Inspirational Technology

Inspirational Technology
Kimbro Staken's views on Mac OS X, XML databases, and other inspirational technologies.

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Sunday, January 13, 2002

Ok the RadioPost service is working via XML-RPC. I had to add a couple simple scripts to Radio to wrap the builtins, so using applescript would still be a better way but this works too. This post was written in TextEdit and posted via the service.
7:58:35 PM

Ok, now the images are back, I don't get it.
8:11:53 AM

Ugh, now the images around the sidebar are broken on the published site. Republishing the entire site doesn't seem to fix it either. Radio has some cool capabilities but there are an awful lot of bugs. I haven't even mentioned the number of missing sub-table and internal server error messages I've seen. The product is cool, but man is it glitchy.
8:06:41 AM

To test out the new upstream to my server I posted a couple screens of the RadioPost Mac OS X service. Just wish this actually worked the way I want. I'm thinking I'll hack something together using XML-RPC until I can figure out the Applescript issues. Anyway, here you can see a shot using the service from Omniweb and what the RadioPost app looks like. This is definitely a toy right now, but it does give some idea of the cool application integration facilities that are available in Mac OS X.
I haven't seen very many good uses of services yet, but there are a lot of interesting possibilities.
7:40:26 AM

Wow, something actually went right for once. I decided to setup a sub folder that would upstream to my current server. I'm still having to use the local FTP to WebDAV hack, but it works. So I have the main site publishing to the Userland radio server and a sub folder publishing to my server. I wanted to do this to cut down on the space used on the Userland server. I could of course easily go through WebDAV directly like I used to, but this gives several nice features.

Automatic rendering of content files with the sites look and feel.

Easy look and feel changes.

Keeps the content local in a easily backed up location.

Allows you to write simple content without worrying about tagging.

We'll see how well this really works after I live with it a few days. I'm a little concerned about the WebDAV link, in particular what happens if the mount isn't there. I need to try an alias for the mount and see if FTP will auto trigger the mount. We'll see. The good thing about this is that WebDAV is a little more secure then FTP as long as you use digest passwords.
7:22:15 AM

After last night you'd think I would have had enough of the pain from Radio, well no not me. Tonight I decided I wanted an OS X service to post to Radio from any OS X app that supports services. I figured it'd be simple enough, maybe an hours work or so to get something really basic working. That would have been including the time it would take me to learn Applescript, Applescript studio, how to write Cocoa services in Obj C, how Radio manages the weblog and how to call that functionality from an external app. Not bad for an hours work, except, except I can not for the life of me get the content of a Cocoa text view to post to Radio. If I hard code a string it works no problem, but pulling the same string out of a text view doesn't work at all. I've narrowed it down to the fact that the content of a text view in applescript is a international string and apparently Radio can't handle those strings. I should just be able to coerce the value into a regular string, at least that's what the documentation says. It does not work as advertised. So even though I have the entire framework in place for the App I just can't figure out why this one little, but very important detail won't work. In this case I won't really blame Radio as this looks more like an Applescript Studio problem more then anything. It's also quite possible that this is a problem with my lack of knowledge about Applescript and Radio.
Sometimes the simplest things can be so incredibly frustrating.
Anyway, everything else works fine. Creating the service was really easy and it is extremely cool to be able to blend Obj C and Applescript within the same app. The power of the Cocoa frameworks are incredible, I can't wait until I've learned them well enough to really be comfortable with them. If I had been familiar with all the tools, this Radio service would have literally taken ten minutes to create. Well assuming I could actually get the text out of the text view that is.
5:53:59 AM

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