Categories
Computers Programming Python

Release Announce- blogtool v1.1.0

I’ve just uploaded blogtool v1.1.0 to pypi.

The minor release number bump is due to switching the option parser library as well as adding the ability to process information from the standard input. The comment option has also been modified to take a couple of arguments.

I’ve added some spiffy, new web based documentation to help with getting up and running with blogtool. The documentation stuff was generated with the help of sphinx, a very cool tool that uses a different plain-text markup format that I’ll be exploring adding support for in blogtool.

Categories
Computers Notweet Programming Python

Announce- blogtool v1.0.1

I’ve released blogtool version 1.0.1 into the wild.

This is a bug fix version. It fixes an error in HTML output where tags like \<img> were not being properly closed. Also takes care of stray ‘&’ characters that need to be escaped.

It also fixes some bugs in the getpost option related to converting the post HTML into it’s markdown equivalent. Nested inline elements were not properly accounted for and escaping of a number of characters was also added.

Categories
Computers Programming Python

Release Announcement- blogtool

I wrote a blog client a couple years ago and have been developing it on and off ever since. One of the reasons I hadn’t done anything public with it is I needed to take the time to organize it appropriately for something like pypi.

I’ve finally taken those steps and have put it out into the wild. The source code is on github, here. I’ve also used python’s setuptools to publish it on pypi, here.

It works with my self-hosted WordPress blog and I’ve used it almost for all but a handful of the blog posts I’ve written on the blog, so I consider it reasonably well tested for those purposes. It won’t support all of WordPress features, but I plan on changing that as I migrate some of the functionality over to using more of the WordPress API. When I originally wrote blogtool, WordPress didn’t have its own API for posting, so that’s why that shortcoming exists.

There are a couple of nice features to blogtool that I thought I’d mention here. One, it uses python-markdown to mark-up post text. It’s proven very capable for my style of blogging, which is 90% text. It handles pictures as well, and I’ve added a little wrinkle for that purpose. Rather than supply a URL or some such for markdown's syntax, simply supply a file path to the picture. Then, blogtool will take care of the rest.

The other nice feature is that posts can be retrieved and edited from a blog. When retrieving, it will reformat the HTML into markdown style format. This is useful for editing comments as well as posts.

So, there it is. My first published code project.

Categories
Computers

BloGTK2

I’ve been searching for a decent blog client for Linux. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a go to client that everyone is fired up about. Scribefire seems to be the closest, but I don’t like Firefox on my system- it’s sluggish compared to Opera. From my poking around, it looks like Linux people tend to role their own in many cases which obviously reduces the demand. That said, I’ve downloaded and run QTM but it’s too temperamental. It gives me a lot of trouble posting and I haven’t taken the time to figure out why. I saw that BloGTK2 was available now, so I downloaded BloGTK2 last night and decided to try it.

First impression- holy crap there are TON of dependencies. I put it on my EEE and it seemed like I was installing Gnome in order to get it to run. But now that it’s up and running I’d say it has a lot going for it. The interface is intuitive enough that I didn’t have to refer to documentation. I did run into a bug using the account “auto-detect settings.” After I had setup my first account, the app crashed when I tried to use it to setup the second account. The feature worked when setting up my first account. I just manually setup the second account and I was able to post and refresh both accounts without issue. Which was good- I was expecting it to give me fits posting after the setup problems.