Bleezer

By the way, the last couple of posts have been courtesy of the newest alpha version of Bleezer, which has full WYSIWYG editing. It also sports a much more elegant and usable interface.

What's really strange is that I keep flipping over to Preview only to realize that it looks exactly the same.

This version also does a couple of new things. My favorite is that when you insert an image it automatically uploads it to the server and inserts the correct link.

More to come...

Posted by larry at 09:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Dave Winer mentioned the problems he had getting the MetaWeblog API specification out:

BTW, while we're on the topic of APIs, here's something you might not know. When I put things like the MetaWeblog API up for review, the flamer-fans almost immediately drown out the discussion, so we're left with a spec that's not complete (but pretty good in the end). Then the very same people criticize the spec because it's not complete. Isn't that special.

I don't mean to single Dave out, but the entire blogosphere is built on APIs like MetaWeblog, the Blogger API, and ATOM, and the documentation and state of all of those specs leaves much to be desired. As for the MetaWeblog spec, I have no problem with it but there just doesn't seem to be one place to go for a coherent documented version. The Blogger API consists of a page of methods and expected parameters. The Atom API documentation consists of a page of HTML requests to send and the expected responses and very little explanation. Good luck figuring out why it is returning an HTTP 500 error.

The other day I spent 20 minutes trying to get MetaWeblog.newMediaObject to work, encoding the file in Base64 just like the minimalist instructions said. Just for fun I tried NOT encoding it, and it worked just fine.

These APIs, if you can find documentation at all, often don't work as advertised, and there is clearly no accepted standard. Writing a blogging tool should be a simple task, but it is made all the more difficult by the need to support the various flavors of specs and their idiosyncracies.

How much effort are we expending trying to deal with the problems we have created just because we can't agree?

Posted by larry at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes version 0.9.5.6 is available. So what's new?

• Much prettier interface, and restructured menus.
• SFTP and Proxy support (though untested)
• Support for Wordpress (online) and MetaWeblog blogging
• Improvements to tag definition and handling

There is also a laundry list of bug fixes and a bunch of other stuff that nobody noticed yet.

• Get Posts with Blogger on Windows XP is unable to retrieve posts - fixed
• Blogger returns 500 error - fixed
• Bleezer occasionally hangs while sending trackback pings - fixed
• Get Posts doesn't return posts properly in edit window - fixed
• div tags in posts causing problems - fixed
• File-New menu option now does something

Support for del.icio.us bookmarking was in up until the last build when it suddenly broke, but you can expect it to show up in the near future.

Remember, suggestions are always welcome. Enjoy Bleezer!

Posted by larry at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

I mentioned yesterday that there was a news story about Bleezer in The Record. I have been asked by City Media Group, owners of The Record, to remove that story as it is in violation of copyright. The gentleman I spoke to was very apologetic, but that is their policy.

In fact, though The Record announced that it would eliminate its paywall starting today, that is only true for the day's news. They do not even allow linking to their articles. So if you want to read it you'll have to pay to subscribe to the paper. Someone will need to explain to them about the Google cache though.

The funny thing was that I had taken great care to preserve all advertising and links around the story so that readers would see it as it originally appeared.

So while I regularly link to the National Post, The Globe and Mail, the New York Times, and other papers, it doesn't seem that The Record has bought in to the value of a hyperlinked world yet. But at least they are taking their first steps.

Posted by larry at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Priscilla emailed to let us know that ir wasn't clear how to get Bleezer to work with the online variety of Wordpress. While that option will be added to the preferences of and upcoming version, here's what you need to do in the meantime.

Just go to File->Preferences and set the following:

Userid:	your userid
Password:	your password
Host:	your_site_name.wordpress.com
Path:	/xmlrpc.php

Everything should work just fine.

Priscilla also suggests that a How-To guide would be useful, and we will work on that as soon as we can.

Posted by larry at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)