Finch PocketBlogger
The tool for posting to weblogs from a PocketPC.
Several people have been asking me recently if Blogger support in Finch would we available soon. Well, today I have good news. I just published a file release to SourceForge with a new version of Finch that has (some) support for the Atom API. The Atom implementation has not been tested with any other service but Blogger. As the Blogger implementation is known to be slightly different from the standard, this means that Finch 1.1 probably does not work with other Atom blog engines. But it does work for Blogger!
Download the installer here
When you want to use Finch with your Blogger blog, follow these directions:
- In your Blogger setup, enable “Publish site feed“ on the Settings|Site feed tab
- Make sure that after publishing, the Atom XML file is indeed available on your web server
- In Finch go to Tools|Options and set the web service URL to the URL of the Atom feed on your site
- In the Credentials tab, enter your Blogger credentials
- Tap OK and try to Sync Down
You can manage only one blog through Finch, even if you have multiple blogs in Blogger.
Request for support: if you have or know of a blogging service that exposes the Atom API and that I can use for free to test, please let me know. I'm pretty sure that the Atom API implementation I have built works well only with Blogger's implementation. And as they don't use categories, I haven't implemented those either. Their implementation of passing credentials doesn't follow the spec at all. I would really help if I could test against multiple implementations.
I have finally decided that this is it. Finch is now stable and can be used against several blogging back-ends. I know that there are several implementations out-there that will not work fine with Finch, but when they conform to the MetaWeblogAPI, it should. I also started an online manual for Finch here. If you want to manage your blog from your PPC, download Finch 1.0!
Now that stabilizing is over, I can focus on new functionality. The main two features I will start working on are:
- Atom API support. This will allow all Blogger users to use Finch (and I like the APi and it looks stable now)
- Picture uploading. I have had several requests for adding some sort of picture support. I am thinking of a menu option in the posting editor that will upload a .jpg to a configured FTP server and include an <img> link to it in the postings content.
The two software products I distribute through this blog (
WordBlock and
Finch) are PostcardWare. I wrote them for myself and don't necessarily want to make any money on it, but I do like to receive a small thank-you every now and then. So I added an about screen to both programs encouraging satisfied users to mail me a post card. I did not know what response to expect, but I figured that my mailbox would easily be big enough to handle it.
I must admit that I was slightly disappointed that I received no post cards whatsoever. Zero. None. 1500 people downloaded the installer for WordBlock in March alone and still: nothing. I felt terribly naive.
Until yesterday that is. I got a nice post card in the mail from Scott & Erika from Florida. Thanks a lot, you not only made my day, but also restored my belief in people doing something for nothing every now and then.
A user noticed me on the fact that Finch RC1 was not working correctly with his website, which is running Mambo CMS. As Mambo is very popular in the PHP community and it does apparently work with w.bloggar, I wanted to fix this. This has turned out harder than I had guessed, but I think it's OK now.
The first problem was that Mambo supports multiple blogs per user. Finch does not do this yet, but I have received request to add this feature, so in the future, this will be solved. For now, you must enter the ID of the blog you want to work on in the Settings dialog. This ID can be a name or a number, depending on your blogging engine. In Mambo, it is a number, so you have to figure out what the numerical ID of your blog is. You can often find this out by inspecting the URL of web pages displaying the blog.
A second issue turned out to be a real bug. The MetaBlogAPI implementation I created follows the one implemented by .Text (the blogging engine I use myself). This turns out to have a small difference from the spec: a list of categories is returned as an array, while the spec states that it should be a struct of struct. Many other implementors seem to have the same error, so the error is also a de facto standard. Mambo CMS follows the original spec. Finch now supports both.
Third thing: a bug in the MetaBlogAPI implementation in Mambo: creation dates are returned as strings in stead of dates. Finch now converts this string to a date itself. I really feel that Mambo CMS should fix this, but then again: their installed base is huge, so I'll just try to manage (so does w.bloggar apparently).
Download RC2 here
OK, I've uploaded the latest version of Finch to SourceForge. This version has a minor bug fixed and has been tested to work fine with both .Text 0.95 and CommunityServer 1.0. For CommunityServer, just use the MetaBlogApi setting and put your blog name in the BlogID field.
Download
here
NOTE: CommunityServer does not natively support MetaBlogApi. You can install it as a plug-in (this is very easy, don't worry).
I've just done a clean install of CommunityServer and added the MetaBlogApi support as suggested in this post by ScottW. It seems to work very well. I was waiting eagerly for the support for MetaBlogApi in CommunityServer, because I wanted to make sure that Finch would support CommunityServer before calling it a final. I'm glad that I have waited for it. It turns out that I had a bug in my code that didn't turn up when using Finch against the .Text implementation of MetaBlogApi, but with CommunityServer, I could not add new posts anymore.
Initially, of course, I blamed CommunityServer, but I had to admit soon that it was my own fault. In my opinion, the MetaBlogApi support of CommunityServer looks very stable now. Instead of using a different web service Url for each blog, CommunityServer uses one stable Url as its XmlRpc endpoint and uses the BlogID parameter to indicate which blog should be edited (just the way the API was meant to work).
I will release an updated version of Finch tomorrow, as soon as I have been able to test the installer myself.
ScottW has entered a posting on the CommunityServer forum announcing that MetaBlogApi support has been dropped from the core CommunityServer build. That's a pity, because it will cause many default installations not to work with most client tools.
He also announces though, that the add-on will be freely available and even includes a zip attachment containing a current version of the add-on. I haven't been able to test it yet, but it is based upon the XmlRpc library from Cook Computing that was also used within .Text. This will surely work a lot better that the hacked together approach of XmlRpc in the RC2 CommunityServer build.
Good news for using Finch on CommunityServer. So, thumbs up!
Recently, I downloaded the 0.3 beta version of Community Server. My personal blog is powered by .Text, the predecessor of CommunityServer. As both .Text and CommunityServer are supposed to support the MetaBlogApi interface, I first decided to just support this common standard in Finch. To my discontent, I found that the support in .Text for MetaBlogApi is, although not bad, not complete. Especially the support for categories seems a bit buggy. No harm done: I implemented the categories for .Text in a special .Text-specific work-around, which seems to work fine.
Then CommunityServer was announced. It is to be the 1.0 version of .Text, although it contains much more functionality, like forums and image galleries. My first take on the 0.3 version: it looks nice, works easily and the integration between the three parts seems to be done well, without requiring all parts to be used. Good work.
The MetaBlogApi support by the CS blogs application on the other hand seems to have been ignored a bit. No matter what method I try to call, I invariably get a 500 server error. As the sources are not shipped with the beta, it is hard to say what the problem is, but something is terribly wrong in there. And even when an exception occurs, this should be reported in an XML-RPC error structure.
I do hope this will be fixed. I will try to file a bug report, although I'm not sure where to do this. The CommunityServer forums I guess.
I'm still aiming at supporting CommunityServer in Finch, but without API support, it all ends
UPDATE: The errors I was encountering where caused because I was accessing CS with the hostname in the URL instead of 'localhost'. When setting CS up, I had entered localhost to be the domain name. CS doesn't work when accessed through a different host name. Still a lot of errors from the API though
It has been a long time since a worked on Finch, but today I have added all of the promised features. It all seems to work, but obviously, it needs some testing. Finch is now feature complete for the 1.0 release.
New features are:
- Category support (even in .Text, where other tools based upon the MetaBlogAPI crash when updating a post in .Text, I decided to create a specific .Text work-around, because I use it myself)
- Shortcuts in the editor (you get a menu with frequently used phrases and utilities like “Make bold“ and “Insert date“). This is based upon an XML file that you can edit to fit your most frequent phrases.
- Several small bug fixes around delete/undelete
- An Exit option in the menu that will really end the process and not just hide it
- The entry screen for the service Url is a bit more helpful
I have decided to submit the CompactXMLRPC library to OpenNetCF. I wrote this very light XML-RPC implementation to support MetaBlogAPI in Finch, but I had not yet published the code. If the submission is accepted, the library will be available under the OpenNetCF shared source license, while Finch will remain under the GPL.
I have made a list of the feature requests I have got for Finch since I posted the first beta. I haven't given a lot of publicity on Finch, so I was kind of surprised that I received constructive feedback from 4 users (thanks!). My main goal with Finch is to keep it simple and useable. And lightweight.
Features I
will try to implement in version 1.0:
- category support
- better support in entering a valid service URL
- Exit function (to completely close the application, freeing up resources)
- shorthands (this will allow you to insert small fragments of text or HTML into your post; this will be configured in a small XML file)
I
will not implement:
- WYSIWYG editing (will make Finch too heavy and will raise expectations too much)
- comment reading and adding (have not found any API support for this
I will also try to make sure that Finch will work with both .Text 0.95 and Comunity Server 1.0
It turns out that for some users, the installer of Finch did not install the XmlRpc service library. It should be fixed now. If you had problems getting Finch to work, try again. You can download the latest version
here.
I have managed to get the sources of Finch PocketBlogger up on
SourceForge. The sources are published under the GPL, which means that you can use the product completely free, but if you make any modifications to the source, you must distribute these under the same license.
From SourceForge you can also download the latest version as an installer file. This version is number 0.91 and includes:
Support for MetaBlogAPI
A few bug fixes
For .Text we use the MetaBlog interface as much as possible, thus allowing the use of Finch for posting to weblogs.asp.net (not tested though, because I do not own a blog there for testing), to solve this problem.
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/finchpb/
The sources
The installer
One of the people testing Finch reported a problem using it for his weblog on weblogs.asp.net (the original .Text website). I have looked into this and it seems that they have removed two of the SOAP webservices that are shipped with .Text. Finch uses all three of them, BlogContent.asmx for retrieving the last x postings, SimpleBlogService.asmx for most of the inserting and editing and ASPNetWebLog.asmx for deleting (which seems like a simple eature to me, but is not included in the simple service).
On weblogs.asp.net, for some reason, only the simple service can be reached. Maybe, I should focus on implementing the MetaBlog API, which is also implemented by .Text (and many other engines), but does not use SOAP. XML-RPC is fairly simple to implement, but it will take some effort.
I will keep you posted.
One of the hard parts of setting up Finch now is entering he right Url in the Service Url textbox in the Options dialog. I will make sure that the 1.0 release will be more helpful.
The way is to it goes like this:
Your blogs url looks something like this (provided that it is a .Text blog):
http://servername/weblogs/YourName
The web services used by Finch are located in a folder called services just below your blog. An example of a webservice Url would be:
http://servername/weblogs/YourName/services/simpleblogservice.asmx
You can test this on your own blog by entering this in a webbrowser. The screen should show a description of the webservice.
Now enter this url in the textbox labelled 'Service URL',
but without the simpleblogservice.asmx part. So the url should end with /services/
If you still have issues connecting, let me know.
Well, I have an installer ready for the 0.9 beta version of Finch PocketBlogger (see screenshots and walkthrough). I actually went a lot smoother than I had imagined, as I have virtually no experience in developing desktop (or palmtop) apps. I've been doing Web apps for 8 years now and I know my way around in VS.NET, but I had expected more difficulties on the way. It was definitely a nice experience to target the Pocket PC platform.
Feel free to download and install. It is free (although I would ask you to check out the About screen). Also feel free to send me feedback, but I will feel free to ignore your wishes. ;)
I will probably opensource this toy soon, but I'm not sure when and how.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Finch is built upon the .NET Compact Framework, so you need either Pocket PC 2003 or you must have the Compact Framework installed. The installer will not do this for you.
I have the basics working pretty well now, so I think this is the time to post some screenshots of a walkthrough. When I have figured out how to do a good installer for PPC, I will post the binaries as well. After that, I will try to get it set up on SourceForge and continue work there.
So when you fire up Finch on your Pocket PC, it will look like this:
In this screen you see the most recent blog posts at the time of last synchronization. You can choose to synch up (posting only your changes to the server), down (getting a fresh state of your blog down from the server) or All (this is effectively Synch Up + Synch Down in that order).
To change or add postings, you can use the context menu:
The editing dialog is fairly basic, offering only a text interface for the body and title. No WYSIWYG or advanced options:
For setting up your connection, you can enter your .Text Url and credentials in the Options dialog (support for other blogging APIs is on the wishlist):
Note that after adding or changing any of the postings, the UI indicates this with a little red tickmark. Deleted items are grayed out. This way, you can see at a glance which changes must still be sent to the server. You can still undelete items as long as you have not synchronized.
Known issues:
- There is a problem with times and timezones. Posting times come out wrong when the .Text server is in a different timezone from the PPC that runs Finch.
- No help available
Hi,
I'm Teun Duynstee. I will introduce myself properly soon, but
right now, I'm celebrating the fact that I post this entry from my IPaq while commuting by train!
!