I guess I’m not being clear enough when I say that there are problems with synching remote entries from a blogging server with the new build of Blog that I’m working on 🙂 I’ve received comments along the line of "why can’t you compare the entry in Blog and the entry on the server and if they are different, do an update?" But the problem here is that the differences might not have been due to changes you made, but rather due to changes made by somebody else since a remote server allows multiple people to update the same entry :p Blog does not have a facility where it can take two entries, compare them and then merge the changes in – that is just beyond the scope of an app like Blog. So, all I can do is have Blog update the remote entry if the text of the entry is different but by doing so, you might be overwriting the changes made by another user.
On the other hand, somebody might suggest, "why can’t you have Blog update the entry from the remote server before somebody makes a change?" The problems here are manifold. First, all journals in Blog might not be connected to a remote server and so I’d have to always keep track of whether a given journal is connected to a remote server or not. Second, in order to have each entry automatically updated, you’d have to be online all the time and that defeats the allure of Blog for many because people like the fact that they can compose offline and go online only to post. Then there are the myriad of timing issues involved such as what if somebody updates an entry just after Blog has updated it and so on … The mind just boggles. The closest I can come to is to pop up a warning box saying that an entry has changed on the server and display the current entry and the entry on the server but even there I’d have to do quite a bit of coding gymnastics such as keeping a copy of the entry saved on the server to compare against the current entry – so not something I really wanna consider just now :p
In other news, I’ve got the remote entry retrieval working and managed to actually pull my very first entries to this very Blog so many years ago – from Blogger.com :p Yes, I posted via Blogger.com for a week and wrote the very first incarnation of Blog during that time since I wasn’t happy with Blogger.com :p But my account (and my original blog) still stands at Blogger.com and I still use it for testing out stuff from Blog.
I then moved on to implementing the upload site definitions under the new database schema on the Sites tab and that proved to be much more challenging than I’d anticipated. I changed the UI quite a bit and am still struggling with the work involved in handling all the new changes. So not much progress made I’m afraid 🙁 Hopefully, I’ll get a bit more done over the weekend and might even get around to working on the actual publishing code so that people like my friend Nigel can get their sweaty mitts on the beta versions to start testing :p
In other news, I’ve made certain changes to the site. I’ve removed the PayPal donation link since I had some problems with PayPal due to the fact that I now live in Sri Lanka and they don’t support accounts from Sri Lanka. So I’ve still got some money in the account but have to wait for six months before I can even get the money out. It seems pointless to keep the link up when that’s the case. However, in case somebody would still like to send me some nice gift or something (hint, hint :p) I’ve updated my Amazon.com Wishlist and have also added a new games wishlist from CD Universe 🙂 So any takers? :p