for OmarS – A little history of my Ink Blogging Application (BLInk!)

Blink

Omar Shahine, in my comments, says “tell me more…”. So with the presumption that he hasn’t read my blog previously…here’s a little history.

On my dotnetweblog check my tablet category. You will see that I’ve been writing some business applications for a tablet as well as playing with the general features and also trying to push for a little more developer interaction from Microsoft (heh).

At PDC, I took furious notes at the keynotes in ink using Journal and posted them immediately up to my blog:

here, here, here and here.

Although it was very satisfying to just take the notes and post them, I was very frustrated with two things – my handwriting was atrocious and no links! Frankly, I can type just as quickly as I write (and a lot more legibly) so it didn’t make too much sense except I got to doodle a little and draw little smiley faces instead of the ol’ :-). I think there’s a lot of reasons to blog in ink but there is no reason not to leverage the handwriting recognition and what is a blog without links.

So this was on my mind. THen the tablet team put up inklog.com. At first glance, cool – blogging in ink. BUt truly, they had the same problem. Crappy handwriting and no links. It was easy to discover that the blogs were gifs.

I just kept thinking about it. How it would be logically and technically possible to implement it. One thing I though about a lot was placement. If I was drawing all over the page, I would basically need to do some real acrobatics to have as close a snapshot of that as possible. I’m still thinking about that. But in reality, it’s a blog. A blog is mostly a stream of conciousness – or an article. It is not a designed user interface that should require tables to place elements etc.

So this is what I came up with and you see the basic implementation in my two previous posts. I actually had not used any of the ink tools from the SDK yet because my business application was using Infragistics tools which are ink enabled.

So I started playing with them yesterday morning and that’s what I have come up with so far. The thing that held me up the most was editing html in Windows Forms. But I already talked about that in a previous post. I did find another tool by Carl Nolan (MS) on the Windows Forms site Control Gallery , but I’m sticking with Nikhil’s and thinking of extending it a little. I’m still thinking about where the implementation goes next and have figured out how I will handle posting without writing my own blog engine (absolutely not something I am interested in doing). So I can use it with dotText or dasBlog or whatever I want.

Hey, I just thought of a name – BLInk! 🙂

Blogging in INK from my Tablet (Part 1)

Blink

(NOTE: IMAGES ARE NOT CROSS-POSTING – PLEASE GO TO MY REAL BLOG TO SEE THIS STUFF!! www.julialermaninc.com/blog)

Before I post my tablet blog – I am just using the web based part of dasBlog right now to show you these two images. These are thumbnails, click for larger view. This is just my experimentation based on a lot of thinking over the last few weeks. I want to blog from the tablet but my handwriting is illegible and I need to link!

I know it is just a start, but the www.inklog.com that the tablet team did is really lacking so far — because all they are doing is grabbing their ink in gifs and posting it. Bad handwriting and no links is a huge problem. I could not get this out of my head so I had to do something. I’m sure they will be coming out with something a lot better than what I have done today!

I could not get far with the dhtmledit control (no documentation etc.) but found a great amount of work that Nikhil Kothari posted as a windows based html editing component. I have a lot more to do here. But I’m just happy that I was able to get pretty close today.

Then I will post the actual blog next.

     

bring on the MS bloggers

Blogging

Wow! Lots of “tests posts” on the dotnetweblogs yesterday. And did you notice who they were from? A whole bunch of folks from Microsoft. That’s pretty cool that this is where they want to be and it says a lot about this blogsite as well as the great tool that Scott has built.

This morning when I opened up Sharpreader and looked at the mainfeed from there. I have to say it was overwhelming. Because the authors are not exposed in the display of post titles, it is really hard to pick and choose what you want to look at when you just cannot look at them all. I actually just went elsewhere though I came back later and started digging through the posts.

I think I went “south”  (to my new blog) just in time. I don’t know why, when presented with so many new posts, someone would choose something of mine over something from a Microsoft developer/program manager/etc that is more likely to be full of useful technical content. I know that only people who are explicitly looking for my posts will ever read them anymore rather than the coolness of having someone discover something you wrote because they were looking through the main feed. But I knew that when I moved my weblog.

Have I stopped programming – what’s all this non tech posting??

Just Rambling

I’m feeling a little burned out. I got a taste of life before user group/ineta/blogging/etc when my friends would not let me near my computer for the entire long weekend of Thanksgiving. I finally got to hike on the parts of the Long Trail that are accessible from our back yard and also on Camels’ Hump which is a mere 4 mile drive to that trail head. So I’m trying to focus on my client work (though I have to get out the INETA Newsletter for December!!) and some non-technical things that have been catching my attention.

I finally noticed how many damned posts I wrote in November. It’s completely insane. But I had SO much information bubbling around in my head after PDC that I absolutely had to get it OUT of my head and blogging was the perfect outlet and better storage system than my poor brain. I think now I’m just feeling a little drained (err “empty headed”?) and now need to focus again on some of my client work. But then I look and see how much is going on with people’s experiments with Whidbey, Avalon, Longhorn, etc and am already terrified of getting stuck in the mud and falling behind. Eeek! It’s a pretty scary trap to fall into.

NY Times article profiles social software researcher Dana Boyd

Blogging

Danah Boyd, a completely hip chick – geek, sociologist,academic – who blogs over on misbehaving.net was profiled in a NY Times article this past Saturday. Danah is an academic who is very involved in social software and is putting her academic eye on phenomena like Friendster. NY Times says “Her irrepressible observations have made her a social-network guru for the programmers and venture capitalists who swarm around Friendster and its competitors.“ Not only is it very cool to see Danah in this type of spotlight, but it says a lot about what is going on in social software/blogging/etc. that profiles of this type are featured in non-technical venues. Though it was the technology section. Thanks to Liz Lawley for making sure we didn’t miss this.

My Cheerleading Category

Community Cheerleading

I like to point out achievements by others in our community, so I decided to just create a “Community Cheerleading” category.

There are a few that I have been holding on to. Here’s one

Jason Nadel mentioned on Sunday that he would be part of a performance at Carnegie Hall! That really impressed me. It’s easy to forget that we see only a slice of the lives of folks in our community and often our friend’s talents abound – even beyond their programming skills. Way cool Jason. I hope it was great fun! What an experience!

Some DasBlog Pointers

Blogging

In the comments of this post, I was asked a few questions about dasBlog administration. I had all of the same questions. Many were answered in the Message Boards of the DasBlog Community Workspace on GotDotNet. But to directly answer Martin and Steve’s Questions:

Steve: The trick for cross-posting to dotText is in the configuration. First check Clemens Vasters post about the version that first implements cross-posting and then in the config for the Cross Post Site (here are my examples)

hostname: weblogs.asp.net
endpoint: yourname/Services/Metablogapi.aspx (so I have “jlerman/services/met..)
api type: MetaWebLog

Martin: The permissions are explained at the very bottom of the Setup page on DasBlog.Net under the section “Post Installation Steps”.

I am still having to get used to the interface for administration of dasBlog. It’s very nice, but I was completely spoiled with dotText. Scott has been working on that application for such a long time and has had so many people to please so there were a lot more bells and whistles built in. Either way, I certainly have no time to do something like this myself and both applications are fantastic achievements and great contributions to the blogging community.

My New Weblog (Part II)

Blogging

Well, if you found your way here then you read part I over there.

Thanks to Clemens and Omar and everyone for creating dasBlog and answering my dumb questions and also thanks to Bill, a support guy at Alentus (my web host) who went above and beyond the call of duty. I asked for someone to look at the admin requirements for dasBlog to see if they were doable (since I can’t totally admin my site) and Bill just went ahead and installed dasBlog for my on my website! Another thanks to Stephen – because knowing that he can bare to do this outside of a database (he’s a database kinda guy) then I can handle it.

I have a little housekeeping to do — links, categories, etc. For now it’s the dasblog defaults.

I was getting kind of embarrassed at my name being almost at the top of the list of the dotnetweblogs — just because I have a lot to say. After 5 days away from my computer I almost wanted to just stop altogether anyway. So this seems to be a good solution for me.

We’ll see.