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Tuesday May 24, 2005

new beta of bloged

I have just placed a new beta of bloged in the same location as the previous beta release. This is an intermediary beta release. There are a lot of improvements in the code, not all of them visible to the end user.

There was a lot of work in the look and feel side of things. Not all of it is quite finished, but it should give an idea of where things are moving to.  
  • The infinite progress panel is in
  • setting the properties is much more userfriendly, though there are a few things that still can be done
  • error in xml-rpc comunication are much clearer
  • the general UI is cleaner. Is this better? I have lots of ideas on improving things a lot more, but there is just one of me...
  • the user is notified that editing the blog header is not helpful in the MetaWeblog api publishing side of things

Some things I did not get to put in, but which I will be working on in the next week:  I'd be glad to hear of any intial thoughts, keeping in mind that there are some things that still need to be done. Are people happy with the general direction this is evolving in?
  • categories functionality
  • improving the properties panel, so that the user can choose to download all remote entries when setting up his connection. Also I want to do a real xml-rpc test.
  • fix some of the smaller unclarities of language people pointed out in the previous review
  • speed up of initial synchronisation

You may need to clear your jnlp cache to get it to download the new version. Is there a way to make sure it picks up on new versions?

Note: before you start testing this version you should delete (or displace) your old xxxx.blog directory that you created previously. This will give you a fresh start.

Posted at 03:43AM May 24, 2005 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in BlogEd  |  Comments[6]

Comments:

I am having issues with username/password errors although the connection test appears to work. putback failed: ...XmlRpcException ... Invalid Username and/or password Still playing around, but it isn't clear to me why I am getting the error. I see that logins to blogs can use SSL now, can xmlrpc connections?

Posted by YakShaving on May 24, 2005 at 10:22 PM CEST #

And the answer is...pay attention to the instructions above and move the old directoy aside.

Posted by YakShaving on May 25, 2005 at 01:28 AM CEST #

Good :-) We don't use SSL yet, but I think this will be very important to have feature for the final release. BlogEd will pull down all the entries from Roller before publishing any. I still need to make this a little clearer and more userfriendly.

Posted by Henry Story on May 25, 2005 at 07:48 AM CEST #

Of course, come to think of it, the problem is also partly due to the connection tester not yet implementing a real query to the server. That may help in recognising the password problem (though not very reliably, due again to the underpsecification of the metaweblog api)

Posted by Henry Story on May 25, 2005 at 10:41 AM CEST #

Does the server type setting actually change anything? Seems meaningless unless you were going to pre-populate configuration options based on known defaults for the listed software.

Biggest improvement needed would be in handling international characters. Key areas are a) display/rendering of international text and b) using UTF-8 for XML-RPC.

Also, the window doesn't seem to respond to a close window event. I always have to kill the java process. Was running under java version "1.4.2_05".

Posted by David Czarnecki on May 25, 2005 at 10:02 PM CEST #

Currently the type settings don't change anything. They are there partly to indicate that I have not tested other servers with the MetaWeblog API. Because of the lack of clarity in the spec I can't rely on a good implementation of the specs being sufficient. I don't have the resources either to test this out on every server implementation. So I have been a little conservative. But as I get more confident that this is working out, I may add a few more servers to the list. I did not know that blojsom supported the MWAPI either. Perhaps I can add it to the test list.

There will probably be a reason at some point to know what the type of the server is. For example when working with Categories, Roller only allows a post to go into one category, whereas blojsom it seems allows it to appear in multiple categories. This would affect the User Interface a little down the line...

Thanks for the point about utf-8 and xml-rpc. And yes, I think I know what happened to the window closing. I removed a couple of System.exit(0) calls...

Posted by Henry Story on May 26, 2005 at 10:15 AM CEST #

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