November 11, 2002

Cycles of change

I’ve read in several places that all things are cyclical – of course, I can’t right now recall where I read this except for a vague memory of a science fiction story or two which talked about human history being cyclical etc. Anyway, things in my life seem to be cyclical too. I’ve noticed the greater cycles – the ones which seem to take years. I think I just started another cycle and that one seems to be a five year cycle and seems to have a valley or a peak (probably a valley would be more appropriate since to me that’s where things start) in October. I’ve also suddenly become aware of minor cycles – things which happen over a few days (maybe four or five days) and then repeat again over and over. Some cycles can be good but certain cycles I wish that I could break out of – yes, all of this really sounds cryptic unless you know what I’m talking about :p So why the heck am I writing this at all if I’m not going to talk about what these cycles involve? Probably just to hear my own thoughts and to put them in order more than anything else.

I don’t think I should be going into the minor cycles at the moment but the major cycles as far as I am concerned, involve career, relationship and family. I think I started a cycle in 1997 when I left for the US and it ended when I came back this year and another one seems to have started off around October again – I don’t know where that one goes but if I can still recall this in five year’s time, I’ll probably be able to tell whether it is really an exact cycle or not. Or maybe I’m just looking for order in a chaotic life, who knows – certainly not I :p

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Posted by Fahim at 6:59 am  |  No Comments

I’ve had more progress with BlogMan 🙂 I was stuck on a few problems since I’d started with the Blog code but changed the data table names for BlogMan and certain errors were popping up that I couldn’t trace at first :p I’ve finally got through all the errors, fixed most of the code and have gotten user information retrieval working. Now, you can retrieve information for any user on your blog as long as you know their login and password. This way, you can even retrieve posts by users other than yourself. I started with some Delphi code which emulated the Blogger API but I’ve discovered that Blogger API calls are not strictly adhered to by some of the other blogging apps or that they support a superset of the Blogger API and so, I am in the process of creating a metablog API library which can carry out the same API call for different blogging tools *and* take care of the differences in the way the API calls are implemented as well. So far, I’ve done user information retrieval and post retrieval and even there, I have to modify post retrieval to work completely with Movable Type.

Blogger only has a content value for a post where as Movable Type has extra text, summary, title and I forget what else. I’ll probably have to modify the interface as well so that all the extra text areas appear as tabbed parts of the main edit window. Hmm … maybe I should make the preview window a part of the tab set too? That’s actually a good idea even for Blog since then you don’t have to keep on hitting the toggle preview button or right-click and refresh each time you make a change to your entry. I’ll have to look into that. But first, I need to get post retrieval working right and then posting, publishing and deleting entries. Once all that works, I can start using BlogMan and from then on, all I’ll really need to do is spruce up things for releasing :p

Incidentally, somebody pointed out in a comment (they didn’t leave their name :p) that Bloggar (I think that’s the name of the tool) already does what BlogMan is attempting to do. I downloaded Bloggar yesterday but didn’t work too much with it but I do like the interface and it seems to support a heck of a lot of blogging tools than I had even imagined existed :p But I don’t know if it supports downloading posts on to your desktop and keeping the posts there for backup – which is the main reason for BlogMan. I want the functionality of Blog with the easy accessibility from anywhere of a server-based solution. Plus, I am used to the Blog interface and would rather work with it (however clunky it might be :p) than a new app. Of course, the final reason is that I can add any feature I want instead of relying on somebody else to do it when they have the time :p Whatever the case might be, I’m continuing with BlogMan so there! <vbg>

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Posted by Fahim at 4:57 am  |  No Comments