Here’s what’s happening in the world of BloGTK:

First, thanks to all who have contributed patches, bug reports, and feedback in 2009. Bringing BloGTK back from the dead was a great experience, and it’s good to know that it’s appreciated.

The next release of BloGTK will be 2.0.1, which will mainly be a bugfix release with some added spit and polish. Again, keep submitting those bug reports so that any outstanding bugs with 2.0 can be squashed.

Next up is 2.1. I want 2.1 to be an awesome release, but right now there’s a huge roadblock. The WebKit library that BloGTK uses loves to segfault. This bug is a showstopper for BloGTK. There may be ways of working around it, but all of them are kludgy and generally uncool.

So, if there are any experts in writing Python bindings out there who can take a look at this bug and offer a patch, that would be extremely helpful. Right now, that bug is keeping 2.1 development from truly moving forward, and I’d hate for this project to be stalled out over technical issues once more.

More news as development continues.

Ubuntu blog OMG! UBUNTU! has a nice review of BloGTK with some great constructive criticism.

For example, they note that the buttons on the editor toolbar can be difficult to understand. 2.0.1 will feature tooltips for all the buttons to make them easier to figure out. Plus, the insert link icon will be the system standard icon.

The review also notes two feature requests: WYSIWYG editing and Blogger tags. WYSIWYG editing is being experimented with for 2.1, and Blogger tags will come once Ubuntu updates the python-gdata library to support them. Hopefully both will be coming soon.

Thanks to OMG! UBUNTU! for the nice review.

Work is continuing on adding support for image uploads with BloGTK. In addition to the Picasa support mentioned earlier, work has begun on native uploads for blogging systems that support the metaWeblog.newMediaObject method. So far, the preliminary code is working well, although there’s a lot of work to be done to make sure it works right.

The next version (tentatively 2.1) will also hopefully be much better with error handling. Right now, when something throws an error, it’s not easy to diagnose just what happened. The next version should do better, not only giving you a better warning of errors, but also creating an error log that can be used to diagnose problems.

BloGTK is continuing to evolve, and I’m getting more and more assistance in making it better. Again, thank you to everyone who has contributed code and bug reports and feature suggestions. Every little bit helps.

Happy Thanksgiving to those BloGTK users in the US of A!

BloGTK 2.0 is steadily being refined, so if you’ve installed from the PPA you’ll get some crucial bug fixes next time you update your system. If you’ve installed from the tarball, there’s an updated download you can install that fixes some critical bugs in Fedora and other distributions.

There’s also some very exciting stuff that’s coming down the road for the next version of BloGTK 2.0. Thanks to a new BloGTK contributor, there’s a patch out there that adds support for Picasa uploads right from BloGTK. Just insert a local image on your computer and hit the upload version, and the new patch will automatically upload your images to Picasa, change the links over, and post your blog entry. It’s a completely seamless experience.

Image uploading is just one feature planned for the future of BloGTK. There are other great new features coming that will make BloGTK even better. Keep checking back here for more news as development pushes forward.

<professor>Good news, everybody!</professor>

It appears that the infamous segfault bug in Karmic has been vanquished, and BloGTK 2.0 no longer tends to fall down and go boom when editing posts. Apparently the WebKit view does NOT want to die, and will decide to take down the entire app if you try. This behavior is more than a little strange, but thankfully there’s a workaround that appears to kill the bug.

The trunk branch on Launchpad has the fix. Hopefully this will fix some other bugs on other platforms.

At this stage, once the fix is confirmed not to cause massive breakage, there will be a point release (2.0.1) with the fix.

From here on out, the next step will be squashing additional bugs, making sure that i18n will work out, and then planning for some new features.

As always, please keep sending bug reports and ideas my way.

For those of you using BloGTK 2.0 on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic, you’ve probably noticed a few problems with crashes. Like, a lot of crashes.

From what I’ve been able to tell, BloGTK will crash when more than two windows have been opened. Why, I’ve no idea. My guess is that there’s some garbage collection problems that are causing problems. Whether that’s due to something in BloGTK itself or the underlying Python libraries isn’t known yet. Given that BloGTK works just fine on Jaunty, my guess is that there’s a bug with one of the libraries.

A bug report has already been added to the Launchpad project. If anyone has a better idea of where the problem may be, please post the information either in the bug report or on this blog.

I apologize for the problem, and hopefully the bug will be fixed as Karmic heads towards formal release.

UPDATE: It appears that the crash is related to the WebKit bindings. Investigation into this bug is continuing.

UPDATE – Sept 24: Some more digging has revealed that the crash happens when one editor window is closed and then another is opened. There is a bug report filed with the pywebkitgtk package that seems to deal with a similar issue, if not the same one. I will continue to see if there’s anything I can do with the BloGTK codebase to prevent the crashes.

I apologize for the problems, and hopefully this issue will be resolved before Karmic is formally released next month.

UPDATE: Nov. 5: Still testing this crash on Karmic. I’m hoping to be able to either find a fix or a workaround shortly. Thank you for your patience.

Also, keep the bug reports coming—there are definitely outstanding issues that need to get fixed with the 2.0 codebase, and the more that get squashed, the better BloGTK 2.0 will be.

At long last, BloGTK 2.0 is here and ready for download. BloGTK 2.0 is a major step up from prior versions, and features a completely new codebase and tons of modern features.

Getting BloGTK 2.0

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty

If you’re running Jaunty, using BloGTK 2.0 is a snap. You can install BloGTK 2.0 from my Personal Package Archive. Just follow the instructions under the “Read about installing” link to get going. Then, you may use Synaptic to install the new version.

BloGTK 2.0 will first uninstall previous versions of BloGTK before installing. Your individual configuration files will remain, however, and if you wish to downgrade, you’ll be able to. (Why you would want to is beyond me, though.) Unfortunately, your old configuration won’t transfer over, but BloGTK makes it much easier to get up and running than before.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic

Packages for Karmic are now available in the BloGTK PPA. Be sure to select Ubuntu 9.10 in the drop-down box before entering the repository information.

Other Linux Distributions

If you’re running something other than Ubuntu, then you’ll need to install from source. To do that, go here to get the archive. Download the tar.gz file to a temporary folder and unpack it.

In the Terminal, go to the folder where BloGTK has been unpacked, and type:

sudo make install

BloGTK will then be installed.

BloGTK 2.0 has been very heavily tested, but it is possible that there are bugs, and there will be updates to deal with them. If you notice a bug with BloGTK, please file a bug report so those bugs can be squashed.

But most importantly, have fun using BloGTK 2.0!

Development on BloGTK 2.0 is continuing, with a formal release getting closer and closer. Here’s what’s been done lately:

• The MetaWeblog API routines have been patched to allow for better compatibility with b2evolution.
• Coding on offline editing has been started.
• The beginnings of internationalization (i18n) support have been added. BloGTK 1.x was not build with internationalization in mind. BloGTK 2.0 will be much easier to translate into other languages.
• The file structure for the app has changed for packaging. It is now possible to install BloGTK into the system. Packages for Ubuntu can now be built from the source.

However, there are a few things that need to be done:

• There are several bugs with BloGTK in Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic”. For example, there are some visual bugs with the progress indicator in the settings dialog and the editor preview system tends to segfault.
• Offline post editing support needs to be finished. BloGTK 2.0 will not have the most robust offline editing features, but I hope to improve on them in subsequent releases.
• Adding full support for the old Blogger API as a fallback. (Although this may be left out—is there really a need for supporting this depricated API?)

The biggest task is ironing out the remaining bugs. BloGTK 1.x was somewhat flaky. BloGTK 2.0 should be much more stable. While it is inevitable that bugs will crop up, BloGTK 2.0 has been more heavily tested than its predecessor.

As always, the source code can be downloaded from Launchpad. Keep those bug reports coming, and with luck, there will be a release soon.

A few bits and pieces from the BloGTK front.

A new Ubuntu package for the old BloGTK 1.1 codebase has been released. This packages fixes a major bug with Python 2.6 and is recommended for all. For details, see the official release message. Thanks to Ralph Taylor for the fix.

Development on BloGTK 2.0 has lulled a little bit this summer, but is now picking back up. The focus right now is on squashing bugs rather than adding new features. Once the system is ready, the code will be moved on to the packaging phase – turning all the code from a bunch of code in one directory to something that can be installed and packaged.

Again, keep on filing bug reports and/or playing around with the source code for BloGTK. Already, there’s been one helpful contributor that’s helped with b2evolution compatibility. The more bug reports or patches, the better BloGTK will be.

Development on BloGTK 2.0 is nearing public release, but before BloGTK 2.0 is ready for primetime, it needs testers to put it through its paces. So, if you are feeling adventurous and want to give BloGTK a spin on your distro and blog, here is how to do it.

Getting Started

First of all, you will need the following packages for your system:

• bzr
• python (2.6.2 recommended. BloGTK is not Python 3 compatible.)
• python-gtk2
• python-gnome2
• python-gnome2-extras
• python-feedparser
• python-gdata
• python-webkit

On Ubuntu, you can add them all by going into a Terminal window and executing the command:

sudo apt-get install bzr python-gtk2 python-gnome2
python-gnome2-extras python-feedparser python-gdata python-webkit

On other distributions, follow the instructions for your particular distribution. (For RedHat-based systems, you should be able to replace “apt-get install” with “yum install”. Some distributions may have slightly different names for these packages (such as “python-webkitgtk” instead of “python-webkit”)

Once you have the required packages, you’ll be able to start testing BloGTK.

Getting the Code

The next step is to get the code for BloGTK from launchpad. Go to the directory where you want the BloGTK code to be located. Next, you will use Bazaar to get the actual code. In your Terminal window, execute the following command:

bzr branch lp:blogtk

Bazaar will then download the BloGTK code to a “blogtk” directory.

Right now, BloGTK is run from its own directory. When the program is ready, it will be installed for all users. For right now, you can install the development version without disturbing any older version of BloGTK on your system.

Using BloGTK

Go to the newly-created “blogtk” directory in your Terminal and execute the following command:

bin/blogtk2

BloGTK should open up and prompt you to configure your first blog account. From the configuration screen you should be able to add as many blog accounts as you wish. From there, you should be able to play with BloGTK to your heart’s content.

How to Create a Helpful Bug Report

The goal, of course, is to get as many people testing BloGTK as possible, and for them to find and help squash as many bugs as possible. To do that, I need bug reports. You can either submit a bug report through Launchpad or leave a bug report right here on the blog. (I would prefer bugs to be put into Launchpad, but will settle for blog comments.) Here are the things you should include to make your bug report helpful:

• Your Distribution (i.e. Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Arch, etc…)
• What Version of Your Distro? (i.e. Fedora 11, Ubuntu 9.04, etc…)
• What Blogging System? (i.e. WordPress 2.8, Movable Type 4, Blogger)
• What Error Did You Get? To find out what errors may have occurred, look both at any printed message in the Terminal window and any messages in the status bar of the application. If there’s an error message in the Terminal, try copying it into the bug report.
• What Were You Doing When You Got The Error? For instance, something like “I was editing a post on my Blogger blog in the editor, and then tried to insert a new blockquote by hitting the toolbar button, and then I got the error.” The more details, the better.

Again, the more bugs that can get squashed, the better. Also, if there’s a feature you want added in a future version, feel free to bring that up as well. However, at this point the focus of development will be on getting rid of bugs and fixing code before adding something new.

A hearty thank you in advance to everyone who helps in testing BloGTK. This program has taken a long time to develop, and I hope that the wait will have been worth it. Each bug report will help make BloGTK better.

UPDATE: Added python-gnome2-extras to the list of required packages.

UPDATE: Changed instructions to reflect the change to the folder structure in the newest revisions.