Day before yesterday was another one of the interminable holidays in Sri Lanka. So I used that day, whatever time I had at work during lulls in work and my evenings to work on quite a few of my apps. Blog now has a timer in Server mode so that it will automatically publish at timed intervals and it also sports a new Include/Exclude list from which you can limit who can (or can’t) post to your particular journal. In addition, I’ve been working on Cee and have bumped it up to 2.0 from the 1.0 Beta which was originally released :p If you’d like to see some of the preliminary stuff (like the spiffy new interface …) download what is still linked as Cee 1.0 Beta on the site – I was too lazy to update stuff and simply uploaded under the same name :p Of course, the build on my machine has some additional stuff like the ability to create a signature/cookie file on your hard disk at timed intervals, the ability to minimize to the system tray etc.

While I was working on apps, I’ve also done some work on BOB and added proxy support to it. This was basically done for my benefit since Norton Firewall doesn’t allow me to upload to my sites using BOB normally – I got around this in Blog with enabling PASV support but since I hadn’t added that to BOB, I decided it was time to do <g> Of course, I could have simply added PASV support and stopped there but I decided to go for broke and added proxy support as well …

In other news, I’ve been looking at several SMS support apps for my iPaq so that I could receive and send SMS messages through my Ericsson T68 via the iPaq. I’ve found several options but all of them have been shareware apps and unfortunately, while $25 would have been nothing much to me while I was in the US, it is about Rs. 2500 over here and that seems like a lot of money for an app that I can write myself with a bit of effort :p I did find a freeware app that does everything I want it to do but it’s bluetooth connectivity seems to be a bit sketchy and that’s basically what I wanted. Oh well … I’ll try their latest version that I downloaded today and if that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll have to look into coding another Pocket PC app 🙂

Well … what with the recent rains and stuff the power cuts are slowly abating – from five hours a day, we’ve gone down to one hour every other day during weekdays. Of course, this will only be till the next drought since most of the power generated in Sri Lanka is hydro-power but I guess that’s the way it is when you live in Sri Lanka :p

Whether we had power or not, I was able to get quite a bit of work done on Blog 🙂 It was mostly due to the inspiration provided by a few Blog users who kept on coming up with challenging new features which just made me want to code – what can I say? I just love a challenge :p I did some preliminary testing, found that most of the new features seemed to work and so sent it off to a few beta testers who had been kind enough to volunteer for the job. So what’s in the new build? First of all, I’ve finally added the multi-user capability that I’ve been talking of for a long time. Instead of going down the client-server path as I’d done with the original beta of Blog CS, I decided to go with a self-contained approach. So now, Blog has three modes: Standard, Client and Server. Of course, this is something that I’ve talked of before and so I won’t go into a lot of details …

What else is new? I added a More … feature which allows people who make long posts to still keep their main page compact and readable. They can use a new Blog tag which will automatically put a link at a specific point in the post which points to the full post instead of having the whole post on the main page. I’ve also added the ability to select the font you want to use for the title and entry edit boxes because of a request from (I believe) a Chinese user who said that he couldn’t see what he typed in Chinese on Blog because Blog was limited to an English font. There are a few other minor enhancements and bug fixes but that’s about it for the current release. I intend to add a few more things before the final release but am not sure of the exact list of changes I plan since I don’t even have a deadline for the final release at the moment :p