July 2005 - Posts

Diarist update progress: Atom for Blogger

Life is being particularly crappy this week, so I'm taking my mind off it by writing code.

Yesterday I got the Atom interface for Blogger working: if you only use Blogger then I recommend you try PocketBlogger first if you haven't already. Still, if you're a Blogger user who finds Diarist useful then this should be good news, because it means that your titles will appear correctly as titles (provided you select the Atom option - I'm still providing the Blogger API support as is for anyone who wants to keep using it or has trouble with Atom).

I'm now down to tidying up some UI features and doing regression testing: I want to make sure that what works well for people with the current version continues to work well with the new version, and that nothing becomes unnecessarily more complicated or awkward. Since Murphy tends to work overtime, and UI changes are to some extent a matter of taste, I'll continue to make the current version available as a download so you can revert back to it if necessary (although I'll probably incorporate some minor fixes in that download - I've forked the code so I can do that).

As for when I'll make this version available for download, count on "before the end of next week". Since I'm in New Zealand the end of next week comes sooner for me than for most people who may be reading this, so expect an announcement (that sounds so grandiose...) soon.

posted Wednesday, July 27, 2005 7:21 PM by kevdaly with 0 Comments

Windows Mobile blogging: Progress with updates to Diarist

I've now got posting via the web service interface to Community Server working.
This means that people whose blogs are hosted on sites that have not implemented the MetaWeblog API (or where for some reason it doesn't work properly, which is the case on some sites) will still be able to use the tool.
It also takes care of the annoying issues experienced by people who post from a different timezone than the one in which their blog is hosted.
Oh, and whether you're posting with MetaWeblog or the web service, categories now officially work with DNJ (at least when I release this version they will).
I hope to also include support for posting to Blogger via the Atom API, which will resolve the Not Really Proper Titles issue.

PS. This post comes entirely from the latest beta via the emulator.
posted Monday, July 25, 2005 10:52 PM by kevdaly with 0 Comments

Metablog working on DNJ?....

Metablog.ashx having been implemented at last for DNJ, I'm naturally doing a little test of posting from the desktop.

In the meantime I've been working on adding Community Server web service support to Diarist, to cover those sites that don't have the MetaWeblog API enabled. It's leading me to confront a design issue that I've also been presented with by my intention of adding Atom support for Blogger: how best to handle multiple APIs for a single blog engine (both from the point of view of storing config information, and presenting a UI to users to let them choose which one they want).
This is actually good news for anyone who's being waiting for me to add an Atom implementation, or just fix the dreaded Titles-With-Blogger issue (in most cases the logical solution is just to use PocketBlogger, but some people might want the support for additional blog engines): it's building up critical mass behind me actually making the necessary changes to do it in a non-horrible manner. I was going to leave it until the CF2 version, but now I think I might as well get on with it.
posted Monday, July 18, 2005 8:08 PM by kevdaly with 0 Comments

Missing Metablogapi.aspx/Metablog.ashx from Dotnetjunkies?

It's looking like MetaWeblog API access is currently missing from Dotnetjunkies (and yes I did post a query on the forum).

I'd thought I might just be having trouble finding the right name and path, but then I managed to find http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/blogservice.asmx without any trouble, so that suggests that the MetaWeblog support hasn't been installed.
I don't know if it's still the case, but in the first official release of Community Server the Metablog stuff was an optional additional download that you had to install and configure appropriately - it appears that my horrified reaction at the time was justified: I reasoned that if it doesn't get installed automatically, often it won't get installed at all, which is bad news for blogging tools.

I'm now going to start looking at what would be involved in changing the support for Community Server in my mobile blogging tool (the previously mentioned embarrassingly named Diarist) to use the web service instead of a relatively standard API - this is annoying in that it will add complexity and code bloat, but apparently necessary.

 

Additional CS changever anoyance: I had to remove my PDC2005 flair,since the tag was too long to fit in the space allowed for it and therefore truncated, basically trashing the HTML in the links section.

posted Thursday, July 07, 2005 6:16 PM by kevdaly with 0 Comments