November 13, 2002

Blog might (might not <g>) be “inept” or substandard but the same can certainly not be said about the Blog users – all of you are top notch 🙂 Thank you for your kind support and defence of Blog. It always is a pleasure to know that people like your software enough to defend it publicly – thank you all, Edward, Tyran, Phil and any others I might have left out inadvertently! Mike tells me that I can relax since BOS have removed the offending remark from their site :p I know, I really shouldn’t have gone into such a snit about it but *I* like Blog and so it kind of irritates me when somebody puts it down without offering an alternative – kind of reminds me of the time everybody (meaning actually the ZDNet groups Net publications :p) were going into a tizzy about this Australian group who had come up with the “brilliant” idea to do a browser which supported both the IE and Mozilla engines. Scope had been out for a while at that point and some of the Scope users got so cheesed off that they wrote to ZDNet and me as well 🙂 But I digress …

Some interesting new ideas have come up for Blog both here and on the Blog mailing list. I want to get into that but I also want to give a status report on BlogMan – so I’ll do a quick report on BlogMan and then get to the Blog stuff :p BlogMan is now at the beta stage – except for getting some sort of documentation in place. It can save and delete entries both locally and remotely, it can publish via the remote server and it can synchronize with a remote server. Currently it will work with both Blogger and Movable Type and I hope to add other blogging utilities as soon as I can find API references for them. If anybody is interested in seeing their blogging utility supported in BlogMan, do let me know (preferably with a link to the API reference for the utility). I hope to release the beta either today or tomorrow but it might be later since you know how I get bogged down with stuff :p Plus, I still need to create a page for the BlogMan app.

Now to the Blog ideas – one idea was by Phil to support style sheets for previewing. This made me think, “Why stop at style sheets? Why not apply the whole template to the preview?” It sounds like a good idea to me but there are problems – if you use relatively pathed images in your template, then they won’t display in the preview and it will look ugly. I was thinking of maybe adding support for a directory which would have all the images used in the template but path parsing could again become a problem due to the way I implement Blog. So then, I decided to give a customized Blog temp directory since that is where I put the temporary file for previewing and if the user can customize the temp directory, then they can put any necessary images in that same location or create the sub-directory structure needed from that location to hold the images. This seems like the best solution but there is a problem there too. Currently, I delete the Blog temp directory both when Blog shuts down and when it starts up (in case, Blog crashed and so didn’t clean up on exit) and you can’t do that with a customized temp directory since there might be image files in there that are needed for the template. So … I’m still left pondering how to go about this. Any ideas?

The other idea is something that has been in my mind since I added the backup facility – the option to do an automatic backup in Blog – either daily or weekly when you close Blog. All the user would have to do would be to set up the frequency of backups and a location for the backups and Blog would automatically create the backups when you close it. This sounds like a good idea to me but I hate adding new features unless a lot of people might use it since otherwise it is just bloat to me. (Yes, I know there are exceptions :p But I’d rather not talk about those <g>)

Tags: General
Posted by Fahim at 5:42 am   Comments (5)

5 Responses to

Subscribe to comments with RSS

#1
Gravatar Image
Edward McCain 12 November 2002 at 2:53 pm



Currently, I delete the Blog temp directory both when Blog shuts down and when it starts up (in case, Blog crashed and so didn’t clean up on exit) and you can’t do that with a customized temp directory since there might be image files in there that are needed for the template. So … I’m still left pondering how to go about this. Any ideas?

I don’t know I am reading it correctly, but it sounds like you need to set a set a ‘dirty flag’ to check for improper shutdown?

Or are you worried about the user images being deleted from the special temp directory? If they are copied there when the user chooses preview, what’s the difference if they are deleted on start? As long as Blog knows where to get the originals (maybe a variable set in the template options?), it wouldn’t make a difference. User kliks preview, Blog reads the template image directory, copies the images to the temp directory, deletes everything on close and start.

Is that close to what you’re imagining?

as for the backup feature — Don’t you make backup’s of your important data? Wouldn’t if be nice if *everything* allowed you the ability to back up your data and special user settings? And did it automatically? What a wonderful world we would live in!

All my backups would be in the d:backups directory.

MSIE favourites, ICQ contacts, Blog archives, Outlook Express contacts, MS Office preferences…

All ready to be archived to a cd-rom, all ready to be imported when the original application is reinstalled…

*sigh* It will all change when I rule the world…

😀

#2
Gravatar Image
Nige 13 November 2002 at 3:13 am

The backup facility sounds neat. The Preview function should be an option perhaps? – in case some of us don’t want/need to increase the disk bloat of an extra directory with images duplicated in it? Or are you only talking about template design images? 🙂

#3
Gravatar Image
John 13 November 2002 at 3:14 am

Backups sound good, and much needed, as a previous Systems admin, one never realises how necessary backups are, until the crash.

#4
Gravatar Image
Bacchus 13 November 2002 at 7:20 am

I love the idea of an automatic backup feature – I myself would have it set to make the backup at least once a day.

#5
Gravatar Image
Greg 13 November 2002 at 7:24 am

Fahim, I’d love to be able to beta test BlogMan with B2 (http://www.cafelog.com/readme.html#xmlrpc for BloggerAPI docs) but I would need to be able to use it through an authenticated proxy server.

If you’re using the IE component to do the actual submission, it shouldn’t be a problem, but it’s something to be aware of at any rate 🙂

Leave a response

:mrgreen: :neutral: :twisted: :shock: :smile: :???: :cool: :evil: :grin: :oops: :razz: :roll: :wink: :cry: :eek: :lol: :mad: :sad: