(OH NO! I think I reinstalled the wronng version now that I’m looking at the time of this post! Oops!)

A change in dasBlog pointed out a small problem with the Blink! off-line blogging tool I wrote two years ago. I originally wrote the app as an experiment in trying to make it fun to use on a TabletPC, but I have been using it to write almost all of my posts (98% of them not on a TabletPC) since then. There are a few minor itty bitty glitches that I will have to work out someday, but since there are probably 10 other people in the world using it…it gets low on the priority list.

Back to the dasBlog change. Pre 1.8 versions of dasBlog timestamped posts as they were posted, but as of 1.8, I noticed that all of my posts were getting the time 2 a.m. That was because I was only adding the current date to the post. So I modified the app to date and time stamp the post with the universal time. Now that I am on dasBlog 1.9 (happily), these posts are getting the proper creation time again.

The original Blink! app was a .NET 1.1 app, but when making this change, I recompiled it for .NET 2.0.

Get it here: www.thedatafarm.com/blink.aspx

Neil recieved his first copy a few weeks ago and shows us the flyer for the book here.

Posted from BLInk!

Since Movable Type supports the blogger and metaweblog apis, has anyone tested BLInk! against an MT blog? I would love to know the results.

Posted from BLInk!

I just updated the installer for BLInk! to include the new “get categories” feature.

Below is what the page looks like.

This post explains how it works.

Posted from BLInk!

A few people asked for a “get categories” feature for BLInk!. I have this implemented (not yet deployed) but have found something odd. I am testing against dasBlog and dotText.

With dasBlog, I can GetCategories from MetaWeblog and Blogger APIs. With dotText, it fails with the Blogger API. Further research explains that the Blogger API does not support GetCategories. So I can only guess that Clemens, Omar and others who worked on dasBlog did their own implementation somehow.

So I will have to disable the GetCategories feature for Blogger API all together.

Here’s how the feature will work.

• Category list exists in settings
• The Post UI will grab the categories from the settings.
• Post UI has a “Update Categories from Blog” button. Of course, this only works when you are online. This will referesh the categories list and the settings info.

Oh, and the categories will be listed alphabetically now.

Note that with dasBlog, if you add a category via settings and select it with your post, the categories list will get updated on your blog.

I will note when I update the installer with this feature.

Thanks to Don Kiely for helping me decide how to implement this.

Posted from BLInk!

Scott Reynolds is playing with BLInk! and came up with a few things none of us had ever done. One I need to fix quickly which is related to not entering your credentials in properly in the settings.

The others are just to feed his habits and make it the perfect blogging application. All great ideas for a wish list. I have to be careful because it’s very tempting to just focus on that program, but I need to do my real work, too!

What I love is that the whole program was designed for a tablet, but then I realized I could use it very handily on a desktop. So Scott was asking for keyboard shortcuts! LOL. BUt that tells me, it really is a flexible app if it has lots of features that make it very tablet friendly, but is that close to being a good blogging app. One thing that is affecting him is he has used other blogging tools. I haven’t. I just made it be what I wanted. But it will evolve. Of coures, first I owe Bliz some spell checking and apparently, I owe it to myself as well for my frequent typos!

Posted from BLInk!

Well, I have uploaded BLInk! to my website. Try it out. It’s free. It’s NOT just for tablets.

It’s not perfect but I think it’s pretty good and Bliz and Softwaremaker have been using it for a while.

www.thedatafarm.com/blink.aspx

I have been using it for a while.

It works with blogger api and metaweblog api apps such as .Text and dasBlog and many others.

Posted from BLInk!

Jim Blizzard is an organized guy. I would never have thought of enabling

• Bulleted
• Lists

or

1. Numbered
2. Lists

in BLInk! without him.

Posted from BLInk!

Bliz has kindly agreed to play around with BLInk for a bit. Hmm – spell checking hadn’t thought of it! 🙂

I appreciated all of  his nice comments but just wanted to clarify something.

One thing he misunderstood was about the API limitation on categories and titles. That is only for the Blogger API. I saw the common workaround but could not get it to work from my application and finally ditched it. However, the Metablog API absolutely supports titles and categories. I also use dasBlog, as does Bliz and am posting with the Metablog API from BLInk! with titles and categories. No problems at all with that. I don’t have to go back to my blog and add those things in after the fact.

.Text and dasBlog support both APIs.

Posted from BLInk!

I really like posting from my little off-line blogging application so I have installed it on my desktop. Even without using the ink features, it is way better than posting online.

That is a big win for me, since I kept working on the program until there was nothing in it that bugged me anymore and now I really like it! Now if only I could draw a little smiley face right here. 🙂

Posted from BLInk!