To give you a look into the the future of BloGTK 2.0 and how it works, I’ve created this short screencast demonstrating how BloGTK works:
This screencast shows BloGTK 2.0′s new category selection system, some of it’s HTML tag insertion features, the new WebKit-powered preview system, and support for Blogger.
This is the first screencast that I’ve ever created, and not a bad effort for the first time out. As development continues, look for more screencasts showing even more of the application over time.
UPDATE: Apparently, YouTube was eating my screencasts, so I’ve uploaded this new copy.
I’m proud to announce that BloGTK 2.0 will now be using WebKit as its rendering engine for HTML content. WebKit is an ultra-fast rendering engine used in Apple’s Safari browser as well as Google’s Chrome browser. With the very nice and easy-to-use pywebkitgtk bindings, adding WebKit to BloGTK took almost no time at all.
What does this mean for you? For one, WebKit is a much better HTML rendering library than the old GTK html viewer. It’s much faster, much nicer, and is generally easier to use.
The other possibility is adding WSIWYG editing to BloGTK. I’m not sure that will appear in 2.0, just so I can get 2.0 out the door quicker, but it’s something that is now possible to add and have it work right. It’s definitely part of the road map for the next release after 2.0.
Development is continuing on BloGTK 2.0, and the addition of WebKit makes BloGTK 2.0 are much better blog editing platform than before. It will open up a whole bunch of new avenues for working with HTML in the application. It’s the sort of thing that makes a humble app programmer very happy…
The latest release in the old BloGTK codebase is now being hosted on Launchpad. This release fixes many outstanding bugs from 1.1 and includes new code to bring it up to date with new versions of Python and PyGTK. This version will likely be the last update to the old BloGTK codebase, as 2.0 is back in development.
Some of the fixes include a modern file chooser for opening and saving files, and improved security for saved passwords.
As you may have noticed, BloGTK 2.0 hasn’t been worked on in a while. That is due to the annoying thing called “real life” getting in the way.
Thankfully, I am hoping to have some free time for the first time in years, and may be able to work on BloGTK 2.0 again in the next few weeks.
In the meantime, I have moved this site to a new server, since Sourceforge and WordPress tend not to play too well together, especially since I couldn’t use Askimet for spam control. The good news is that this server will not have the problem with comments that existed before.
The current code for BloGTK will need some updates for newer versions of Python and libglade. For one, the current Glade file crashes the Glade editor. This is, needless to say, a major annoyance.
As always, I would appreciate help, especially help in the form of code patches and development help. Bug reports are nice, but patches that fix the bugs are even better.
I apologize for the lack of updates in the last few months. My time, sadly, has been extremely limited, and work on BloGTK has gone to the sidelines.
If anyone would like to help complete BloGTK, please contact me at blogtk at jayreding.com. Or you can contribute code directly through Launchpad. My time will continue to be limited, and getting BloGTK out the door may take a long time at this rate.
Secondly, many have reported problems with commenting on the site. Apparently my anti-spam system was bouncing all comments instead of just spam. I’ve replaced it with another anti-spam plugin that should hopefully work better. If that fails, I will be moving the site to a new server that lets me use Askimet. I apologize for the bounced comments.
The goal for BloGTK is to get the remaining functionality working, get offline editing working correctly, and then concentrate primarily on bug fixes and the like. BloGTK already seems to work fairly well, and rather than keep adding features, I would like to develop BloGTK into a stable product that does a few things, and does them well.
Again, I apologize for the lack of updates. BloGTK is a hobby for me, and I don’t have much time these days. As always, any contributions that anyone has are always appreciated.
BloGTK is still evolving, although at a rather slow pace. The next big step will be better support for offline editing, followed by custom tags for the editor.
Some of the recent changes:
Now complete is the system for inserting links into posts, as well as some minor backend changes.
The creation dates of posts can now be altered in the editor. This can be used to set posts into the future.
The post preview now displays the post categories for a given post.
As always, the development version of BloGTK 2.0 is available on Launchpad is available on Launchpad.
The source code to BloGTK 2.0 is now available at Launchpad. That means that if you’ve been waiting to hack away, you now can do so.
Launchpad has some impressive collaborative features, and while I’m still getting my “sea legs” in terms of how it all works, it seems to be a good way of managing this project in the future.
You will need to install Bazaar to get access to the code. Under Ubuntu, that’s as simple as
sudo apt-get install bzr
in a terminal window. Other distributions can get in on the fun too, but you’re on your own.
Right now, BloGTK needs only two additional packages from a stock Ubuntu install. Those packages are python-gnome2-extras and python-feedparser. Once those are installed, BloGTK should run.
Create a new working directory and run the command
bzr branch lp:blogtk
and the code will download to a blogtk directory.
Right now, BloGTK 2.0 has no installer, and must be run right from the testing directory. It will create a new folder in your home directory called .BloGTK where the config data and cache are stored.
BloGTK is not beta software, this is at best an early alpha. Many features are missing. Some things may not work as intended. Some things may not work at all. BloGTK needs a lot of love, and most importantly it needs a lot of eyeballs and testing.
Feel free to use Launchpad to hack away at the code and especially feel free to contribute patches and suggestions. The more help I can get, the faster BloGTK development will go.
Enjoy your BloGTK hacking, and hopefully as time goes by, BloGTK 2.0 will become one of the best weblog editors out there.
Here is a preview of the new BloGTK 2.0 interface. This interface is designed to make the process of working with multiple blogs much easier. You can have all your blogs available from the main interface, no matter where they’re hosted or what system they use.
BloGTK 2.0 Main Window
Development on BloGTK 2.0 is still proceeding, although there are some big pieces left to go. Mainly, the first run configuration needs to be built, and the offline editing functions need to be put into place. However, as soon as BloGTK is functional enough to be usable, I do plan on putting the code out on Subversion as a developer release.
I should also mention that this blog will be getting a makeover in the near future as well. As nice as the WordPress default template is, BloGTK deserves its own style…
A quick update on the progress of BloGTK 2.0. Right now the focus is on getting the MetaWeblog API support working correctly. So far, so good on that front, although there’s a lot of testing to make sure it all works correctly.
There’s also an article that every open-source developer should read on why Free Software tends to have bad usability. BloGTK 1 could be the poster child for that—it’s UI design was atrocious—and I’ll be the first to admit it. I do care about usability, but developing a usable interface is a difficult skill to learn. BloGTK 2.0 is going to get a lot of usability work as development continues, especially when it gets loosed on the world.
Development on BloGTK 2.0 has been very slow lately as my day job has taken priority and I’ve been dealing with an annoying problem with the account settings panel. The good news is that the code is now working (but needs more testing to be sure), and I can move on to adding more polish.
BloGTK 2.0 will use RSD introspection to try and configure most of the settings to a blog with nothing more than the address. That means that most users won’t have to worry about endpoints, blog IDs, or picking the right API. Even though BloGTK is geared towards more technical users, that saves a lot of guesswork.
In WordPress news, WordPress 2.6 is out. Those of you who are upgrading will not have a problem with BloGTK, but if it is a new install, you will need to activate XML-RPC in the settings to use BloGTK or another remote blogging tool.
Finally, once BloGTK 2.0 is in a semi-feature complete state, I’ll be putting the code up in a public Subversion repository for testing. The old BloGTK was written in a time where version control was a major pain—finally I’ve done the right thing and started using an internal Subversion repository for development.
As before, there’s no definitive ETA for release. I was hoping to have something in time for the Ubuntu 8.10 release, but that looks doubtful. With BloGTK, I pushed the app out the door, and made a lot of rookie mistakes and poor design decisions. I want 2.0 to be more polished and professional. That means taking the time to try to get it right before letting it loose.
