Lots of coding but not much time to update :p Unfortunately, the coding has mostly been for my consultancy stuff and so I’ve not been working on Blog as much as I would like. First, there was C# stuff to be done since one of my old clients had a problem with an ASP.NET component that I’d done for him to access CSV data as you would a database file – at least as far as reading the data went. Microsoft seems to have their own ideas about how to do CSV files and there is no standardization at all (go figure :p) and so files created in Excel would not work with my CSVReader component. So I had to go in and add a patch to make it get along with CSV files created from Excel.

Then there is the PHP project I’m doing for Martin. I’d already done phase one of the project which was a web interface to create a graphical representation of a sign on the fly using given text, fonts, colours etc. For phase two, Martin wanted to be able to allow the user to upload an image, specify the positioning and optionally, be even able to resize the image and then add the text on top of it. I’d done the original code a specific way since there was no file upload involved. However, when I got to phase two, I realized that I couldn’t do things the way I’d done originally – where I’d gotten all the form input and then used JavaScript to put it all together and call a PHP script to generate the image on the fly and display it on the same screen. For this, I couldn’t do it that way since there was the uploaded image file to consider. So I had to go back and rewrite things from scratch and I had to allow for temporary image files to be created on the server, saved and used between each reload of the interface. This took some doing and I don’t really like it that much since this creates a lot of files on the server. However, I’ve added a cleanup routine which clears up all these temporary files at a given time interval and so it’s not that bad either.

This particular project is keeping me fairly busy since in addition to all of the above, I also had to figure out how to create an e-mail in PHP with attachments. The way I normally work with a programming language is by picking up what I need as I go along. So I had never done e-mails with attachments in PHP before this and I discovered that the PHP documentation was kind of sketchy about how to do things since it simply pointed me to a different website which actually had lots of explanations about MIME types but the final example code was extremely convoluted and complicated and I didn’t want all of that :p So, I simply sat down and broke down the code and got only the bits I needed and came up with something which actually seems to work after some tweaking :p

Of course, there is another bit of PHP code that I’ve been working on in the midst of all of this – the comments system that my wife uses on one of her sites 🙂 Yes, it looks like the same as the comments system which is used here .. but it’s not :p I used the original code but modified it so that the comments would be saved to a mySQL database instead of being saved into text files. In addition, I added the ability for multiple users to be hosted on the same comments system and the ability for each of those users to have multiple blogs with comments. In fact, a full blown, remote server commenting system 🙂 The system itself is a bit buggy (as you’ll notice from all the test comments on my wife’s blog if you were to go there :p) but I’m slowly getting the kinks out of the system and getting it on the road to being a useable system.

So what of Blog you ask? Well, I’ve got the HTML editing stuff working and I need to find some time to sit down and test that the publishing of entries and uploading of images works fine too. Once I get that done, I can release the first beta. However, there is so much going on with other code (plus lots of shenanigans at work … about which I might rant one of these days on SM :p) that it might take a little while. So bear with me 🙂

Yes I’m not dead and I’m finally back – more info can be found at SM :p And no, Blog coding has not been suspended, shelved, dropped etc. either 🙂 I did take a little hiatus from coding since I was hitting brickwalls at every turn with the WYSIWYG HTML editor component but that was because I was using WPTools. Julian was really kind in letting me use the component in Blog but the problem was that I was trying to use something which wasn’t really designed for what I had in mind. Plus, Julian already has a lot of established users and so I don’t think he has as much time to devote to somebody who wants features that most others would not need or want.

When I got back from my hiatus, I looked at the HTMLEditor component from PurposeSoft again. I’d been a beta tester for HTMLEditor 2.0 but had decided not to use it in Blog initially due to some considerations that I decided not to bother with this time around :p Fabian who develops the component has been truly responsive and has been kind enough to let me use the component in Blog and has even let me work with the upcoming HTMLEditor 3.0 component – which actually has all the features that I missed in HTMLEditor 2.0 in the first place 🙂 He’s been fixing all the bugs in HTMLEditor 3.0 as soon as I find them and thanks to his diligence, I’m almost done with the WYSIWYG HTML editor component. Now I just need to fix various publishing related stuff and I should be ready to release the first public beta of Blog 8.0.

On other code related work, I’m working on a PHP project, have to go back to a Visual Studio .NET component that I did for a client and might also have to do some other Visual Studio .NET development work but am too rushed at the moment to do much updating :p Will try to get around to that sometime in the future – and I’ll keep on updating my rambles and rants etc. (and boy do I have some doozies :p) over at SM when I have some time …

Well, I completed all the work on the first project I was doing for Martin – the one where I developed a web interface to generate text messages with a given font, color, size etc. on the fly. It took about a week of tweaking to get it to the exact stage where it was useable and Martin seems to have liked my work and I am gratified by that 🙂 He even asked me to do another project for me – which is actually an extension of the first one since he wanted the additional feature of being able to place an image (resized if necessary) on the generated image with the text message and to be able to specify the position of the new image. I have been working on that particular project over the weekend and have a working demo. So the work goes on.

In the meantime, I’ve also been dabbling with a lot of stuff on the domain itself. I had been told that my host supported add-on domains and that it was possible to purchase an extra package which would let you have 50 add-on domains and 50 parked domains along with my current domain. So I got that package since I wanted to add a few additional domains on and have so far been having nothing but problems with the adding new domains. It seems as if I chose the wrong time for it because the host server had just gone through some problems and it wouldn’t initially create the DNS entries correctly for any new add-on domains. One good thing though is that tech support for my hosting company seems to be very responsive (except of course on weekends :p) and they fixed that problem as soon as I let them know about it.

I then discovered that FrontPage Extensions were supported by my host but not on add-on domains :p In trying to find out where the problem lay, I messed up one add-on domain completely and so had to try and recreate it and guess what? The server control panel will not allow me to do that since there is a DNS entry for that domain already on my host’s server and of course, I have no way to modify the DNS entry! So I’ve had to submit another helpdesk ticket and it being the weekend, of course nobody has responded yet. Ah well, the joys of being a geek :p

I wanted to make this entry today in the morning and discovered why I haven’t been writing as regularly as I used to – I just don’t have the time anymore once I get done with my e-mails and the rest of the stuff I do in the morning :p So I guess I’ll either have to learn a new routine (such as making my entries in the evening when I get back from work) or start getting up even earlier. Since the former is much more easier than the latter and I tend to be extremely lazy, I guess I’ll go with the former option <vbg>

I completed coding on both my PHP projects yesterday – at least the major work is done but there of course remains just the cleaning up, tweaking. I’d already set up the demo for the client for whom I was doing one app and I was going to set up the comments system today and run it through some live testing but I got so busy at work that I never got around to doing that. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be able to find some spare time to do that since I do want to get that comments system going.

In the meantime, it looks as if I’m getting more clients via Geek for Hire :p Actually, there was only one new consultation and I had to turn that down in the end due to ethical considerations but Nigel suggested another project for the mobile phone market that looks pretty interesting – especially given that I have a P800 and have been itching to code for it. I promised Nigel that I would look into the possibility of what he wanted to do but alas, I got no chance at all to do the reference that I intended to do and so that’s another thing that I will have to do tomorrow. I did change the business model that I use at Geek for Hire since I realized that asking people for a consultation fee up front was not going to work :p So now, I simply ask people to submit their consultation and if we can come to some sort of an agreement on the work to be done and the payment, then, we get to the payment part … Now that I think about it, that seems more sensible anyway, duh :p

At work, I’m supposed to get back to Visual Studio .NET and C# since we’ve become interested in a collaboration tool called Groove. The tool is supposed to be used in Sri Lanka to link up all the different organizations working on achieving peace in Sri Lanka and to engender communication between the different groups. I’m supposed to be one of the support people for the tool and I was immediately interested in the possibility of creating a blogging tool to be used with Groove (since Groove allows plug-ins, or tools as they are called in Groove) since the collaboration aspects would allow multiple people to work on the same blog and that sounded like a neat concept :p I found out that there is already a blogging tool for Groove but it works only with Blogger and so I was all ready to start working on a new tool which would work with MT, B2 or any other server-based alternative working with the Blogger/Metablog API or even work standalone like Blog … till I discovered that the Visual Studio .NET support of the Groove Development Kit (GDK) extends only to Visual Studio .NET 2000! They still don’t support VS.NET 2003 – and this with Microsoft being one of the partners in the Groove venture!! Ah well … they do say that they’ll have support for VS.NET 2K3 soon and so I guess I’ll have to wait till then if I want to do any development with Groove …

I haven’t written anything in a long time have I? Partly it’s been due to an extremely heavy workload but it’s also been due to the fact that I’ve been guilty about the fact that there hasn’t been any appreciable progress with the next release of Blog :p However, I see that that’s not going to happen for a while now and so I’ve decided to start posting again both here and at SM as often as I can – even if there is no Blog related news – just to keep the sites running and whoever is interested (if there are any faithful readers :p) updated.

So what have I been busy with if I’m not coding Blog? Well, at work I’ve been handed the new task of writing project proposals for the company since both people who used to do the job have suddenly decided to leave one after the other. So, I’m left with a task that I positively hate :p While I don’t mind writing stuff, project proposals just make me want to gag due to the amount of BS that you find people putting in there – I just can’t do that. I’d rather state the reasons why we should be hired clearly and concisely instead of writing reams and reams of hyperbole that nobody would read anyway – but that’s the business world for you .. or something like that. Anyway, I just got done with one such proposal (my first actually) and will have to start work on the next on Monday.

In the meantime, I’ve got my first real, paying client from Geek for Hire 🙂 So I’ve been working on that project during the evenings and my spare time. It’s an interesting PHP project since it’s an area that I’d not covered in PHP before – in fact, I’d not even been aware that you could do something like this with PHP before the project came along and now I have a pretty strong liking for PHP just because of the versatility it’s shown 🙂 So what’s the project? It’s a set of web pages to create an image on the fly based on user input text and a font, font size and font colour specified by the user. I completed a demo for the client a while back and have been working away at the final product for the last couple of days. I’m pretty happy with the way it’s turning out and hope the client is too 🙂

Finally, I’m doing another project whenever I have a bit of time to spare – again in PHP but also utilizing mySQL. This one’s a remote commenting system for Blogs (or anything else as well, if you want to use it that way) similar to the service offered by HaloScan, YACS, Ennetation etc. Is it any different from any of the previously mentioned services? Not really – except that the implementation may be slightly different since I’ve not looked at any of those services for ideas :p But the reason I wrote it was so that I’d have access to multiple commenting systems without having to re-deploy the same commenting script that I’d been using in multiple directories. Plus, since then a friend who has no access to PHP has expressed interest in a remote commenting system as well and so for the moment the system is just being developed for those reasons 🙂 In the future however, I might consider using the system a bit more broadly since it does allow multiple commenting systems under multiple owners and will have fairly extensive configuration options ranging from template based page design to an obscenity/swear word filter to smiley support … but all that is for the future, first I must get the basic system up and running 🙂

Just a quick update since nothing has been posted for a while – no beta for Blog 8.0 has been released. When a beta is released, it will be a public beta and so nobody really has to apply to be beta testes :p However, a lack of spare time and being pulled in several different direction at the moment has temporarily put Blog development on the back burner. I will get back to it when I have some time to spare but be patient in the mean time 🙂 Incidentally, one of my mirror sites (Nortiq) is gone forever since they were doing some reorganization of their server and found that they were unable to host me anymore. So thanks once again for the hosting so far Lyon! Now, there’s just two – the main site and KuhnDog’s mirror at RazorSys – I should thank KuhnDog once again for his kind support and hosting through the years. He’s done a lot that guy … 🙂

The PNG image addition has been coded as well for Blog and the image parsing at the time of publishing to set up the proper paths for the images. Of course, none of the above changes have been tested yet and so a new release will have to wait till the testing is complete. That and the fixing/looking at of a couple of bugs reported by different people. One has to do with images (or rather, I think it was entries) not being published the first time a post with images is published. This seems to happen only with an alternate image directory rather than when the images are on the same folder as the blog pages but I’ll have to look into this problem (which I thought I’d fixed with the help of Nigel) again once I get the current testing done.

The other problem is another one I thought I’d fixed – archives dropping off the archive table of contents if there is only one entry for a given month or – something along those lines. I’ve got the data from the user who had the problem but haven’t been able to test this till now due to the fact that the code was being worked on and there was no way to do any testing in the interim. So, hopefully I’ll be able to look at all this stuff over the weekend and perhaps even do the 7.2 release by Monday. A word of caution here though, even though I will be using full version numbers till we get to 8.0 and mixing in any bug fixes along the way, these releases are to be considered beta releases and so to be used only by those who’d want to mess with beta software :p The reason that these will be beta releases is the fact that I’m doing a lot of internal changes and might not have the time to test out all the different internal interactions and how they might (or might not) work. So I’m hoping that somebody brave enough to test the beta releases will find the problems and tell me while I work on adding the rest of the features :p Oh yes, some features are incomplete – like the 7.2 release will probably only have the WYSIWYG look on the main entry window – all others will have the old HTML edit look till I know for sure that the WYSIWYG component works fine.

I turned my attention to image insertion and editing the attributes of an already entered image yesterday. I was trying to find out how to retrieve the attributes for an inserted image but was not getting anywhere and so I decided to stop and concentrate on a different problem – being able to use all formats of web-ready images. I’d been working so far only with BMP files and when I tried to insert a JPG or a GIF file, I discovered that they would not display properly. So I had to sit down and discover how to get JPG and GIF files to show up on the WPTools components and after some unnecessary code edits (which I had to revert), I finally figured out how to do it after taking a look at one of the WPTools demos. Of course, at that point I did not think of including PNG images (I remembered this only later in the evening) but it should be a simple matter to do the necessary changes now.

Once I had the images displaying properly, I went back to work on retrieving the image attributes but try as I might, I couldn’t seem to get this to work right. I finally decided to write to the WPTools usenet group for help but almost as soon as I’d done that, I figured out where I was going wrong :p I had had tunnel vision in that I’d been looking only at a particular property to find the image file location whereas the location was stored in a completely different property! So lesson learned – just because there is a property named FileName does not mean that the FileName will be stored there :p Anyway, once I got over that particular bit, the rest was pretty easy and I had the image attribute editing working by the time I concluded work for the day.

Now all that remains is for me to go back and modify the publishing and parsing routines so that the parsing routine looks for image and file links and converts them from local hard disk references to remote server references at the time of publishing. I also am considering adding a published flag to each entry so that I can automatically upload linked files to the server but under the current setup that would not work too well since the published property would be set for the very first publish and if you publish the same journal to multiple server, the files will not be uploaded to the rest of the servers. Granted that this might be a problem for only a few people, but it still would be a problem. So that will probably have to wait till I do the database restructuring …

I spent most of yesterday’s coding time on the hyperlink modification problem with the new revision of Blog. Basically, when I right-clicked on an existing hyperlink and selected the option to insert/edit a hyperlink, the dialog box that popped up was supposed to be populated with the attributes of the hyperlink that I clicked on. I got this bit working without too much trouble but once the values on the dialog box were changed and you clicked OK, the hyperlink was supposed to be changed and this wasn’t happening. So I spent most of yesterday’s coding time trying to figure out what was going wrong.

As seems to happen to me a lot, I discovered later that the problem wasn’t where I thought it was :p I thought that the hyperlink modification function in WPTools wasn’t working properly since the changes weren’t being saved at all but after about two or three hours of wasted time, I happened to make a change in the Blog entry itself and then do the hyperlink modification and it worked fine! So I realized that hyperlink modifications weren’t somehow being caught by the WPTools component as a change to the content and then I realized that this was a documented case since I was supposed to call a specific function to notify WPTools that a change was being made – duh! Of course, even after that things wouldn’t work for some strange reason till I changed the Hperlink modification function I was using since there were several to choose from. But, I did finally get that bit working.

Then I moved onto image insertion but couldn’t proceed further than a simple bitmap insertion to test out that things actually did work before I had to stop coding for the day. I’ll have to figure out attribute changes and the ability to insert web images (JPG, GIF, PNG) today if I do get to do any coding and then go on to work on modifying the attributes for an already inserted image – as well as change the Blog parsing routines to compensate for the changes that will have to be made to the way the image location is stored in the database since WPTools needs the full path. There are several more problems there in working with images but once I get all that sorted out, I intend to do an interim 7.2 release so that people can test out the new stuff (if they want to work with beta software that is :p) while I move on to further changes.

It’s been a very long time indeed :p However, the good news is that I’m actually back to working on Blog 8.0 again. I was stuck for a while on how to get hyperlink and image insertions working since the WPTools component only allows the insertion of the actual image or URL – there is no support for additional attributes like target, width, height, id, class etc. I wrote to the WPTools usenet group hoping somebody else might have come across the same problem and found a solution and I found somebody – Nick Crosby. Nick was kind enough to give me a few pointers on the direction that I should follow and after a day of stumbling around I was able to figure out how to insert a hyperlink with extra attributes. In the process, I also modified the hyperlink entry dialog box in Blog so that now you can select a set of default targets from a dropdown list or enter your own target – this should help people working with frames or IFRAMES. I also added a blank field where you can enter any other attributes of your choice as ‘=’ separated values pairs.

The only problem is, that I am not able to get the editing of an already entered URL working properly on the WYSIWYG view 🙁 I can retrieve the actual URL fine, but can’t retrieve the extra attributes since none of the WPTools functions for retrieving the URL support the extra attributes. Bummer! I’ve written back to Nick in the hope that he has encountered this problem too and has figured out a way around this and am waiting on him. In the meantime, I guess I’ll also try to find out how to add extra attributes to images. Of course, since Blog now also has a working HTML view, it is simple enough to edit a hyperlink in the HTML view but what if a user prefers to work in the WYSIWYG view? Shouldn’t they have the flexibility to enter a URL and to edit a URL? I think so. So I’ll try to get that working …

In the meantime, I’m also trying to figure out how to handle images and external file links in the new setup with Blog. Since images will be displayed in the editor only if I retain the external link to them specifying where they reside on the hard disk, I’ll have to retain that information when I save an entry. However, what I used to do with Blog was retain the file information only when the image was first added, automatically upload the image file but store only the file name as a remote reference on the Blog entry. Not sure if that even made sense to a lot of people but anyway, the problem is that the old approach will not work. I have to retain information as to where the image file is on the local hard disk in the database. This will probably mean that I have to parse an entry each time before a publish, find the image tags, convert them to server references and then publish. That’s going to be a bit of extra work and I hate approaches where you have to do repetitive work needlessly – but in this case, I think there is no getting around the need for the extra work. Ah well…