Things have been kind of quiet here at The Developer’s Corner but I’ve been posting fairly regularly over at SM :p But that was mostly because I’ve been moving over from Movable Type to WordPress (WP) as my backend blogging tool over at SM. I’m finally moved over, the data is converted, I’ve even written a plugin for WP and have gotten the usual tweaking associated with a new tool out of my system 🙂 But then, since I used BlogMan to post to SM, I find myself without the ability to compose entries offline now since BlogMan does not support WP and Blog’s support for remote servers is not complete. So it was back to Blog coding with a vengeance :p

However, I was hindered by two things: a) a bug in the HTMLEdit component that drops any images inserted into an entry b) lack of time. The first problem is actually a serious one in that I couldn’t add any images at all in WYSIWYG mode into a blog entry. I’d written to the developer of the HTMLEdit component, Fabian, about two weeks back about this and had heard nothing from him. He’s usually very prompt about responding to bug reports and when I’d not heard from him in a week, I tried again but still no luck. I then tried a kludge to work around the problem and it seemed to work and so I’m going with that for the moment but if Fabian has for some reason dropped off the face of the earth, I’m going to have to look around for a different WYSIWYG HTML editing component before I can complete Blog 8.0 and that’s going to mean redoing a lot of work I’d already done. Ah well …

The second problem, lack of time, is something that I’m always plagued with but recently it’s gotten worse since I’m working for two different organizations at the moment. The second organization is moving into new offices and I’ve been put in charge of procuring and installing all the technical equipment and that has been taking a fair bit of my time. In fact, I’ve been coding Blog in the evenings when I can and since I’m dead tired by that time, don’t be surprised if a few bugs creep into the next release :p

Speaking of the next release, it is going to be big – and I don’t mean the executable size … though that might turn out to be a fair jump from the last release as well :p I’ve had to totally revamp the internal database structures to support the ability to post to remote blogging servers and to try and make the journals totally independent of where they are published to. Plus, the new publishing to remote servers ability meant that I had to re-write the internal publishing code as well. Personally, I think that the revamp was good since it looks and feels much more streamlined now. However, since I still haven’t tested the code thoroughly, it might turn out to be not such a good thing after all. In fact, since I’ve done a lot of restructuring, re-coding etc., the next release is probably going to need a lot of extensive testing to make sure that I didn’t break anything. So, while I hope to have a release out soon, it might turn out that the next release is much, much further away than even I anticipate 🙂

No, I haven’t stopped development and gone into hibernation again :p In fact, I’ve been updating stuff over at SM fairly regularly (yeah, that was a shameless plug :p) But I did have to stop development for a while since we had a lot of holidays and I got caught up in watching movies and doing other fun stuff but then I did get back to development but hit a sudden snag – images in the HTMLEdit component started disappearing on me :p I have written to the author of the component about this but haven’t heard from him about it and am sort of waiting on him. Actually, I just read something on his site which might provide the answer to the problem but I have no idea when this particular feature mentioned on the developer’s site was implemented because I don’t remember it being there originally when I stared working with HTMLEdit – but then again, my memory isn’t always perfect :p

Incidentally I know that some have been suggesting that I should drop the HTMLEdit component altogether since there were problems with it but please bear in mind that both the HTMLEdit component itself and Blog 8.0 are in beta at the moment and that we’ll get all these problems ironed out by the time the final release rolls around. So bear with me while we slowly (but surely) fix these things one by one 🙂

I guess I’m not being clear enough when I say that there are problems with synching remote entries from a blogging server with the new build of Blog that I’m working on 🙂 I’ve received comments along the line of "why can’t you compare the entry in Blog and the entry on the server and if they are different, do an update?" But the problem here is that the differences might not have been due to changes you made, but rather due to changes made by somebody else since a remote server allows multiple people to update the same entry :p Blog does not have a facility where it can take two entries, compare them and then merge the changes in – that is just beyond the scope of an app like Blog. So, all I can do is have Blog update the remote entry if the text of the entry is different but by doing so, you might be overwriting the changes made by another user.

On the other hand, somebody might suggest, "why can’t you have Blog update the entry from the remote server before somebody makes a change?" The problems here are manifold. First, all journals in Blog might not be connected to a remote server and so I’d have to always keep track of whether a given journal is connected to a remote server or not. Second, in order to have each entry automatically updated, you’d have to be online all the time and that defeats the allure of Blog for many because people like the fact that they can compose offline and go online only to post. Then there are the myriad of timing issues involved such as what if somebody updates an entry just after Blog has updated it and so on … The mind just boggles. The closest I can come to is to pop up a warning box saying that an entry has changed on the server and display the current entry and the entry on the server but even there I’d have to do quite a bit of coding gymnastics such as keeping a copy of the entry saved on the server to compare against the current entry – so not something I really wanna consider just now :p

In other news, I’ve got the remote entry retrieval working and managed to actually pull my very first entries to this very Blog so many years ago – from Blogger.com :p Yes, I posted via Blogger.com for a week and wrote the very first incarnation of Blog during that time since I wasn’t happy with Blogger.com :p But my account (and my original blog) still stands at Blogger.com and I still use it for testing out stuff from Blog.

I then moved on to implementing the upload site definitions under the new database schema on the Sites tab and that proved to be much more challenging than I’d anticipated. I changed the UI quite a bit and am still struggling with the work involved in handling all the new changes. So not much progress made I’m afraid 🙁 Hopefully, I’ll get a bit more done over the weekend and might even get around to working on the actual publishing code so that people like my friend Nigel can get their sweaty mitts on the beta versions to start testing :p

In other news, I’ve made certain changes to the site. I’ve removed the PayPal donation link since I had some problems with PayPal due to the fact that I now live in Sri Lanka and they don’t support accounts from Sri Lanka. So I’ve still got some money in the account but have to wait for six months before I can even get the money out. It seems pointless to keep the link up when that’s the case. However, in case somebody would still like to send me some nice gift or something (hint, hint :p) I’ve updated my Amazon.com Wishlist and have also added a new games wishlist from CD Universe 🙂 So any takers? :p

Work on Blog continues 🙂 I completed the data conversion code yesterday and it all seems to work fine. So I moved on to the first task in the new build – updating the Journal Management Dialog to support the new features. As the first step, I renamed the FTP Sites tab to Servers and added a type dropdown which specifies the type of server – FTP, local or one of many remote blogging server types supported by Blog. At the moment, I’ve added entries only for Blogger.com, MT and B2 (though I believe WordPress is actually the successor to B2 and so B2 might not even be in development anymore :p) as remote blogging servers but you can basically use any remote blogging server which supports the Blogger API or the MetaBlog API. I also plan to add more support for the MT API since I hear that that has evolved quite a bit.

Anyway, the Server tab has a much nicer (and less complicated) UI now since selecting the server type enables/disables the fields used by that particular server type. So for instance, the local disk option doesn’t show you anything to enter except a descriptive name – I think that should be much less confusing than the old UI :p But then again, I might be mistaken.

If you select any one of the remote blogging servers, then a whole new section opens up where you can load all the remote blogs for that server. This *has to be* done at setup time and I’m not sure how I’m going to handle people who don’t follow this step but what’ll probably end up happening is that they will not be able to define an upload site without the remote blog list being populated. I did test the loading of the remote blog list and that works too 🙂

Once I had the remote blog list working, I had to provide an option to load all the posts on each remote blog on to Blog and it seemed like a good idea to have this option on the same tab – still in the Journal Management Dialog’s Servers tab. Yeah, I know it might be crowding things a bit but functionally, it seemed to make sense to have all of this in one place.

The retrieve posts button lets you get posts for the currently selected remote blog – either just the post for the entry selected in the main UI, a specific number of posts or all the posts for that blog and then it asks you to specify which local blog to put the posts in. This way, you can transfer over all your posts from a remote blogging server and be able to publish these posts in any manner you like – or even publish to multiple servers (even remote servers) from now on. I’m still working on this bit and once I get this perfected, I should be ready to move on to modifying the Sites tab where you specify individual upload sites. This will have to be recoded to include support for remote blogging servers.

I guess it’s a good thing I wrote about how I planned to do stuff in Blog yesterday :p Because it is obvious from the comments that I’ve received so far that if I’d done things the way I’d planned to do, I’d have messed up :p I was planning to allow publishing only the current entry (or all unpublished entries) for remote blogging servers – the same way the functionality had been implemented in BlogMan. However, I see that most people would have expected Blog to behave the same way it has been behaving so far – basically, pick up all updates and publish in one go. While this is still possible with the publish all unpublished entries option, there is one catch – in *my* terminology, "unpublished" would mean an entry which has never been put on the remote server at all – if you’d put the entry on the remote server already but had edited it since then, that particular entry wouldn’t get picked up by the publish all unpublished entries option.

So, at the moment I’m trying to figure out how to implement a mechanism that would detect changes for published entries in Blog but am not so sure that I can do this since a remote blogging server implies that there could be more than one person who might have changed an entry – so the entry that you just changed might already have been changed on the server by somebody else that you gave access to … How to make sense out of all that is going to be the problem … Personally, I think I should leave that to the user’s discretion by letting them use the "Publish only the current entry" option. But even there, I’m not really sure how to do all this in a user friendly manner via the UI. Guess I’ll have to ponder on this a bit …

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 …

There have been concerned queries as well as complaints in private e-mails about my long absence and the non-appearance of any updates to Blog :p Let me tackle those two issues in a quick update. My absence is due to work, work and even more work :p I haven’t even had time for updates since I’ve been running from meeting to meeting, coding over the weekends and even providing support for work related stuff over the weekends. It has been very rewarding both results-wise and financially. What can I say? I need the money 🙂 Now, I’m busy doing even more work since one of the projects/organizations I’m involved with is heavily involved in the ongoing peace process in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan parliament was dissolved a while back and fresh elections were called for the 2nd of April. That means a lot of work and a lot of monitoring since in this country, elections inevitably lead to violence. The organization I work with/for is involved in providing election monitoring support and ensuring that we try to have a peaceful election. This means a lot of work in the next few weeks and so, I’m probably not going to have much time for updates. After that, I guess we’ll see – and I’ll also have more info about what I’m up to after that.

As for the complaints, all I can say is that Blog is free software. I don’t charge for you using it. So, don’t complain if you don’t get support or don’t get regular program updates since I have to work things around my real life and my work which actually pays the bills :p I’ve had people complain about the delays, about me charging for support and about the fact that Blog isn’t as easy to set up as it could be. Again, if you paid for it, I would understand all your complaints and do my utmost to fix it … but you aren’t paying for it. So keep the complaints to yourselves – at least, don’t bother me with it since as busy as I am right now, it just pisses me off :p

On the other hand, I must thank Tyran especially for taking up the slack on my behalf and helping out people on the forums. He has been invaluable and he’s doing this for free on his own time just so that he can help others. So show some appreciation and at least thank him 🙂 I really don’t have much time anymore and respond to only issues that seem important on the forums. Bear with me. Hopefully, things will get a little less hectic soon …

One of my little one-shot utilities, MailCoder, seems to have been featured on the UK Sunday Times and I’m suddenly getting e-mails from people asking me how to use MailCoder :p When I wrote the utility, I simply wanted something which would encode e-mail addresses so that spammers couldn’t get at them. Once I’d written it, I thought that somebody would find it useful and so put it up as a download. However, I never thought that it would need any documentation since it was a simple screen with just two buttons on it and so there was no documentation :p

Big mistake – especially when something like The Sunday Times decides to feature it, since I guess everybody wants to give it a try then :p Anyway, here is the standard e-mail that I’ve been sending the people who write to me and ask me how to use it. Hopefully, it helps a few people who might also take a look at the site before writing to me 🙂

"MailCoder was written for people who want to display their e-mail address on a web page they’ve designed (not sure if it works with web forms and forums or not). You simply plug in your e-mail address into the E-Mail Address field, click the Code button and then click the Copy button to copy the coded address into the clipboard. Now simply switch over to your website’s HTML code and paste the coded e-mail address in. When the web page is browsed using a browser, you will see the address displayed normally. Hope that makes sense."

Update: I went over to the Times web site and it looks as if it was my friend Nigel Powell who wrote the offending article :p He’s got a section on The Sunday Times named "Don’t panic: Nigel Powell answers your home technology queries" and while I can’t get into read the section (the online edition needs a subscription), I think this must have been where MailCoder was mentioned. I’m sure that Nigel didn’t anticipate people not being able to use the app either – or else he probably would have explained the thing in detail 🙂

Incidentally, while writing this entry, I realized another problem with Blog – somebody mentioned that copying and pasting from websites was broken. Now I see what happens :p The HTMLEdit component takes the pasted entry as HTML and tries to deal with it, HTML tags and all! So it puts in a comment tag at the beginning to say that this is a fragmented entry and that ends up in making the whole pasted bit effectively invisible in the WYSIWYG view. You can still go to the HTML view and take out the comment tag to make the pasted text appear but I think I might have to add a "Paste as text …" option or make pasting as text the default …

Well, the new release of Blog 8.0 beta is out :p I think I put up the download yesterday and nobody seems to have noticed the change in the sidebar yet since I haven’t received any comments about it :p Or maybe people are just so totally satisfied with the new build that they have nothing at all to say :p In any case, the build is there, it seems to work fine for me and hope it does the same for you 🙂

Yes, this is kind of the time for my usual monthly update :p At least, that’s what my updates on this site seem to have devolved to of late. But I do have news – lots of news. Some good, some bad but still news :p So let me get started without much ado.

First, I haven’t had much time to work on Blog of late since I’ve been working on Roomz (which I actually got to a working stage before I shelved it for a bit ..) and then I moved on to Amanuensis, the writer’s editor that I’d written for my wife. I started working on what I think is going to be my first novel (not sure if it will be a novel yet since with me, the stories develop as I go and so I have no idea where this will head) and I realized that Amanuensis missed a few features that I personally needed. So I rewrote most of Amanuensis and I am pretty happy with how it has turned out. I’ll probably be putting up more info about Amanuensis on a separate page either today or in the next few days.

That brings me back to Blog. I’ve gotten back to Blog again and have fixed the last few things that I needed to do to get Blog 8.0 beta 3 out. In fact, I’m typing this on what will become the 8.0 beta 3 release :p So yes, there will soon be a new release of Blog 8.0 as well. This build fixes all the bugs discovered from the previous beta and also adds the ability to ping weblogs.com and blo.gs and the ability to have your permalink anchor tag placed wherever you want with a new Blog tag (and the option to have it still auto-inserted – which is the default). I will continue to work on the next build of Blog 8.0 in the coming weeks – in between adding stuff to Amanuensis and working on my story that is :p

The bad news? Well … I’ve realized that while I want to help people and release software for free so that everybody will benefit from what I code, I do have to make money somewhere – especially since I’m married now :p Plus, I seem to spend quite a lot of time responding to questions which had already been answered on either the FAQ or the forums just because people don’t bother to take the time to look. The donation link does nothing (I’ve received a total of two donations since it’s been up for the last two years or so – thanks to those who donated BTW!) and I spend quite a lot of my time providing support for my software when I could be doing other stuff. And no, I am not going to make Blog shareware. I still want my software to be free (well, almost all my software to be free – I’ll get to that in a bit). But I think I’m going to start charging for support since a lot of people don’t seem to even take the time to consult the FAQ or the forums. I will update the FAQ and the forums will continue to be in place but if you want personal support from me, it will have to be done on a paid basis. I feel bad about taking this step but that seems to be the only way to go at this stage. The support package will be reasonable since it will be a nominal fee and it will get you complete support for a month – that should usually get a person completely set with Blog and they shouldn’t have a need to consult me again after that, should they? :p

The final bit of news is that while all of my existing software will continue to be free, Amanuensis will not be. I will probably put up a page (as I mentioned before) which details the features of Amanuensis (and I personally think it’s a great writer’s editor – I should know since I looked at quite a few out there and wrote this because none of them had what I wanted or were way too expensive being in the $99 – $500 range). I might even put up a demo version which will be fully featured but will have the option to save completely disabled. I plan to sell Amanuensis at around $ 30 or so. Again, more details later …

That’s about it for the moment. I need to go do lots of stuff – coding, web site and documentation. So till next month … :p

I really should have done another update sooner than this – sorry about that 🙂 So what’s happening? Well, I have fixed almost all of the known bugs in the current Blog 8.0 beta but am kind of stuck on moving forward :p How come? Both because of work and because I’m doing several external projects for various people … in addition to working on a Java collaboration application which uses the JXTA framework :p Let me get to all of that in a minute but first about Blog – I’ll probably release the latest build of Blog 8.0 beta today or within the next few days since it seems to work fine … at least for me. Once I get my current lot of other stuff done, I’ll get back to reworking Blog … but of course, by then, I’ll probably have a new set of bugs to fix based on the latest release :p

Now about the other stuff – most of it is fairly innocuous stuff anyway and not worth mentioning but I’m kinda pumped up about the collaboration app 🙂 It all started because I got involved in a project at work which deal with Groove. Groove is a collaboration app which allows multiple people to work in collaboration in what they call a "shared space". The problem with Groove is that it’s a resource hog and needs a machine with 256MB+ RAM and while that is not a problem in the rest of the world, in Sri Lanka where most machines are still probably at the Pentium stage with 32-64MB of RAM, it can be a major problem. The people at work are going ahead with the Groove related project because they have their own reasons to do so. But the more I worked with Groove, the more I became convinced that there must be an easier way to do what they are doing on less resources and on more hardware platforms since Groove is limited to running on Windows based operating systems.

Java seemed the best route to go since it would allow portability and the ability to run on quite a few different platforms and then I stumbled across the JXTA project which tries to provide a P2P (Peer-to-Peer) framework in Java. This seemed the ideal way to go since I was looking at a P2P app anyway and so was born a project that I’m calling Roomz. So far, I’ve gotten the UI and the basic framework in place and am now busy adding spare functionality. I try to work on Roomz whenever I have a spare moment and so, I really haven’t had much time for coding anything else 🙁 But hopefully, I’ll get Roomz to an acceptable level soon and will be able to decide where I’m going to go with it and at that point, I should resume coding other stuff … Or at least, that’s the plan :p