Something changed

There's not been any major developments on the Bleditor front, baring getting a treeware copy of Javascript: The Definitive Guide through work. It's a weighty tome, but it's the, erm, definitive guide. I've been playing with AIR a little bit more at work, but not as much as I'd like. This should change - we're dropping support for Windows 98, and by just targetting XP and above (in the Windows department) we can embrace the loveliness of AIR completely. The two projects I'm on right now are the last ones we're doing that will run on an eleven year old operating system... and we exhale.

Anyway, AIR is the way forward at work, and I'm an unashamed fan. So there.

But to the guts of this post. Something changed. Swurl.com got shut down thanks to some really nasty copyright hoopla occuring, and after a bit of searching I (and several other people I know) discovered storytlr.com. Storytlr is everything Swurl should've been but never achieved. It's so good that I decided to point www.twindx.co.uk to it - for all intents and purposes, my website is now run by storytlr. I'm shortly going to switch twindx.com to match twindx.co.uk and then my world will be completely unified thanks to the work of a pair of top-notch European coders.

Another test entry

Not progressed much over the past week or so. Finally got a problem I had with Google authentication sorted - apparently I had to register my sandbox URL with Google, something I could find absolutely no information on for absolutely ages - and then I went and found a reference to this page, elsewhere:

https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageDomains

... where I could register everything, allowing unfettered API access. (How two different installations of Firefox were managing to post using the sandboxed app though, no idea.) Nice of Google to make it so easy to find... by searching on an unrelated website.

No attempt has been made this week to do much more than get this access sorted. And this API access will be moot (m00t!) when it goes from online to AIR, but the first phase was always to get this working in a browser. Something I was desperate to do was get it all going on a WebKit based browser (I'm using Chrome right this second, the Google whore that I am) because AIR uses the same technology.

Next up is to try a different rich text editor (to try and sort out the XHTML output), and then start hitting the harder stuff - the management of the blog, and a more joined up authentication system. And make it look less like a mishmash of disparate bits of code written in snatched opportunities, and more like something I can be vaguely proudish (kinda) of.�I've laid my hands on a couple of highly recommended O'Reilly books to help me along the way - Javascript: The Definitive Guide and CSS: The Definitive Guide.

I'm such an exciting fella.

Coming up soon - my report about the Maker Faire up in Newcastle... but not now. Now I'm going home!

The continuing test cycle... continues

Just put the rich-text editor into Bleditor. It's the first third-party code (well, besides the API) I'm using. Need to make sure that it posts something sensible. So...

• this should be bold
• this should be italic
• and this should be a link to the editor's website

Hmmm. Well, immediately I can see that the XHTML support (which the author admits openly is flaky) is flaky. I may have to look at other editors; XHTML is important to me. I read virtually everything in an RSS feed reader and I'd like XHTML for that please. Hmmm.

But otherwise, I'm guessing (as I type this, not knowing for sure) that this has been a success.

Work continues on Bleditor

It's a terrible name, I know, but my Blogger editor is called Bleditor. It's Stephen Fry's fault (or should I say @stephenfry) for referring to his long, thoughtful blog posts as blessays. I couldn't help but stick the words together using the finest Fry glue.

I've got a terrible logo for it as well, once again ripping off inspired by the classic Sinclair logo:


At the moment there's no rich-text editor, or any sort of blog management. I need to get more used to DHTML (and find the time to work with it) to get the management in. Work continues, but not with speed.

When there's something I'm not utterly embarrassed about showing, all my odds and sods will turn up on the project page, but the functionality is so basic right now (not quite a million miles away from the polished AIR app I desire, but a good 900,000 miles away) that right now it's just my claim being staked.

Test entry

This is just a quick test. Coming from the earliest version of the Blogger editor project thing. Um, so there. Pardon me if I don't stay to chat, it's getting late...

Blog editor development diary thing

Okay, so my initial fumblings with the blog editor have failed. But I've learnt some important and interesting things along the way, which should make what I'm trying to do next much better. It means more work for me, but it should make it less like a slapped-together, hacked about bit of sample code and more like something that I'm happy to share.

Having spent a bit of time over the weekend looking at editor components, I've decide I'm going to use NicEdit as the basis for things. Although not as mature as other editor components like FCKeditor, Xinha, TinyMCE et al, it's small, fast and has a couple of neat features that I can use further along the development. Firstly, it has a plugin in development that produces XHTML code (something important to me - I want <em> and <strong> tags, not styled <span> tags) - it's not perfect, and the other editors have better ones, but it's incredibly lean and should be good enough. Secondly, and more importantly in the long run, it isn't restricted to replacing textarea boxes with its own textarea-like surface. It can make any <div> editable (or <span> or <p>), as you can see in this demo, and that would be ideal for snagging the CSS from a site so that the text you're editing appears exactly as it will when it's published. Real WYSIWYG, just like Live Writer does.

So, it's not quite back to the drawing board, because I've got an actual idea of how to develop things now (as opposed to just hacking away with a code machete).

The other thing I need to do is try and figure out how to get an AIR app to provide a valid API key to Google - but first things first, this is going to be an online editor. I'll tackle that further along the line.

A first test of my blog editor