It’s only been a few days since the new BloGTK was announced, and already development is continuing at a more rapid pace than I would have expected. For a project being done in my limited free time, BloGTK is moving right along.

No, I don’t have an ETA for the first release. Other than “when it’s done,” of course.

So far, support for creating and editing new posts with Blogger, Movable Type, and WordPress is working. The UI is shaping up nicely—and that means that there will be some screenshots coming in the near future.

What’s left? The configuration system needs to be built, there’s a bunch of tools in the editor that need to be built, and then round after round of testing. BloGTK 1.0 was pretty buggy—I’m hoping that 2.0 will be better and more stable.

There will be more updates as development progresses. The website will also be getting an upgrade (with the old theme being given new life as a WordPress theme) sometime in the near future. Keep checking back here for more updates as BloGTK continues to push closer to release.

The next version of WordPress will make it harder for external clients like BloGTK to work by disabling the APIs they use to function.

Take a wild guess as to how I feel about that one.

Granted, all this adds is one more step for users, but it also suggests making remote access a “second-class” citizen to the WordPress world. You don’t solve security issues by shuffling them under the rug. The WordPress team still has to fix security vulnerabilities — this isn’t saving them any time of effort. It may help some users on the margin by removing one vector for attacks, but it’s not going to provide a big enough benefit, especially given the myriad other ways in which WordPress can be compromised.

If WordPress wants to get serious about security, they need to apply this same logic everywhere. Malicious themes are a huge problem — so user should have to explicitly enable theme support. Malicious and poorly written plugins can open WordPress wide open to attack — so before any plugins can be used, users should have to explicitly authorize plugin support. The list could go on.

This may sound harsh, but the WordPress team is taking the Windows Vista approach to security. Adding steps for users just makes things worse because it tends to engender a false sense of security. The real security solution is doing old-fashioned things like making sure that you’re sanitizing every piece of input you get — not annoying users and the developers who depend on your ecosystem.

If WordPress can’t adapt, people will move on. WordPress flourished when MT lost its edge — and back then WordPress was not the better package, but it had the mindshare of the community. The next WordPress is waiting in the wings, and if WordPress keeps taking such a mistaken approach to security, they could easily fall behind.

It looks like one enterprising user has gotten BloGTK 1.1 working on the Asus EeePC. The EeePC is a great mobile blogging machine, and BloGTK makes it even better.

It’s been a while since there was an update to BloGTK. During the last period of development for BloGTK there were so many frustrations and so little time that I had to give up.

Flash forward to a few weeks ago when I’m putting together my new Ubuntu box—I notice that there’s a Python library for Blogger’s GData system installed. And it even has a nice system for interfacing with Blogger. When I last did work on BloGTK 3 years ago, I had a lot of the app built. Maybe it was time to take another shot?

This entry is being created in BloGTK 2.0. The build is nowhere near complete, but there has been enough progress that it’s safe to announce its existence to the world.

BloGTK 2.0 will add some great new features like:

• A completely revamped interface designed for multiple blogs
• A new editor, with integrated spellcheck, HTML syntax highlighting, and undo/redo.
• Support for multiple categories.
• Full support for Blogger
• Autodiscovery of weblog settings (if your blog template supports it
• And much more…

There is no release date for BloGTK 2.0, as it all depends on finding programming time in my busy schedule. However, this time the technical hurdles have been surpassed and it is possible to deliver the kind of program that users have been asking for.

There will be much more coming as development continues on the next generation of BloGTK.