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.

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.

More as development continues.

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.