Been really busy with coding yesterday that I didn’t update the journal or respond to most of my e-mails. So what was I busy with? Not NewsHoard unfortunately – it was Blog again :p It’s mostly UI related stuff like the ability to hide either of your toolbars and have the setting saved across sessions, a system tray icon with a little context menu, lots of keyboard shortcuts, the option to display the archive links on the journal itself – so that you could have a little side-bar with links to older posts. Lots of stuff like that and most (if not all <g>) of them were suggested by Jason.

Speaking of Jason, he did a great guide for people moving from Blogger to Blog about how to convert their templates over and I should have put it up yesterday but I was too busy. So I have rectified the omission today by putting up the guide and also updating the FAQ/Know Defects section of the Blog page so that it is a little bit (but not much) more helpful :p

Ok, I made a big boo boo 🙂 I didn’t test one piece of the new functionality properly and that’s the one which had a bug <g> The option to turn off converting carriage returns to HTML paragraph tags had a bug which causes the publishing process to publish blank entries. I have fixed it and have uploaded the distributions again. If anybody who downloaded the Blog 3.5 distribution during the last couple of hours needs the above mentione feature, download the distro again. Otherwise you’re fine … sorry about that 🙂

jugg and Jason make a great pair of friends to have 🙂 They find bugs, test my apps as soon as I code them and suggest features that I hadn’t even thought of but which make everybody’s lives so much easier – thanks guys! Thanks to Jason Blog has moved from 3.0 to 3.5 because I’ve added so many new options and features that I felt that my original intention of naming this version 3.2 was inappropriate :p I haven’t updated the docs as much as I should but the “What’s New” section lists all the new features and bug fixes. A couple of things to beware of though – the database structure has changed again and so you need to get the latest Database Conversion Utility and I have added a new Edit menu item which you’ll see only if you either replace the existing Blog.cfg file with the new one in the distro or delete the existing one. Other than that, I think everything should be pretty straight forward …

Oh yeah, one more thing – if your journal publishes to a sub-directory on your FTP site, be sure that you have given the absolute path to that directory and not the relative path … Sometimes your ISP sets things up so that when you log in, you will always end up in a particular sub-directory but you have access to the parent directory of that subdirectory as well. In that case, make sure that the sub-directory path you specify in Blog is from the root .. It would have worked fine earlier but not with the new code. I don’t even know if this paragraph makes any sense – seems really complicated even to me :p

Yesterday was pretty busy in terms of coding but most of it wasn’t for NewsHoard – it was for Blog <g> First of all, I completely revamped the archiving and publishing processes – or at least the FTP part of it so that an FTP connection is not terminated at the end of each file transfer. Instead, the connection is terminated only if the next file transfer is to a different site. This eliminated the multiple FTP connections to the same site that happened in previous versions of Blog. Thanks should again go to Jason for pointing out the problem … Then I heard from Alan Dawson from Bangkok who pointed out that Blog seemed to have problems with system date formats other than the American one :p It took me a while to figure it out but once I did, I fired off a new build to Alan and he tells me today that everything’s fine now. There was also a problem that Jason reported with regards to using menu items in Blog under Win95 and experiencing a crash – I think I fixed it but forgot to ask Jason whether it works now. So all in all, a lot of fixes and features and improvements to Blog – so while I was kind of reluctant to let one of my apps move ahead of the others in terms of version numbers <g>, I think I’ll have to release a new build of Blog soon … maybe today but definitely this weekend 🙂

Forgot to mention a couple of things earlier today – there’s a site named WebAttack which seems to have featured Blog 🙂 They gave Blog a five-star rating and are sending quite a few people my way and so I thought I’d mention it – their site reminds me of some other site or maybe I’ve been there before … not sure but after a while being on the web it sort of all blends together anyway :p

Somebody named Coolgui actually put the Forums to good use by starting a Scope bug reports discussion but I get the feeling not many people visit the forums I’ve set up since there have been only three messages since it was started :p If more people start using it, it might be a good place to get support for all the software that I code …

I just read with great sadness that Poul Anderson passed away last night. For those who don’t know (are there any such?) – Poul was one of the Science Fiction greats from when Science Fiction could really be written with upper-case letters, when it used to be about great and wonderous things that evoked a sense of wonder and made us dream of places far away and beings strange. In the past few years we’ve lost so many of the greats of SF – Isaac Asimov, Gordon R. Dickson, Douglas Adams and now Poul Anderson. I’m not even sure that there are many of the greats left from the days when SF really flourished … 🙁

Where do I start today? 🙂 Jason (FreakHo) gave me such a lot of great feedback that I had to put aside work on NewsHoard to do some tinkering with Blog <g> I added the option to archive either weekly or monthly, added a new Blog tag which allows you to display the link in the archives for the current entry and formatting options for the time of the entry. In the process I also streamlined a few areas of code and fixed a couple of other bugs. I didn’t really want to release this build since there have been way too many releases of Blog recently :p so I gave a private build to Jason and he’s got a few more suggestions and bugs that I probably will be fixing soon <vbg> After that, I probably will be doing another release – unfortunately, some of the enhancements I’m planning include another database change 🙁 Ah well …

I got NewsHoard connecting to the news server and downloading news groups and also got the news group subscribing working – though somewhat imperfectly at the moment. The next step is to actually download the headers for a particular news group and then the actual post itself. I am not planning on including the binary harvesting functionality for this preliminary version. The release when it comes will be more a proof-of-concept than an actual app since it will be missing a lot of features and won’t have a nice GUI – the last is largely due to the fact that I haven’t been able to get in touch with sinesolis to bug him for more icons :p But it should get the ball rolling and then I know I can always depend on the users to suggest features that they’d like to see in the app.

I got an e-mail from my friend WareWolf – turns out that he’s out of work at the moment 🙁 Sometimes we lose sight of the fact how much the current downturn in the economy is affecting some of those around us because we ourselves are employed. Having been unemployed for a while myself, I know exactly how WareWolf must be feeling. He’s opened up an online store in the hopes I assume of trying everything possible. If any of you have any hardware needs and are shopping online please visit his store – you might find something that you need and you’ll also be helping out somebody …

We have this mock-paintball game running at work where several of us point our finger at anybody else in the game and go “bang!” and they’re dead for about five minutes … I got shot early in the morning by one of the guys driving by as I was walking in from the parking lot and just moments after that another guy drives by and shoots me again <vbg> Nothing like a mock drive-by shooting to get you in a good mood :p

I saw a post about the whole Blog vs. Blogger issue by a Blogger user named FreakHo yesterday on his blog. He talked about trying out Blog and had a list of reasons as to why he personally didn’t like Blog and would continue to use Blogger. Me being me <g>, I had to talk to him and find out more so that I could make Blog better. So I e-mailed him and we’ve been communicating back and forth about Blog, Blogger and the features that he finds lacking in Blog and I’ve actually got quite a few excellent ideas from him. Now the ideas are bubbling and boiling inside my mind and I’ll have to get them out soon by implementing them – ah the curse of coding :p

Speaking of the curse of coding, I have managed to make a lot of headway on the rewrite of Gossip which incidentally has been renamed to NewsHoard – the new name comes by courtesy of KuhnDog. Since the functionality is changing, KuhnDog thought that NewsHoard described the app better and I liked the name and so went for it. The initial release will be version 2.0 however since the codebase is basically that of the original Gossip with some new XML parsing code for working with the newsfeed backends. The UI is not complete by any means but if you’re interested, here’s a screenshot:

I noticed that what seems to be a Dutch variant of ZDNet has an entry about Blog posted on their site but not the English version of ZDNet – weird … Unless the first site is a parody or something like that …