Tyran was kind enough to volunteer to do some proper documentation for Blog. I know he’s got a full plate in front of him already and was reluctant to ask him to take up something I know is going to go on and on and on since such a lot of things change with each release of Blog (you should see the changes list for the next release :p) but he said that he’d still do it. So thanks a bunch Tyran – you’re a gem 🙂 Incidentally, Tyran already sent me a proof of concept that he’d built around the current Blog.txt file and to me it looks great! I couldn’t even recognize that it was the same document at first because it looked so different 🙂 It’s got a table of contents, a proper index and a search facility and when done, will be a great help to all new users – hope you’re all properly grateful to Tryan :p
Incidentally, I’d intended to pan a movie yesterday but forgot all about it when I got carried away by my rant :p The movie was “Doctor T and the Women” and is it just me or does anybody else think that it is one of the worst movies ever made? It tries so hard to be a “women’s” movie (at least that’s how it seemed to me …) but ends up being extremely condescending and patronizing towards women – not to mention negative. I hated it from start to end and only went through the whole thing in the hopes of finding something redeeming about the whole experience but there just wasn’t anything!
I’ve started working on Blog 7.0 again and I made a slight change to one of the Server mode features based on a discussion I had with Anders Nystedt. He mentioned the fact that if he’s using Client mode to remotely post, that he sometimes submits the same post twice and that crashes Blog server. Now this is a known defect but still something that shouldn’t happen. So I had a little discussion with him about it and decided that it would be better if the post could somehow be handled. So now what Blog does is that if a post with the same date and time already exists, it checks the author and if the author is the same, it replaces the existing entry (incidentally, that provides instant remote editing facility – ta da!) but if it’s by a different author, then it logs the error and skips the e-mail. I just realized that I can extend the same principle to delete an existing entry by having the user send out a blank message body! Anybody else think that’s needed?
I also added a proper log file to Blog. Currently it’s not customizable and will automatically backup the current one and recreate a new one when it reaches 100k but I might decide to make the file name and the file size limit options controlled from the Options dialog – not sure yet since I don’t really see the need for customization here (at least not for the file name) but I might change my mind. Oh yeah, the log now records when Blog was started and shutdown as well 🙂 In case you’re wondering why I’d added a log file at all, it’s mostly for the benefit of Blog Server users since a server means you will leave it running unattended but would obviously want to know what happened – especially when something goes wrong.