There it is – Blog 1.5 is out 🙂 The documentation turned out to be not such a big deal and I decided not to spend too much time updating the Blog page either and so I was able to get the distribution out in double-quick time. If you have an existing installation of Blog, extract the distribution to a different location, read the upgrade instructions and then proceed. Let me know if you have any problems or have any suggestions, questions etc. Have fun!

Haven’t still gotten around to posting Blog 1.5 since I have to update the docs so that they will reflect the new changes accurately and also inform users how to do an upgrade as opposed to a new install. Guess, I should get that sometime today but if I get buried at work, it might not happen till I get home from work. Just keep watching this site – if you have nothing better to do that is :p

Finally got around to doing some major coding 🙂 I updated Blog quite drastically since I overhauled the GUI completely so that you can resize the main window and have all components resize along with it, added some splitters so that you can resize individual portions of the screen and also added a log window to the bottom of the screen so that you can see what is happening when you are publishing your entries. It is much more user friendly – at least that’s what I think :p

I’ve also integrated changes based on all the user input to make the functionality and some of the labels in Blog much less confusing. At the same time, I’ve overhauled the internal database structures a bit so that publishing multiple journals/pages to the same site should be much easier.

However, since this is an update, existing users are going to have a little more work if they want to preserve their existing postings and settings 🙁 I don’t know whether I should do two separate distros – one for new installs and one for upgrades but for the moment I’m not planning to since there is no automatic installer and I’m hoping that people will read the instructions before they do anything … Guess we’ll wait and see …

Linux has changed (and is still changing) dramatically in such a short time period! I first gave Linux a try with Linux Mandrake when it was at version 6.x and that was about a couple of years ago … I was really impressed with Mandrake’s distribution and was totally gung-ho about Linux for a while before going back to Windows because most of my favorite apps were still in Windows or I couldn’t find alternatives under Linux … and finally of course, I’m a Windows programmer <vbg>

I gave Mandrake a try again a few months back when Linux-Mandrake 7.2 was released and it was much more robust and much, much more improved with the inclusion of KDE 2.0 but at that time it really didn’t fit in with my then computer set up where I had a Windows network at home with my desktop acting as a server for ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) and while Mandrake did have ICS at that point, it didn’t seem to want to work with my set up.

Part three of this saga began yesterday when I burnt a couple of CD’s with the ISO images for Mandrake 8.0 and let me tell you, I’m impressed! The setup was amazingly easy, I am in love with the GUI and ICS works like a charm! In fact, I think I’m going to run Mandrak 8.0 on my desktop as my main OS from now on since I use my desktop only to share the Net connection and to connect to work via Metaframe and there is a Linux version of the client so I’m all set there :p But will I do any Linux code? Probably not but then again since Kylix is there from Inprise and I am a rabid Delphi developer now, who knows what might happen? <vbg>

Received a couple of e-mails from two different people who had trouble getting Blog to work and that made me realize again what a shoddy job that I’d done on the Blog configuration dialogs :p Unfortunately, was so busy at work that I didn’t have any time to post anything about it. Today wasn’t any different but I’m finally home and am able to post to my heart’s content. I’ve been working on both BOB and Blog and making a lot of changes based on excellent feedback from several different users among whom can be numbered my friends John and jugg as well as Hugh Myers and Jay Manley. Now I do have a dilemma though …

The dilemma is whether to release BOB and Blog now since a lot of things have been improved upon or to wait till I can get all the extra stuff that I wanted to put into those two before the next release. I am tempted to do a release now but again, I feel as if that would be pointless since I’d probably get the rest of the features put in almost soon after and then would have to do another release … Decisions, decisons! Guess, I’ll wait and see whether I get any coding done this weekend …

I guess the Gnomies are finally stopping :p Had some more traffic yesterday due to the LockerGnome digest issue but the traffic is again down to normal levels today – which is to say around 50 or 60 people for the whole day 🙂 Not that I think it’s a bad thing since I do know that I have some die-hard users/readers who visit this journal everyday. So a big thank you to all of you – you know who you are 🙂

On the coding front, not much done as far as big improvements go but I’ve been tinkering a bit with the standalone version of Blog and have been fixing quite a few minor GUI problems and little usage issues. For instance, I’ve been trying to get paragraphs to be automatically recognized by Blog and marked as such instead of the user having to specifically mark them with the paragraph tag and I finally figured out how to do it … I think :p I’ll know for certain when I publish this entry because this is going to be the first live test of that.

I also replaced the HTML component used to preview since the one I was using didn’t recognize certain special character notations and the only reason I used that particular component was because I couldn’t figure out how to use the default web browser component included with Delphi in this particular context. Finally figured that out too. Shows how inexperienced I was with Delphi when I first began on Blog <g> – then again, it’s not surprising since Blog was my very first Delphi app :p

Had a pretty busy weekend since I replaced my notebook on a spur of the moment decision 🙂 My notebook is my main development machine since I carry it around almost everywhere and I’d kind of been thinking of going for a new machine since I wanted a few things that the newer machines had but I was more or less inclined to wait till Windows XP came out and then get a machine with XP pre-installed (of course, I would format the hard drive and install XP again but that way I wouldn’t have to pay for XP <vbg>) But went to Circuit City on Saturday and saw this sweet Compaq Presario 1800 machine that I couldn’t resist and so I decided to give it a try and see if it worked for me – if it didn’t, I could always return it to the store … ain’t America great? 🙂

To cut a long story short, I ended up spending the rest of the weekend transferring all my work and accumulated e-mails over to the new machine and also installing Windows 2000 and all the software that I use on a regular basis. Of course I haven’t used this machine extensively for anything useful yet but so far the experience has been very positive 🙂 There are a few things that I do miss from my old machine – an IR port is the biggest thing since now I have to hook up the USB connection to sync my iPaq but then again, the USB connection wouldn’t work at all under Win2k on the old one … So I guess as always, it’s a bit of good and bad but mostly the new machine has been good. Of course, all that work meant that I didn’t do any useful coding :p

Speaking of coding, I’ve been noticing a very irritating thing about Scope recently that would probably mean a fix pretty soon 🙂 The Enable JavaScript button seems to switch functionality all the time – sometimes being depressed would mean that JavaScript is enabled while sometimes it would mean it is actually disabled. Very confusing and I do use a few sites which depend on JavaScript heavily … guess, it’s time to go back to MSVC and see what the heck I did 🙂

I had completed fixing all the bugs that jugg had discovered in BOB yesterday and for added measure fixed a few bugs that I found too 🙂 So since there wasn’t anything further to do at the moment, I decided to write up the docs, set up the web page and release BOB! So there it is on the sidebar – take a look and let me know what you think.

I got another e-mail from Hugh Myers and he tells me that he finally got Blog to work! And from his trials and travails I learnt a lot – especially that my haphazard labelling of items could be really confusing to somebody who didn’t understand what I meant :p I wonder how many other people tried Blog and gave up on it because they just couldn’t figure out how it was supposed to work? The good news is that I’m going through Blog and revamping a lot of these things that could cause confusion. I also need to change some of the internals of Blog and so I don’t know whether I would release Blog 1.2 now or do the internal changes as well so that I could release Blog 1.5 … And I promised jugg that I would get back to Gossip after releasing BOB :p Oh well, even I don’t know which one I will work on next 🙂

Oh yeah one last thing, since I have access to the Nortiq mirror from home (as opposed to work) I have brought that site back in synch with the other sites. So if you need an alternate to download from, Nortiq is good 🙂

My friend John in France mentioned today that he’d be happy to beta test BOB for me and then jugg came online and he said that I should release BOB as a beta till I can get the documentation done. In fact, he got a copy of BOB from me then and there and ran it through it’s paces and found a few things that needed to be fixed 🙂 Most of the stuff was minor and so I was able to fix them quickly during my lunch break and so I’ve uploaded a bare bones copy of BOB to both Tripod and Razor Systems. There are no docs and no instructions but it’s very easy to use. Extract the ZIP file to a directory of your choice, run the BOB.EXE file, define a few sites and save them (unless of course you want to keep on typing the site details each time) and then do the file transfer. It’s as simple as that … Oh yeah, where’s the file? It can be found here :p

The Gnomies still are a coming 🙂 Though it wasn’t the blitz I’d thought it would be from descriptions of other sites that had simply gone under the barrage of users trying to get to the site, there were quite a lot of visits yesterday and it doesn’t seem to be abating yet … Of course, I guess not everybody who reads LockerGnome would be interested in a blogging tool and so I shouldn’t have been worried about the site going under 🙂

Anyway, the response from all the new users hasn’t been … ummm … very impressive :p I have one new member for GroupHug and did receive some very detailed and in-depth comments from one user who’d tried out Blog. This particular user – Hugh Myers – pointed out some things that even I hadn’t noticed and I’ve been using the proggy daily <vbg> Of course, it also made me realize that Blog isn’t all that intuitive to use and I should either add context-sensitive help, include a help file or write better documentation 🙂 Oh well, if I had the time to do all of that … but we shall see …

On the coding front, I completed preliminary work on BOB! All the basic features now work but I still need to run it through some rigorous testing. I’m just wondering at the moment whether I should release it as a beta with no docs and no support page or wait till the weekend so that I can get all that stuff up and then do a proper distro. What do all of you think? 🙂 I’ve been getting some feedback on Gossip from Steve and jugg so I know there are at least two users of that proggy :p I’m actually beginning to wonder whether besides Scope, anybody really uses my apps besides me <vbg>