I’ve discovered that it should be pretty simple to implement an application that would allow somebody to post to both Blogger and Moveable Type (MT) using a client to compose the entry offline! This should work with Grey Matter as well since I believe that it supports the Blogger API as well. However, not all the blogging applications/servers support the Blogger API in the same way – for instance, MT does not allow you to edit templates since their template mechanism is different to Blogger’s. However, this is a starting point and so I have decided to start work on a new app I’m calling BlogMan – short for Blog Manager :p It is basically using the existing Blog interface and code as a launching point – it will even have the 7.0 interface with comments display etc. even though I cannot currently support the extraction of comments … but I’m hoping that I can at least add extensions to MT to do some of this. Not sure about the others since it’ll depend on each implementation I guess. I will probably have a better understanding when I have a working prototype but that might not be for a week or so.
In the meantime, I have also been thinking about some of your suggestions and ideas for Blog. John mentioned that he liked the current separation of entry and HTML template and wanted it kept that way – with reference to a WYSIWYG entry option. This was just to do the entries, the template still would be separate. The reason for the WYSIWYG entry box would be so that you can get your entry exactly the way you want it to – especially for those who use a lot of HTML code in their entry. It personally wouldn’t do much for me since I don’t use images or lots of HTML code but there are some for whom it could be a great boon.
Then there is the questions of plug-ins. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought and originally I had been thinking of a way to create a comprehensive plug-in system which would allow new features. I realize that this will probably never work. But, it is possible to allow a plug-in system which would allow new Blog tags. For instance, I know that the BlogCookie tag can be easily parcelled out to a plug-in since I don’t think everybody uses it – plus, it needs Cee to be installed to use it. A plug-in would make the whole process so much more cleaner and you could probably even have Cee installed in a completely different directory than Blog. Another good candidate for the plug-in system would be a calendar display a la MT. There are many possibilities and I’m going to look into creating a plug-in system for the next major release of Blog, which will be 8.0 but there probably will be the bug fix release that I’ve been talking about before then – especially since Tyran’s pointed out that I have broken the search text highlighting in the Find option somewhere along the way :p
yes, yes, yes, i want a calendar! I have a calendar …. but haven’t installed it yet. Also, have to beg to differ on MT not allowing template editing. I had a wickid MT template my first few days at Viberate.org, but I deleted it and switched to blog cuz I met you. Visit the link to Lindsey on my site, she does bad ass MT templates and is the chick that set mine up for me those few days.*muah*
I don’t mean that MT itself doesn’t allow template editing – but the BloggerAPI for MT doesn’t allow remote template editing :p If I couldn’t edit the templates in MT, *our* site would look the same as everybody else’s 🙂
Hi, Me again, I love the new addition in Blog 7.0 whereby the line feed is converted to br /, this is a great assist, other than that any playing with the code in the entries would have me manually decode the entries.
I found myself not using the line feed and adding in br / manually before your latest update, if you decide on an html wysiwyg editor, please create an option to disable the feature.
It reminds me of the original frontpage software that MS released that continually played with the code and if one alteration was made the entire page had to be recoded.
Fahim, I only found one thing strange with the br / for linefeeds and carrige returns: If I build a table using HTML, the table gets padded with extraneous “br /”. This isn’t always a problem, but it does sometime cause my tables to be larger than I want. I have gotten around this by turning off the br / feature (going back to original mode) when including tables in my posts.
Any thoughts on how to fix that, maybe from a posting side?
I too like the calendar idea.
As an addition to plugins, would a scripting system be something you could consider? Of course, you would still have to think through what kind of stuff to make available for scripting. For instance, you could allow custom insertion scripts that would add html code to your current entry based on input, database data, etc.
Hi, I have a feature suggestion (unless I am a moron and there is already a way to do this.) Right now, entries when archived appear in an archive file that uses the same template as the main page. I want to be able to specify a different template (not for archive.htm, but for arcyyyymmdd.htm files) so that my archives look similar too, but not the same as, my main page.
Thanks!
i thinks this has been done by the folks at http://www.wbloggar.com/