I’m baaaaaack :p Actually, I’ve been back in the middle of the whole coding thing (or at least trying to …) for a couple of days but didn’t have much luck getting started with the coding till yesterday. But more on what’s been distracting me can be found over at SM 🙂 Yes, I’ve started posting again at SM as well though I think I’ll end up combining the two into one blog again and keeping the SM name rather than The Developer’s Corner. I’m kind of attached to The Developer’s Corner since I’ve had it around in some form or another since around ’97 or ’98 but I think it’s time to let SM take over … But that’ll probably be discussed in length in a different post on SM :p

So what about the coding you say? Well, I got an e-mail from Nigel about the possibility of me getting off my posterior and actually coding in the BlogMan features into Blog since he was interested in using WordPress for his site but wanted to have the Blog interface to post from 🙂 I’d actually been a little less busier than I’d been for a while due to the end of the elections over here but hadn’t really gotten around to coding since I’d reinstalled Windows on my notebook in the meantime and was feeling too lazy to install Delphi and all the components I use again :p Actually, the laziness came from the fact that it’s possible that I’ll be switching my main work machine to a different notebook in a month or so and then I’ll have to start the installation cycle all over again. However, since Nige was willing to beta test, I thought I should actually get cracking on the code now. And so I did 🙂

Of course, it took me till yesterday to actually get all the little Delphi bits together and my installation working the way I needed it to code Blog again and so not much work has been actually done. I did get started on the database changes to necessary to accommodate the BlogMan features yesterday. Since I was doing major database changes, I also decided to rename some of the tables (nothing that concerns the user but just thought I’d mention it here anyway :p) since I hadn’t liked the original names I’d used but been too lazy to fix it till now :p

However, it’s already becoming apparent to me that some terminology changes are going to be needed in Blog as well from this release on. For instance, with the addition of support for remote servers like Blogger.com, MT or WordPress, you get two different types of blogs – the blogs in Blog and the blogs on the server. Confusing? Yeah, I thought so. The blogs in Blog are the blogs where you make your entries but these aren’t always the same as the blogs you’ll have on the server … though they can be. The blogs on blog can be published to any location such as your hard disk, directly via FTP to a web server or to a blog on a remote server. However, your blog installation needs to know about the blogs on a remote server in order to determine where your Blog blog is to be published … even more confusing huh? I really don’t know how better to explain this concept :p I guess I can retain the terminology I currently use, "journal", to refer to a blog on Blog and "blog" to refer to a blog on the remote server – but that is something I’ll have to figure out later on …

There are even more issues with the new changes though. While Blog publishes a whole range of entries when it publishes to local disk or via FTP, it can publish only the current entry if it publishes to a remote blogging server since the server actually handles the real work of publishing the entries and decides how many posts are shown on the main page etc. This probably is not even a problem if somebody publishes only via FTP or only to a remote blogging server but if they wanted to do both (and I do believe that Blog should provide this option since the core concept of Blog is that you should have the freedom to do anything you want with your blogs …), the way this is accomplished (and even more importantly, the interface and dialogs provided to get there) might get a bit complicated. Again, I guess we’ll just have to wait till I get the code far enough to actually get to that point …