Monday, February 11, 2002

Before anyone asks, the code will be available via the MIT license through the MosXLand SourceForge project in a couple of days. I need to fix up the preferences a bit. If there are any volunteer developers to help with interoperability with other Blogger based services, ping me. 11:03:27 PM

Assuming this works, this post was actually composed in OmniWeb's source editor. It was posted via a little app called RadioServices that is a blend of Cocoa Services and AppleScript Studio. Did it work...? --- It did work! Cool-- now I can post to radio from any application that has services. I can take advantage of the spell/grammar checker in Word... use Project Builder's code formatter... edit Tables and other HTML markup via WebObjects Builder... easily post the output of a command in the terminal. Simply select the text and shift-cmd-R (App->Services->Post To Radio. I can even make posts on the train without a net connection. OS X Services + Radio Desktop + Cocoa + AS Studio + 1 hour = All of OS X is now a Blog editing/posting machine! 10:07:59 PM

It appears that DW and crew are one step ahead... I would bet this will fix the bug I mentioned in the previous post. system.verbs.builtins.radio.macros.weblogRecentPosts changed on Mon, 11 Feb 2002 07:13:02 GMT: Fixed a bug where when deleting a post from an archive page, the post would be deleted, but the public site would not be updated, and a macro error would appear when the browser reloads the page in the desktop website. [Radio.root Updates] 10:50:43 AM

As it turns out, writing a chunk of AppleScript to post through to your local radio desktop is trivial. property radioDesktopUrl : "http://localhost:5335/RPC2" property username : "default" -- name of password as listed in preferences property userPassword : "<>" property blogid : "home" on run tell application "Finder" to set content to (the clipboard contents as text) tell application "http://localhost:5335/RPC2" set postNumber to call xmlrpc {method name:"blogger.newPost", parameters:["doesnotmatterafaik", blogid, username, userPassword, content, 0]} end tell end run However, this does not solve the problem of making it convenient to post via AppleScript. You still have to select, copy, run the script-- too many steps. I think I have a solution that will make posting easy and universal to OS X-- ping me if you can test it (it'll be a few days before it is useful). There also seems to be a bug somewhere in Radio and its interaction with the Blogger API. I posted via Blogger, then deleted the post in Radio, then posted via Blogger and reloaded my desktop home page. Radio gave an error message of 'could not find table 00000040' which was the post ID of the post I had last deleted. If this happens, it seems that making another post from the desktop fixes the problem. 10:38:26 AM

Feature request: Filter hits from my content-- be it my radio desktop or links included in my content-- to itself from the referer log. The referer log has proven to be incredibly valuable. If I ever do move to hosting my weblogs on my own equipment (a 30GB scratch space has a few possibilities above and beyond a 20mb scratch space), ensuring that I have the same referer functionality as offered by the userland server will be near the top of the todo list! 12:44:38 AM

Minor bug: The 'category name' -- i.e. "Radio Commentary" on this page -- at the top of the page is a hyperlink back to the user's home page. It would seem that it should either not be a hyperlink at all or should link to the category itself (maybe to the #top of the page? Of course, you are already AT the top of the page if you can click on it). Actually, what I would really like would be for the title line to not be a hyperlink at all. Instead, the 'Categories: ' line could be a dynamically generated list of categories that excludes the currently displayed category as well as any categories that are effectively "turned off". This all comes back around to an issue that has been previously [indirectly] documented in this category. Out of the box, categories in Radio are treated as second class citizens once published. That is, it is incredibly easy to create a category via either the Radio app (which links to a web page) or through the desktop preferences. However, once published, it takes a while to glean exactly where the category has been published and exactly what URL should be used to reference it. The first time I turned on a category and made a couple of postings-- during the 30 day trial period-- it was quite the frustrating experience in that I couldn't figure out where the posts went once upstreamed. Once I figured it out, it took me a couple of days longer to figure out the whole templating thing to the point where I could permanently have links to the categories. Of course, if I were to switch themes now, my category links would be blown away and I would have to start all over [well, not all over-- I would like to think I'm not nearly as ignorant about this Radio thing as I was two weeks ago]. Flogging the deceased equine: Categories don't exist in the blogging world outside of specific, proprietary per-product implementations. At least, I haven't seen evidence of categories in the various web service APIs that have been published so far. This hampers the use/growth of categories in that third party tools can't post/publish to a particular category without first posting, then editing the post in the Radio desktop to push it into the desired categories. 12:42:10 AM