Nothing much in the way of new coding I’m afraid since I didn’t get a chance to work on BlogMan (and yes, DeViLbOi I haven’t forgotten PostMan :p) – I’ve been busy with a few other things but hope to get back to BlogMan soon since I want to be able to make offline posts to my MT blogs soon. As far as PostMan goes, it is actually useable but is missing quite a few features that people might want, is a bit buggy and slow. It’s the slowness which actually halts me from going ahead with further development since I don’t want an e-mail client which takes ages to check mail when Eudora does it faster. It probably is either something I’m missing (most probable) or the Indy component that I’m using to do POP3 access. Either way, I will get back to PostMan but I usually find I code better when I work on something I’m interested in and so at the moment, it’s going to be BlogMan :p

Before I get anymore requests for this particular feature (suddenly, it has become very popular and I’ve received no less than three e-mails requesting it within about a week or two), the ability to have a different template for the archived entries is slated to be added in Blog 8.0 🙂 Both Tyran and Darin asked for it as well as another user in a comment left on this journal. Since so many people seem to want it, it’s going to be there in the next big release. But just have no idea as to when the next release (major or minor) is going to be since there seems to be enough coding projects to be divvied up between a whole team :p Ah well, I guess one at a time is the way to go …

I’ve also received a request to add scripting capabilities to Blog – so that a script written in perhaps VBScript or JavaScript can automate certain functions in Blog such as publishing, logging etc. While the idea has merit, I am again wary of adding too much bloat to any of my apps. I like to keep an app at a stage where it can still be carried around on a floppy. I know that’s sort of archaic at this juncture of computer development and that Blog really isn’t there since the compressed installer is around 2MB but to me that is still acceptable … kind of. But when you have a 4 or 5 MB installer, I don’t like that and I don’t know how big the final executable will grow to if I added scripting. Of course, as usual, I will do what the users want since you are ultimately the people who will need/use these features – I got Blog to the stage where it does what I want a long time ago :p

Slowly fasting :p

The month of Ramadan started today and so I have started fasting. Some people are confused as to why Ramadan seems to come around at different times of the year each year and that’s because Muslims follow the lunar calendar instead of the Gregorian calendar which is based on the sun. So there is a difference in a certain number of days between the Muslim years and the Gregorian years :p A new month starts with the sighting of the new moon and the new moon was sighted in Sri Lanka yesterday and so the month of Ramadan began last night. We got up early in the morning today and ate since we are supposed to not eat after dawn till dusk. One of the main things I always note about the month of Ramadan is that I have plenty of free time since I get up early and then don’t have to worry about lunch and stuff. But of course, since a strict adherence to fasting means no entertainment, no luxuries – not just no food and water. But I find that I read a lot more even though even that might be frowned upon by the ultra-orthodox since it is not really contemplating God or anything worthwhile – especially considering the kind of stuff that I read … but that’s another post entirely :p

I am still working on BlogMan. Though I should have gone on to entry retrieval and posting after doing the blog information retrieval code, I decided to deviate a bit and add multiple user support 🙂 So I’ve been working on adding the retrieval of user information for a given blog. Of course, this part is a bit clunky in that the BloggerAPI needs a login and password to retrieve information for a user instead of allowing you to retrieve information about all users on a given blog if you are an administrator for that blog. And the UI is kind of cluttered because it is all on one tab called Servers. You define the information for a given server and on the same screen you have a list of blogs for that server and a list of users for any given blog. I just completed the user information retrieval but haven’t tested it yet.

Once that is tested and is proven to be working, I will have to modify the UI so that you can select a given blog *and* a particular user from that blog. Then you should be able to use a synchronize option which allows you to retrieve either all the posts for that user and synchronize those with your local database or retrieve a certain number of recent posts. There are limitations here as well since I have read that Blogger only allows up to a maximum of 20 recent posts to be retrieved whereas B2 allows you to retrieve all posts by the user. I don’t know how Movable Type behaves in this respect. So it’s going to be a fine kettle of fish to sort out all this stuff.

Of course, that brings me to the other thing that I haven’t added yet and am mulling over – server categorization. Currently, each server you add to BlogMan is not categorized as to whether it uses Blogger, MT or B2 etc. Since there seems to be variations on the API support, I probably will need to add a server type/category field. Now my dilemma is as to whether I should have a separate table to hold the server type – this will come in especially handy when/if using different plug-ins for each server – or to hardcode the server types in to a drop down box for the moment. I still haven’t decided and will probably end up hardcoding for the moment since it’s easier :p

Wedding March or the Ides of March? :p

Since I am off the marriage stakes, my brother has become the latest contender in our family :p Of course, I’m sure that most you either know or have guessed by now that my own reluctance to be part of an arranged marriage stems from the fact that I’ve fallen in love with Jen <g> but be that as may be, my parents are actively searching for a bride for my brother now and he seems not too averse to the idea provided that they find a girl who meets his specifications. I should explain something here – or several things actually :p

The first thing is that in Sri Lanka (and in many other Asian countries too …) brothers usually get married according to age – so the younger brother cannot get married till the elder brother marries. It’s different for girls though – if you have a sister of marriageable age, you are supposed to get her married before you look into your own marriage :p For instance, my sister (who is three years younger than me) got married about ten years ago whereas my parents weren’t that particular about getting me married till recently and that too was probably because I was blocking the path to wedded bliss for my brother 🙂 Anyway, now that I have told my parents that I don’t want an arranged marriage (and that I would tell them once I’ve found the girl I want to marry – who incidentally is Jen and she tells me that she feels the same way but we still haven’t met in person …), they’ve decided that it’s time to concentrate on my brother.

Of course, that brings us to the second point – while love marriages do occur in Sri Lanka and other Asian countries, they still aren’t as common as arranged marriages by parents, especially in the more orthodox families. So my parents will try to find a Sri Lankan, Muslim (all of that is important to them :p) girl from a family that they deem is suitable and then the girl will have to fit my brother’s criteria and of course, he’ll have to be what she wants in a husband and finally the wedding (or at least the negotiations for a wedding) can take place. What a lot of work! :p

I am well and truly in the throes of creating another app :p The BlogMan prototype is coming along pretty well and I was actually able to connect to my Movable Type server yesterday and retrieve information about my blogs there. Retrieving posts and making posts is still going to take about a week to finish but we’re getting there. Of course, I’m already beginning to notice certain things such as the fact that I will probably need to either create a plug-in architecture or a separate API file since apart from the core Blogger API, Movable Type also seems to implement other access methods for features it has but Blogger doesn’t – such as the category feature. A plug-in architecture probably is the best since then I can support almost any blog server with XML-RPC capabilities but for the moment, I’m too lazy to do that and will probably go with a straight API file but keep the plug-in idea in mind. I won’t say more till I have actually gotten some of the other stuff to work since I have certain reservations but not sure if they are well founded or not.

I’ve also heard a few comments about Blog 7.0 linefeed conversion feature 🙂 Now, I had not even considered putting more than basic HTML formatting in my entries but I see that Rob has been using tables – sometimes I feel as if I am the person who least uses all the features/possibilities of Blog :p The easiest way not to have the linefeeds automatically insert line break tags into your tables is to have the table code and the contents in one complete line with no breaks at all. Yes, I realize that looks totally ugly and is hard to debug when a problem occurs but it will definitely keep the line break tags from appearing. The other thing I can think of is to use some sort of a new tag which will mark certain areas as non-parseable by Blog so that its completely bypassed by the Blog tag/linefeed parser. This might however, slow things down a bit and so there’s going to be a bit of a tradeoff in speed for clarity of entry.

Since so many people seem to be in favour of the calendar idea – I guess plug-ins are a definite feature to be implemented in the next major release of Blog. But just because I create a plug-in system, don’t expect me to create the calendar plug-in :p I might or might not since I’m way too lazy <vbg> I might simply convert the cookie tag into a plug-in, release the source and expect somebody else to do the actual work :p Of course, thinking about a plug-in architecture has brought up certain other difficulties that I had not considered at first. Blog relies heavily on database access but the plug-in creators might not have access to DBISAM to do any development work – so that means that I’ll probably have to create an internal Blog API which gives plug-in authors transparent access to the Blog databases. I am currently thinking of making it a simple function which takes an SQL statement and returns the results for the query as a variant array. Not sure if that will actually work since I haven’t tried it out yet but I’d like any input on the idea from the other developers out there. Anybody? 🙂

What’s in a name?

Darin suggested that I should have named this site “:p” since I use that a lot <vbg> Actually, that’s kinda appropriate too since I do do that a lot. I scatter emoticons all over my writing quite liberally (sometimes I think I do that a bit more than is called for by “approved” writing styles – but who care’s for other people’s conventions? :p) and it’s mostly because it is hard to convey emotions when you’re writing. I want people to know exactly how I felt when I wrote something and you can be sure that if I put a smiley somewhere that I was smiling as I wrote it. Of course, the only exception is the “:p” because I am not sticking my tongue out when I put it down … but I feel like doing so 🙂 That basically explains my attitude towards most of the world too – I like to stick my tongue out at them and say “nyah, nyah” and just do whatever I want to do and hence the constant usages (or should that be overusage? :p) of the ubiquitious “:p”

Love makes the world go round …

I wrote rather disparagingly about love a couple of days ago and wondered if there really was as much true love around as people seem to think. And right on the heels of that rant I saw an article in a Sunday newspaper over here where it is said that "love at first sight" might not be just the stuff of books or mushy minds :p Dr. Helen Fisher of the Rutgers’ University Center for Human Evoluionary Studies, New York is supposed to have said that "You can fall in love in less than eight minutes of conversation. Humans are animals that were built for love at first sight. You can simply look at somebody and trigger that brain chemistry for romantic love."
I am not sure how far this is true and if love at first sight equates to the "pure love" that I talk of – the kind of love where you put your loved one(s) ahead of yourself. But I thought it was kind of interesting to note Dr. Fisher’s comments …

Incidentally, speaking of love, my love Jen has been making her presence felt on these pages :p So I’ve changed the banner for the site to include her as well – sorry if I am not describing your side of things too well baby, so feel free to let me know what your description should be …

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

Change is a constant …

I’ve been updating the template for the site so that you don’t have to scroll horizontally to read an entry. I hated that bit about the template but it took some reworking to get that the way I wanted it to. It still might not work properly for you and if so, let me know.

I was talking to Jen today and realized that she could post here too since Moveable Type does allow multiple users – so now it’s become *our* blog instead of just mine :p I don’t know how often she’ll be posting here but you can expect several posts a day from me – at least till the novelty wears off <vbg> After that, who knows? I still haven’t had time to look into the Moveable Type, Grey Matter, Blog et al client that I have been talking about but I know it’s possible now since I did have time to look into the MT documentation. So it’s just a matter of time as to when the client arrives …

Solipsistic – what the heck is that? :p

Now I meant to write about this today anyway but then Jen went and asked me about it in a comment – but then again, we are like that in that we think and say the same things a lot of the time … Anyway, before I get distracted, back to what I wanted to say about the name of the site … The name has to do with my weird crazy ideas about reality – I sometimes wonder if the world around me is an illusion that I’ve dremt up and I am the only real person and that’s where the name comes from since Solipsism is (according to the dictionary)

1. The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.
2. The theory or view that the self is the only reality.

Anyway, that explains the Solipsistic part (but we’ll probably go into my idea and theories about reality more some other time :p) and the Meanderings is just because I ramble on and on about so many things …