eclecticism

September 26th, 2002 |

I’ve mentioned a couple times that I’ve been using EspressoBlog to make posts. In the process, I’ve come up with a few issues and ideas, and figured a post here (and TrackBack ping to Phil, since it works in EB now!) would work…

Issue: TrackBack gets turned off.

I keep the ‘allow pings’ option in Movable Type turned on for every post — it may not get utilized much, but hey, why not? However, posting from EB seems to set the TB flag to ‘off’, requiring me to go back into my post through the usual MT interface and turn it back on.
Issue: the ‘HTML Tags & Blog List’ drawer and the ‘TrackBack’ drawer cover each other.

This had me confused at first — I had the ‘…Blog List’ drawer open after logging into my blog, and then opened the ‘TrackBack’ drawer. Since they both slide out the right hand side of the window, and the ‘TrackBack’ drawer isn’t as wide as the ‘…Blog List’ drawer, at first I didn’t think the ‘TrackBack’ button had done anything. I clicked it again, and then I noticed the extra shadow effect that was appearing underneath the ‘…Blog List’ drawer. Oh! Closed the ‘…Blog List’ drawer, and viola, there was the ‘TrackBack’ drawer. Possible solutions: either put the ‘TrackBack’ drawer on the left side of the window (as that’s the side the button is on anyway), or see if there’s some way for one drawer to toggle the other — if one is open, then opening the other will close the first.
Issue: ‘Post (Don’t Publish!)’ seems to be broken.

At least, it didn’t work for this entry! I’m assuming it’s supposed to act as a ‘save as draft’ option, but after posting this entry and hitting my site, there was the entry, definitely not in draft status. Not a biggie in this instance, but possibly could be in other instances.
Idea: could EB automatically log into a specific blog (or at least a server)?

If I leave EB running this isn’t an issue, but if I quit and then re-launch it (for instance, due to logging out of my account on my ‘puter), then before I can post anything, I need to re-connect to my MT installation, then choose a specific blog. Since most people probably only ever need to connect to one server (and many probably only need to connect to one blog), could there be a ‘default server/default blog’ option(s) setting so that EB would automatically set up the connection upon startup?

I think that’s it for now…more as I think of them. Now, to post this, then hit the web-based log in to turn on TrackBack!

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6 Responses to “Thoughts on EspressoBlog”

Phil Ulrich Says:
September 27th, 2002 at 10:14 am

Hey,

I’ve tried to post this comment multiple times but it just doesn’t seem to work. It just sends me to mt-comments.cgi and a blank comment form. You might want to look into that while I’m looking into these issues.

I appreciate the feedback. I’ve thought about most of the issues concerned, and I have answers for…well…most of them. I might even be able to fix one or two.

TrackBack gets turned off. This is a limitation of the mt-xmlrpc.cgi script; Ben forgot to have it read the blog’s TrackBack default as well as comments default. It’s a known issue and due to be fixed in 2.5, last I heart, but until then, there’s a temporary fix. It involves adding one line to mt-xmlrpc.cgi.
1. Look for the line that reads: $entry->allow_comments($blog->allow_comments_default);
2. After it, add: $entry->allow_pings($blog->allow_pings_default);
Drawers covering one another. I think I’m going to have to remove one of the drawers and make it a dialog or something. See, this is actually an issue of the way Cocoa handles drawers. They only try to open on the side they’re supposed to - if they can’t (i.e., too close to one side of the screen), then they open on the opposite side. Try moving your EspressoBlog window further away from the right or left sides. I’m looking into a fix for this one, as I don’t like forcing a window to have to be in a particular spot in order to work.
Post (Don’t Publish) not working. Hm. I’ll look into it. I never use this, so that might be the problem.
Auto login. It wouldn’t be too terribly difficult to have EspressoBlog retrieve your blog list upon launching it if there’s a username and password saved. My only caveat is that this would probably slow down the program’s main window actually opening (i.e., it’d bounce in the Dock for a while, then there’d be a pause, then it would open the window with blog list in hand). I thought about caching blogs and categories, but I wondered how other people felt about that.