Here’s a quick update on the state of BloGTK.

Lucid Packages: Sorry for the delay in packaging. I will have packages for Ubuntu 10.04 on the PPA up shortly. I will post an announcement here when they are available.

The new packages should eliminate the errors about the python-gnome2-extras package not being available. Ubuntu changed their packaging of certain GNOME libraries, and the new BloGTK packages will work with the changes to Ubuntu.

WebKit and BloGTK: BloGTK 2.0 uses the pywebkitgtk library to embed WebKit in the application. This library has caused many problems and is no longer in active development. So this means that the WebKit rendering code will have to be rewritten – and there’s a lot of code. The good news is that using PyGI introspection should give BloGTK closer access to the latest and greatest WebKit features. The bad news is that it may take some time to get it all working. Hopefully the change will be straightforward and BloGTK can leave behind all the bugginess.

Future Releases: The current plan is to move BloGTK 2.1 into being a largely under-the-hood release. The focus of that version will be on moving to WebKit introspection instead of pywebkitgtk and fixing bugs. Other features I want to implement are better error handling (with a GUI telling users how to turn on XML-RPC for WordPress), and better internationalization support.

After that, there will be a major feature release. BloGTK will move to WYSIWYG editing, with the optional code view still available. Image support will happen – either uploading the image to your blog or using Flickr/Picasa. There will be other cool stuff too. Thankfully, some of this code has been written, so it won’t be too difficult to implement.

BloGTK 1.x (2003-2010), RIP: The 1.0 series of BloGTK is not going to be developed further. Getting BloGTK 2.1 pushed out to all the major distros will be a priority. BloGTK 1.x had a much longer life than I would have expected. Thousands of people have used it, and it’s done better than I could have hoped. But it’s not worth maintaining anymore now that BloGTK 2.0 has taken off.

Thanks to everyone who has supported BloGTK – it’s appreciated! The upcoming architectural changes should remove one of the more frustrating roadblocks to making BloGTK what I always wanted it to be, and will hopefully lead to another major leap in open-source blogging.

Development on BloGTK 2.1 has been at a virtual standstill for a while, partially because I’ve been short on time and partially because there’s been a nasty segfault bug that kept cropping up whenever I tried to get the prototype WSIWYG editing system to work.

Now, lo and behold, it looks like that bug is no longer present, at least as of the latest version of Karmic. I’m performing more tests to confirm that the bug has been wiped out, but it looks like the crashes with the WSIWYG system aren’t happening any more.

If the segfault bug is gone, that will mean less time trying to trace that annoying crash and more time working on the next iteration of BloGTK.

With luck, BloGTK 2.1 will have WSIWYG editing; support for image uploads to your blogging system, Flickr, or Picasa; and some under the hood fixes as well.

Thanks to everyone who has submitted bug reports lately — I always appreciate the feedback.

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.

<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.

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…