It’s the knowing that’s hard …

We watched “Home Delivery” yesterday. It is a Bollywood comedy but it really wasn’t that funny :p It took way too long to set up the characters and their back story and then where it could have been funny, it kind of skipped over the possibilities and simply opted for more boring stuff. It did have some great feel-good moments towards the end but most of the audience (except for us masochists of course :p) would have either turned off the movie or walked out long before that.

Sometimes though, even a bad movie can lead to an epiphany 🙂 As I watched the movie, I began to see similarities between how the movie’s plot evolved (or didn’t evolve) and my novel, “Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog“. The thing is, I’ve not been able to get much feedback on “Honest” or the writing style I use there. When I submit a chapter for critiquing, I get arguments about whether I should have used blaster or credits in there instead of inventing a term. Or I get told that it’s cute but that my humour gets annoying after a while :p Of course, on the other hand, there are others who’ve said that they like the writing.

To be honest, I don’t really let the criticisms or compliments bother me since I know that both are weighted by individual preferences. Sure, if everybody was unanimous in saying that I sucked, then I’d give up writing but so far that hasn’t happened (and that’s not to say it still might not :p). But basically what I’m getting at is that I haven’t used gotten any concrete critiques (except from a couple of people) that I can use to specifically “fix” my novel. But watching “Home Delivery”, I thought maybe my problem was the same as the movies – it sounds good as an overall idea but the execution meanders too much to make a good story :p

I don’t know if that is actually the case or not. Maybe I just haven’t found the right person to submit my work to but any avenue is worth investigating and I feel that my story perhaps has too many characters and too much meandering. So I’m going to use “Home Delivery” as a template of what not to do and then take apart one of my favourite novels to see how things work there. Then I’ll decide how I go on from there – whether “Honest” can stand as it is with a few tweaks or perhaps if I should simply rewrite it to be leaner and meaner 🙂

How do you cope?

How do you cope with all the stuff that needs to be done in one single day? I’ve often talked about Stephen King‘s assertion that life is like a pony – that it sometimes canters, sometimes gallops and sometimes walks. (Or words to that effect – I couldn’t find a reference online after doing a casual search :p) At the moment, the pony of my life is galloping for its life – in fact, its running so fast that its likely to break its own fool neck :p

I’m so far behind on stuff that I need to do that I can’t even see the back of the line :p I’ve got articles that I need to write for TechPedia; a crit that I’m supposed to send out to my crit pal of his next chapter and I’m working like crazy on my blogging app, Blog, every spare moment I get to get some features that I really want working. That’s just the tip of the iceberg though. I’ve also got to do at least two installations – one an auction system for a friend to test out and another a forum + WordPress integration installation to test out some functionality. Yeah, life is full 🙂

No, this is not a whining thread where I talk about how hard my life is :p I actually wanted to talk about how you deal with such a situation. What do you do when you feel overwhelmed when things are piling up and you feel so pressured to get things done but all that happens is that you get more and more worked up and everything starts crowding you in? First of all, take a deep breath. Then do the same thing that you do when you walk – lift up your foot and put it down and do the same with your other foot 🙂 Just take things a step at a time. That’s about the only way to deal with a situation like this. Of course, it would also help to prioritize but for somebody like me who does things on impulse, that doesn’t really work. So do what comes naturally (except to panic that is :p)

There will always be things to do and most probably, all of them are going to be urgent. The trick is not to let things get the better of you. Tell yourself that you are in control. Do what needs to be done now and put the rest off till later. Hopefully, you’ll come out on top … if not, I’m already at the top of the tallest building I can find and you can join me there … to enjoy the view of course :p

Coding again …

I started working on Blog again. Despite all the research that I did into other blogging tools which supported the MetaWeblog API, I just couldn’t find an app which worked exactly the way my rather picky tastes dictate :p Sure, I found a couple which came close but nothing was quite there. If everything else was there, then live spellchecking wasn’t there and I do like knowing if I make a spelling mistake instead of having to check on words over and over to make sure that I wasn’t imagining things 🙂

So back to Blog it was. The first issue I faced was, the question of how to implement the UI so that somebody could select either to publish a post or to save as draft easily. The current menuing system I was using wasn’t very good at displaying toolbar buttons with multiple options :p I had originally given up on the standard Delphi components because I had run into issues with setting up custom menus/toolbars buttons on the fly but by now I had forgotten what the exact issue had been. So I decided to give the standard Delphi components one more try. I ditched the custom menuing system and went back to Delphi components. I’ll know soon enough how that goes …

I did manage to get the posting as draft to a MetaWeblog system working soon after that. All it needed was changing a few lines of code 🙂 I then wanted to get uploading of images via the MetaWeblog API system working. While this involved fairly few code changes to implement, detecting new images and ensuring duplicates are not uploaded proved to be a lot more difficult. So I put that on hold for the moment in favour of another objective – getting custom tag support working with the WYSIWYG editor. Still working on that one …

Wasted time …

I’ve been involved in an online controversy for the past week or so. OK, maybe involved is too strong a word – I’ve been following it keenly. I don’t like taking sides unless I know all the facts in a case and in this case, I didn’t know all the facts. Both sides claimed that they had unrevealed facts and that they couldn’t reveal all the facts just yet. So, I’ve been following things to see how it develops 🙂

Sure, I had my own conclusions (or rather theories) based on what I knew so far and what some of the players said themselves. But that isn’t necessarily proof, right? Of course, that didn’t seem to stop most people from taking sides and defending "their" side or vilifying the other side. The sad thing is, all this brouhaha broke up over a site about creativity, a site aimed at helping writers to hone their skills and their craft. Now, all that energy and all that talent is channeled towards name calling and arguments. A waste of time, or what?

A writer’s main job should be writing. And I hope, that when one writes, it will be something constructive, something useful or something entertaining. Sure, some of these posts are entertaining for a given value of entertainment – just like some people find cockfights or dogfights entertaining :p But I still feel that this energy could have been devoted to something else. We don’t know all the facts, we can’t presume to judge. So why not spend our time creatively rather than fighting others or baiting trolls? But that’s human nature for you – we just don’t know what might be logical. We do the exact opposite :p

Of course, I’m no better since I’ve been spending all my writing time reading this stuff and mentally commenting :p But I’ve decided that enough is enough. The community in question will be revived in its own time. There is not much to be gained by dwelling on what has happened. It is time to simply look to the future and start working on writing again 🙂

Scavenger hunt

There are days when I just spend all of my time hunting for something. No, not the meaning of life :p I’d set my sights on a specific set of features for an app and then I’d go hunting. There’s a lot of interesting stuff such a hunt turns up but sometimes it ends up being just a waste of time :p

Following up on yesterday’s comments about a good blogging client which supports the MetaWeblog API, I launched a search for such a client. Sure, I found lots and lots of them but the question is, were they any good? :p Most of the ones I found, I’ve added to the list of clients provided at the above wikipedia entry. Not sure if that entry will remain as it is but if you’re interested, you can take a look there 🙂

Basically, I was looking for the following features – full MetaWeblog API support (including the uploading of images – no FTP!), should fetch the complete post (most of the clients I tested fetched only the first part of the post if there was a more … tag), should have a WYSIWYG editor, should fetch all categories correctly from the server and mark each post with the correct categories. Those were the major features. In the "nice to have" section you have, the ability to fetch and save old posts from the server and the option to fetch only posts made by yourself.

Most of the clients I tried out failed the "must have" list of features. Quite a few of them did not fetch the full post for some reason – I’m guessing that they implement the MetaWeblog API but don’t look at the text returned by the more part of the entry for some reason or other. And an interesting thing was that there were a lot of clients out there which use the .NET Framework – I guess apps using the .NET Framework are going to be as common as VB apps soon! Wait, what am I saying? VB now use the .NET Framework :p

Yes, all poking fun at the .NET Framework aside, I found all the apps using the framework to be rather clunky, glitchy and slow. Sometimes things would work and sometimes things just didn’t. It gave me a rather bad taste in the mouth after a while. But moving on, I found only a few clients which actually met my standards – BlogJet, Anconia RocketPost and Chrysanth WebStory. I must mention that BlogWizard appeared to be capable of meeting the standards but I could never get it to work well or reliably. I was able to look at a post it fetched by opening it in a text editor and the post had everything but the category info but I could never open the post in BlogWizard itself :p

As far as the successful candidates go, I don’t like the editing interface in BlogJet since it seems to be a bit minimal but it does seem to do the job very competently. RocketPost is the one with the most bells and whistles and the one I would call the closest to my ideal. It had only one issue that I could find – it consistently removes an HMTL comment tag that I placed at the beginning of each entry. This comment marks where the system would later insert a Google AdSense code and so it was irritating :p WebStory had a lot of bells and whistles as well but while it fetched the category list correctly from the remote server, for some reason, it wasn’t assigning them to the posts at all when it fetched posts. Besides, it seemed to have set limits on post titles when the remote server didn’t – this was annoying.

Unfortunately, all of my final choices are commercial apps and while I like RocketPost, I am not about to pay $99 for the professional version which supports multiple blogs. (The home version costs $37). BlogJet on the other hand is $40 and does support multiple blogs. Of course, given that I still can’t find something within my price range that has everything I want, I might be better off simply coding the features I want into Blog :p Though looking at all these new blogging clients has made me re-think the user interface in Blog. Hmm …

A good app is hard to find …

Why is it so hard to find the perfect blogging utility? :p I’m currently writing for another blogging site and so, my blogging requirements have gone beyond simply typing out text and publishing it 🙂 Blog does all that pretty well but Blog doesn’t handle draft publishing or uploading of images via the MetaWeblog API (instead of through FTP) just yet. Since I was feeling rather lazy and didn’t want to spend another week coding these features in, I decided to see if I could find an alternative.

The new Word 2007 beta has some interesting blogging features and it works pretty well as a blogging tool on its own rights. But even there, the image support and category support is limited. Images are only uploaded via http (using FrontPage extensions I assume) or FTP and the FTP upload has issues since the image location sometimes gets messed up in the resulting links.

All I wanted was a simple WYSIWYG editor which would allow me to create an entry, add images to the entry and provide one-click publishing where I could either publish or save as draft and also have all of my linke images uploaded to the server automatically. Apparently, there is no such app as far as I can discover and my own software is the closest to what I want to find 🙁 So I guess I’ll just have to sit down and hammer out more features into Blog and try to get it to the point where I want things to be … unless I find an alternative before then :p