Guoqiang Wu's Blog : Blog Editor

CSBlogger updates

guowu — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 07:17:00 GMT

Haven't touched it for quiet a while, tonight I suddenly feel motivated to fix a few old bugs on CSBlogger and the newest build is now available here.

Version	Description	Credit
1.1.0.38	Bug fixes: 1) Error when retrieving post with an apostrophe(') in the title 2) Error with SetNamedNodeProperty when retrieving posts 3) Post content appears blank when opening the saved xml file	Craig and Scott

Besides the fixes I made, there may also be two behavior changes(good or bad) due to changes made on Community Server side(it seems like msdn is now running on CS 1.2):

a) The GetRecentPosts API issue is now fixed.

b) It seems a new bug is introduced with the EnableComments property: it is always set to false when post is retrieved from the server. When updating existing blog entries, please make sure "Enable comments" option is checked if you do want comments turned on.

Special notice to Community Server 1.0 users:

Because Community Server 1.1 is now available publicly, I decide not to maintain a separate binary for Community Server 1.0 any more. However, you can always download the source code and compile it for Community Server 1.0 if necessary.

CSBlogger 1.1 is released!

guowu — Thu, 26 May 2005 05:58:12 GMT

Available now here. I am little bit surprised that CSBlogger didn't get much attention as its .Text cousin SimpleBlogger had. So I decide to list a few reasons why you should consider using CSBlogger as your Community Server blog editor:

1) It provides features that are standard in Microsoft Office application, but not available in most blog clients, including: format painter, undo/redo, spell checker, auto-correction, etc.;

2) It has full offline support, which means you can blog on the go;

3) It has the nice look and feel of web pages, and good user experience of standalone windows application. Personally I think it is pretty cool. Take a look at screenshots, and see whether you disagree with me.

4) The "Insert Picture" and "Paste Html" issue in SimpleBlogger has been workaround in the latest release;

5) Oh, the new release allows you specify a signature for your blogs, like the one you see at the end of this post;

...

Ok, better stop now. Also stopped should be updates on CSBlogger releases. Now that everything I want it to do is in place, I think I can get some rest now. But, if you find any bugs, please let me know.

Have a nice day and thanks for listening to me murmuring!

Community Server Issues - Part II

guowu — Wed, 25 May 2005 05:35:17 GMT

A while back, I complained about the big pain caused by the SOAP header change between Community Server 1.0 and 1.1 web service APIs. Scott was kind enough to explain why they made the change. Still, getting my blog editor to work with both versions is painful. At first I went for the easy route and created separate editions for each version. It turned out to be very silly and annoying to maintain two almost identical copies of the code. So I decided to bite the bullet and use conditional compilation to merge the code together. The process was smooth but tedious; those "#if…#else…#endif" clauses scattered everywhere really do not look pretty. After all, it worked fine and now I have one code base to work with. You will see the combined source code uploaded a few days after I am done with a major update on CSBlogger. Stay tuned if you are interested.

Anyway, back to the topic. At the time I posted the first one, the next issue I planned to talk about was that Community Server strips out all style formatting in blog entries. That, after a few weeks, seems to me not as bad as it originally appeared. I guess the point is that blogging is not web publishing and bloggers should try to keep their posts clean and plain. I don't necessarily agree with this but can live with it. Just that tables in my old posts now look so horrible that I had to change the custom CSS for my blog to make them at least look ok.

That leaves me with two remaining issues. Both on the blogservice web service API of Community Server:

the GetRecentPosts API turns out to be "GetOldPosts": it always return the oldest n posts if given n as the number of posts to retrieve from the server. This would make my blog editor too hard to use for those long time bloggers because they will have to retrieve all their blog entries to get the latest one. I don't know whether this happens also with the GetRecentArticles API;
the value of the Date field in a BlogPost is off several hours even though I had set the time zone in my user options. To workaround this, I had to manually add/substract a certain value to the date.

I hope those two are not my mistakes. :-) That is all I have in mind for now. Next time I will post some suggestions and feature requests on the web service APIs.

[Update] Just found one more issue: the "IsPublished" value of a BlogPost is always true when calling GetRecentPosts.

Have a nice day and thanks for listening to me murmuring!

Updates on CSBlogger and source code release

guowu — Fri, 20 May 2005 09:25:36 GMT

Some minor bug fixes are made. As always, the new build can be downloaded here. The source code is also posted there upon requests. You will find the source for the Community Server 1.0 edition under the "CS1.0" sub folder.

In the future, I might do a few blog entries on how the whole thing was designed and created. Don't hold your breath on it though: I am pretty occupied these days.

This post is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Use of materials found in this post is subject to the terms specified in the Terms of Use.

Community Server Issues - Part I

guowu — Fri, 13 May 2005 12:14:01 GMT

Ok, seriously, I have encountered several problems on the web service APIs provided by Community Server during the process of creating this InfoPath blog client. It seems to me the forum at communityserver.org is not very active. Therefore I am posting it here in hope of getting someone's attention.

Some of those issues I believe are bugs, some of them might be design changes. But what I really, really do not understand is the soap header change between CS1.0 and the CS version on http://blogs.msdn.com (I believe the latter is newer, pre 1.1, maybe?). Take a look, here is the CS1.0 header:

<soap:Header>
    <BlogCredentials xmlns="http://communityserver.org/blogs/services/posts/">
      <Username>string</Username>
      <Password>string</Password>
      <Blogname>string</Blogname>
    </BlogCredentials>
</soap:Header>

and here is the msdn one:

<soap:Header>
    <ServiceCredentials xmlns="http://communityserver.org/blogs/services/posts/">
      <Username>string</Username>
      <Password>string</Password>
      <SectionName>string</SectionName>
    </ServiceCredentials>
</soap:Header>

Due to this change, the client proxy classes of both versions are totally incompatible to each other. In order to work with both, you'd go through two code paths for each web service calls. (Well, someone familiar with reflection might do better, but I doubt it). I, actually ended up creating a separate edition for each of them. What a pain…

Of course, there are a few other changes made in the newer versions. Most of them are meaningful and easy to accommodate. For example, the ModerateComments property of the BlogPost class is now changed to a ModerationType enumeration. The functional improvement is obvious. Now what could you get by just changing namings in a published API set, besides introducing incomptabilities?

CSBlogger Take 2

guowu — Fri, 13 May 2005 11:58:13 GMT

Finally I was able to get CSBlogger also working with Community Server 1.0. In the mean time, a few minor bug fixes are made to make both the blogs.msdn.com and the CS1.0 edition. The new build is released at the same location here. Hopefully it will be stable enough for a while. Now I have some serious complaints on Community Server coming…

Here comes the CSBlogger

guowu — Wed, 11 May 2005 12:23:39 GMT

The download link and other information for CSBlogger, an InfoPath client for Community Server blogs, is now available here. Please post a comment under this post if you have questions or find bugs.

Updates on SimpleBlogger

guowu — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 03:21:00 GMT

Being a shameless diver (read a lot, post nothing) in the blog world for a while, I did not know that my SimpleBlogger InfoPath form does not work with blogs.msdn.com any more due to recent move to community server. Thanks to Gareth for notifying me on this. Before I start complaining like a lot others already did, let me give you a quick update on what I plan to do about SimpleBlogger in respond to this change:

A new InfoPath form will be designed to create or edit blog posts on community server based blog servers. Aside from the pain of re-designing the whole thing, there actually seems to be something beneficial: the new web service API provided by CS is pretty complete, meaning that it is possible to use the API to do almost everything you can do in your blog's web administrative interface. Assuming I can get it to work, I am going to remove the "Simple" part from the form name and add something to indicate that it works only with Community Server. Maybe something like "CSBlogger"? Anyone has a better idea?
The SimpleBlogger form will be kept as-is for those happy .Text bloggers.

If everything goes well, I may get it done before I goes to vacation on the week of April 18th. So keep posted if you are interested in blogging using InfoPath. Oh, one last thing, this is the "plan", not a "promise", :-)

SimpleBlogger update

guowu — Tue, 10 Aug 2004 04:18:00 GMT

A new build is available for download. Here is the information:

Form Version	Release Date	Backward Compatible	Changes (thanks to)
1.0.0.252 (Current)	08/09/2004	Yes	fixed reload categories (G. Andrew Duthie) allow saving credentials with form (G. Andrew Duthie) removed useless links to comment entries

Please see the original post if you want to know more about SimpleBlogger.

BTW, the weblogs.asp.net (blogs.msdn.com) server is not very responsive today. You may have to retry a few times if you get connection failure or invalid html errors.

Available: a new version of the InfoPath blog editor for .Text (simpleblogger)

guowu — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 03:24:00 GMT

Yes, it is already up there. Documentation is also updated.

I also created a category dedicated for SimpleBlogger. If you want to keep track of future updates, you can subscribe to this feed.

A simple InfoPath blog editor for .Text - SimpleBlogger

guowu — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 09:07:00 GMT

About

SimpleBlogger is an InfoPath based blog client utilizing the simpleblogservice API provided by .Text. Main functionalities are:

view current posts;
edit existing posts;
create new posts;
view comments.

Feature highlights

In fact, those mostly are benefits provided by InfoPath. SimpleBlogger does very little.

Standard editing features found in most Microsoft Office products, but not in most existing blog clients, such as: background speller checker, format painter, undo/redo, insert/draw table, line spacing, etc.
Full offline support: imagine writing your blogs on your flight!
XHTML compatible: the post content generated by designer are in XHTML.

System requirements

.Net Framework 1.1
Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003 SP1

[Update 07/27/2004] - Office 2003 SP1 is released.

[Update 07/30/2004] - If you have problem with SP1 install and you had SP1 Preview installed previously, see whether this InfoPath team blog entry could be any help.

Intended users

.Text bloggers.

[Update 05/26/2005] - Community Server users, look here.

Note: if your blog server is a custom build of .Text, SimpleBlogger may or may not work for you, depending on whether the following assumptions are broken:

Assumption made	Result if broken
RSS feed URL = blog URL + "/rss.aspx"	unable to view/edit existing posts
SimpleBlogService URL = blog URL + "/services/simpleblogservice.asmx"	unable to update existing or publish new posts
SimpleBlogService web service is working as expected and there are no modifications to the APIs	same as above
/rss/channel/item/wfw:comment node contains the post entry id	unable to edit existing posts
/rss/channel/item/wfw:commentRss node points to the post comments RSS feed	unable to view comments

Screenshot

Click on the picture to view in full size.

Installation

Download the SimpleBlogger.msi and run it. If you installed SimpleBlogger before, please uninstall it first.

Revision history

Form Version	Release Date	Backward Compatible	Changes (thanks to)
1.0.0.252 (Current)	08/09/2004	Yes	fixed reload categories (G. Andrew Duthie) allow saving credentials with form (G. Andrew Duthie) removed useless links to comment entries
1.0.0.214	08/01/2004	No*	fixed some saving problems minor UI cleanup
1.0.0.156	07/30/2004	No*	removal of validation on username; (G. Andrew Duthie) redesign of post editing; extended schema to allow "managingEditor" elements found in some .Text RSS feeds; (?? and others) improved comments display others...
1.0.0.1	07/20/2004	Yes	Added error handling code for form load, minor UI touch
1.0.0.0	07/19/2004	-	Original release
*This means existing file created with old version of SimpleBlogger may not open once the new version is installed. If you have such file with work-in-progress post entries, try to post them using the old version before installing the new version.

Usage

Open the InfoPath form template from your install location(default: %ProgramFiles%\InfoPath Form Templates\SimpleBlogger.xsn).

Hint: the above is only necessary if you don't have a saved form file (.xml) for your blog. You can always save data for your blogs in a form file and open the form file directly later. This is also how you can do offline blogging.

Support

This is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Use of this tool is subject to the terms specified in the Terms of Use.

Known issues/Limitations

1) General blogging related functionalities

Symptom: a) when posting a new entry, you can not specify advanced options that are available for the .Text Web Admin page; b) for existing posts, categories information is not shown, thus can't be modified.

Cause: SimpleBlogger relies on the simpleblogservice web service API provided by .Text. It can not do anything more than what simpleblogservice web service can do.

Workaround: None

Status: None until simpleblogservice implements those functionalities or another SOAP based web service is provided.

2) Posts created or modified in other blog client looks weird in SimpleBlogger

Symptom: this may happen when the html source of the post contains mangled html tag like <A><B></A></B>

Cause: SimpleBlogger performs several simple steps to fix up bad HTML code to make them XHTML compatible. The emphasis here is "compatible", not "effective".

Workaround: None

Status: None. Converting HTML to XHTML is too complicate a job for SimpleBlogger to handle it well. As long as you stick to SimpleBlogger, which always generates XHTML compatible post content, this should not be a big concern.

3) Inserted pictures are not shown on the web page

Symptom: Pictures inserted using InfoPath built-in "Insert Picture" feature will show up correctly in SimpleBlogger, but not on the web page.

Cause: By design, InfoPath inserts the actual picture in the xml data by encoding it as a base64 string.

Workaround: In source edit mode, locate and modify the "img" tag created by InfoPath or simply insert the by yourself like this <img src="http://some.website.com/somepicture.jpg" />

Status: I already tried really hard to make this easier but failed. I will try something new later. In the mean time, I would really appreciate if someone discover a way to get the insertion point of the InfoPath Rich text control or text box and share that with me.

4) Unable to paste into post content in design mode

Symptom: this may happen if copying from source external to InfoPath, e.g., a web page.

Cause: investigating

Workaround: Paste into Notepad first.

Status: investigating

5) Font size shown in the web page may not be the same as shown in the design mode of SimpleBlogger

Symptom: this most likely happens with text inside tables.

Cause: investigating

Workaround: it seems like setting the font size 1 point higher or lower than current font size resolves the problem. Hint: you can use CTRL-] or CTRL-[ shortcut key to increase or decrease font size by 1 point.

Status: investigating

That's all I know of. There definitely are more. Please let me know if you find issues with SimpleBlogger, I'd be happy to investigate as long as I have time.

Finally, as always, enjoy blogging!