May 29, 2004

Things have been kind of quiet here at The Developer’s Corner but I’ve been posting fairly regularly over at SM :p But that was mostly because I’ve been moving over from Movable Type to WordPress (WP) as my backend blogging tool over at SM. I’m finally moved over, the data is converted, I’ve even written a plugin for WP and have gotten the usual tweaking associated with a new tool out of my system 🙂 But then, since I used BlogMan to post to SM, I find myself without the ability to compose entries offline now since BlogMan does not support WP and Blog’s support for remote servers is not complete. So it was back to Blog coding with a vengeance :p

However, I was hindered by two things: a) a bug in the HTMLEdit component that drops any images inserted into an entry b) lack of time. The first problem is actually a serious one in that I couldn’t add any images at all in WYSIWYG mode into a blog entry. I’d written to the developer of the HTMLEdit component, Fabian, about two weeks back about this and had heard nothing from him. He’s usually very prompt about responding to bug reports and when I’d not heard from him in a week, I tried again but still no luck. I then tried a kludge to work around the problem and it seemed to work and so I’m going with that for the moment but if Fabian has for some reason dropped off the face of the earth, I’m going to have to look around for a different WYSIWYG HTML editing component before I can complete Blog 8.0 and that’s going to mean redoing a lot of work I’d already done. Ah well …

The second problem, lack of time, is something that I’m always plagued with but recently it’s gotten worse since I’m working for two different organizations at the moment. The second organization is moving into new offices and I’ve been put in charge of procuring and installing all the technical equipment and that has been taking a fair bit of my time. In fact, I’ve been coding Blog in the evenings when I can and since I’m dead tired by that time, don’t be surprised if a few bugs creep into the next release :p

Speaking of the next release, it is going to be big – and I don’t mean the executable size … though that might turn out to be a fair jump from the last release as well :p I’ve had to totally revamp the internal database structures to support the ability to post to remote blogging servers and to try and make the journals totally independent of where they are published to. Plus, the new publishing to remote servers ability meant that I had to re-write the internal publishing code as well. Personally, I think that the revamp was good since it looks and feels much more streamlined now. However, since I still haven’t tested the code thoroughly, it might turn out to be not such a good thing after all. In fact, since I’ve done a lot of restructuring, re-coding etc., the next release is probably going to need a lot of extensive testing to make sure that I didn’t break anything. So, while I hope to have a release out soon, it might turn out that the next release is much, much further away than even I anticipate 🙂

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Posted by Fahim at 11:43 am  |  No Comments