post to should appear as ABC<[email protected]> but if you have the problem that Duane is experiencing, it would look like AB><[email protected]> I don’t even know if that made any sense :p
Well, given the state of the Indy demo projects, and the lack of good documentation, I’m not surprised it was such a problem.
Thanks for putting in all the work into BlogMan to get it working with a proxy – even though you don’t need to go through a proxy.
Well, I have IE6 with the service pack 1 installed running on 98 (not SE) here, and the mailto link you mention seems fine. I do have all the updates available from Windows Update installed, however. Maybe for Microsoft’s flaky stuff to have a chance of working you need ALL updates and service packs?
regards
jim
I am also running IE6 with SP1 and am not having any problems with the link with Win 2K Pro. I tink Duane just bwoke it and doesn’t want to admit it. 🙂