September 18, 2004

OK, I’m much further along the path to the next beta build of Blog though I realize that the next build is going to be very much a hodgepodge of not quite ready features 🙁 There are certain major problems which aren’t always apparent with this new build that I’m working with. For instance, there seems to be a bug with the spellchecking since I could right-click on a misspelt word and it would take almost a minute before a menu would pop up. Since I have no access to the source for the HTMLEdit component, it’s very difficult to debug this kind of problem. It used to be much easier when the author used to respond immediately when I submitted a problem but these days, I either get no response at all from him or something like “I’ll look into this tomorrow” and then silence. I can’t really blame him too much though since I haven’t paid for the component and I after all am using a beta version. So while I do thank him again for his kind sponsorship, I am beginning to worry about where the component itself is headed if he’s either too busy to provide support or is not interested in doing so.

But on to the good news :p I’ve been working with Nigel’s data in trying to get it all over to his WordPress installation since it was Nigel who woke me up and got me working on Blog again 🙂 He’s got over 4,000 entries if I’m not mistaken and so far, I’m still in the first hundred or so :p However, I have fixed quite a few bugs and added a few user-friendly features that I might not even have thought of if I hadn’t been working with this data just because going through the transfers over and over again made me see things that I might not have seen otherwise :p The transfers to WordPress are working fairly well now – in fact, I am using WordPress over at SM and have been posting quite regularly with the new build of Blog with no problems whatsoever. However, there is one aspect of transferring to WordPress which is still giving me problems – special characters like the British pound sign (£ … not to be confused with the hash sign which is also called the pound sign :p) or the Euro (€) sign. These seem to cause the XMLRPC server on the WordPress end to throw a hissy fit :p I have tried encoding the characters via HTML encoding but have met with mixed results – it sometimes works but has an extra character in front of the character I wanted and sometimes even the encoding throws a hissy fit. I have a feeling that this is connected to the fact that WordPress uses UTF-8 encoding for all XMLRPC stuff but haven’t had enough time to delve into things to figure out what exactly is happening and how I could try to fix it.

In fact, my aim today is to rip out some of the XML parsing routines from the WP code into a separate routine, dump the XML sent from Blog into that code and see if something blows up. Having to debug between two different languages is a pain in the posterior and this way, I’ll only have to deal with PHP till I figure out where exactly things are going wrong in the first place – whether it’s the PHP end of things in WP or the Delphi end of things in Blog. Once I figure that one out, I should be fairly on my way to getting all of Nigel’s data transferred over. But as to when the next beta will be released, all I can say is that I hope it’s soon but I’d hate to inflict people with a not-quite-working WYSIWYG view since that’s supposed to be one of the major features of Blog 8.0 :p

Tags: General
Posted by Fahim at 9:00 am   Comments (0)

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