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BlogEd

BlogEd is a client side only Blog Editor put together as a quick hack by James Gosling. It is original in that all the editing a content creation (html and RSS files) is done on the client, and is then pushed to a thin server (a server with nothing more than a web server running) using ftp or ssh.

Work is going on to develop it into something more general, perhaps a client side ContentManagementApplications.

Community

BlogEdToDo: A changing list of things that need to be done.

Documentation

Basic Blog Editing

The documentation in BlogEd for this is very clear and simple. (To fill out anyway)

Authoring of Blogs on thick servers

BlogEd can now post entries and its attachments to a thick server such as snipsnap or MovableType using the MetaweblogAPI. This works but is more of a proof of concept phase.

To get it to work the following elements need to be set in the Properties dialog:

• metaWeblogPublish should be true
• blogId should be the name of the blog.
  • On snipsnap that is the path to the blog. The default is "start". But any snip that one creates with only "{weblog}" as a body can become a blog. The name of that snip is the blogId.
  • On Moveable Type this is deducible from looking at the front page of your blog. On my clean installation the first blogId was "1"
• loginId, passwd are obvious
• metaWeblogServer is the path to the xml-rpc server or script.
  • For snipsnap this is the snipsnap url followed by RPC2 (eg. http://localhost:8668/RPC2)
  • for the Movable Type it is the location of the mt-xmlrpc.cgi (eg.: http://localhost/~hjs/mtype/mt-xmlrpc.cgi)

Some problems with this link:

• It would be very nice to have it Atom enabled
• It does not work well (at all) with Wikis. Even if it did, the way BlogEd is set up currently, it would end up being very clumsy, as each wiki entry would require the creation of a new blog.
• It does not synchronise changes that may have been made independently to the server
• The blog file format is very clumsy and really got in the way of this implementation, resulting in a big and nasty hack.

In The Pipeline

GUI improvements

One gui improvement we are looking forward to is adding the usual button interface using all the new goodies from the JNDC libraries. Something like this is to be expected:

We should allow ourselves to fall back to a pure html mode or wiki mode, perhaps for advanced users.

Publishing to thick servers

BlogEd has allready been enhanced to use the MetaWeblog API to publish blogs to servers such as MovableType or blog/wiki combinations such as snipsnap. (Those two are the only ones that have been tested) Clearly the RESTful approach taken by Atom is much cleaner and more powerful and should be added as it stabilises as a priority to BlogEd. (The date for this is currently thought to be mid November 2004)

Improved RDF Data Format

Currently the BlogEd data format is a simple but binary and ad hoc format. This does not make it very easy to either debug the format or enhance it. Since a blog is a set of meta properties of an entry (who wrote it, in response to what it was written, on what date it was written, what was written) it seems natural to use the standard language for describing resources: RDF. A lot of work along these lines has allready been done, the data structure is nearly settled on, and the implementation phase has allready partly begun.

Merging with JNN^?

JNN is Java News Reader, also developed by James Gosling. As mentioned in ContentManagementApplications, a Blog Writer is going to be particularly interested in the thread preceeding his Entry addition, and any reply to his entry. He is certainly going to want to keep a copy of the context of the discussion as this could affect his position, and what he has put his name to. He will want to be allerted to these changes. A News Reader and a blog writer are therefore tools that should be cooperating tightly.

With the RDF data format in place it will be very easy to place all news stories of interest to the reader into one database, the same database as the database containing the stories written by the user himself. This will make it possible for the author to search quickly across all stories he has published or referencing his writing. Since we are placing content into an RDF database these stories will be annotable using any other RDF ontology.

WikiEd^?

Editing a Blog is not very far from editing a Wiki. Taking care to make the Entry the key component of a wiki as shown by the following UML diagram that attempts to represent the Atom data structure:

it should be clear that a wiki is not much more than a set of blogs. If WikiEd^? is not that far then one may ask what more is needed to get to a more general ContentManagementApplications.

Bloging from mobile devices

Bloging should be accessble from any device. One should be able to take a picture from one's cell phone, add some comments to it and publish it whilst on the road on a bicycle trip for example. James Gosling suggested having an e-mail interface to BlogEd, a technique used by a few other blogging software. Would it also be possible to post an entry directly to the server?

Usability improvements

These are best found by using BlogEd to edit a blog.

I have found that a preview button that creates a local preview of the blog to have helped me speed up the writing of my entries dramatically. This preview currently makes a full copy of the blog available locally. Perhaps a preview of the currently written entry would have been enough...

-- HenryStory - 23 Jul 2004