gnome-blog 0.8… Dangerously Close
It’s been quite some time since my last Boof post, mainly just because I’ve been crazy busy with classwork. But tonight I was taking a leisurely reading session of just whatever felt cool at the time to relax–drooling over the latest gnome goodies mentioned on Seth Nickell’s blog, when I stumbled again on gnome-blog. Which is now up to version 0.8.
You know, it’s getting even nicer. My project expectations for Boof really aren’t that advanced, and it seems that gnome-blog has just about everything I was looking for.
I’m posting from gnome-blog right now, and it’s definitely not what I’m looking for, for a couple of reasons.
First, it’s WYSIWYG. It’s nice, but it’s tons faster for me to actually just type Boof than it is for me to use an “Add Link” button. (In Seth’s defense though, he did make keyboard shortcuts for the Add Link… button that makes things pretty damned intuitive if you practice it.) I also like being able to make my own lists and stuff. But I don’t do anything fancy in any blog post, so maybe I could get used to WYSIWYG. I don’t know… jury is out.
Second, no category selections. I don’t know if this is something that’s difficult, but I just can’t live without categorizing my blog posts.
Finally, while it does have image support, it doesn’t appear that the image functionality is modularized away from the blog integration. I would really rather have an image upload system that would work with my Gallery2 based image gallery than to use any blog software based image storage system.
However… these are relatively minor things overall, which makes me wonder if maybe I should be looking at gnome-blog as an application that I might want to start hacking on. It’s done in python, it’s GTK, it’s got spell check (or at least he claims it does, I haven’t seen it work on this post yet), it has a modular blog software backend (already supporting BloggerAPI and WordPress). This really close to what I want.
It makes me wonder if maybe I could graft source based editing on as an option, using GtkSourceView for source editing. Then support for categories… then gnome-blog could be right up my alley for day to day blogging use.
Anyway, I’m excited to check it out. I’m always a big advocate of not reinventing the wheel, and it would be exciting to be a contributer to a gnome project. (Even something as small and trivial as a gnome applet for blog posting). Without getting the contributer angle all blown out of proportion, if Seth wouldn’t be interested in my changes, I’d be fine with that. I know I’d still love having my “perfect” blogging application.
Update: The majority of this post was done with gnome-blog 0.8, this update is me editing the entry in WordPress. First some irregularities:
- Empty Title — Yeah, I have no idea. For some reason the title of the blog was just the first line in the body, not a title at all. It was a simple cut and paste to fix… but wtf?
- Kind of gross HTML generation — I suppose this is to be expected from a WYSIWYG editor, but I had high hopes, especially when the widget doing the post rendering during the editing process seemed to be rigorously HTML anyway. Alas, each paragraph ended with
</p><p>all on the last line of the paragraph, followed by a single line break, followed by the next paragraph text. Almost like a whitespace removal of\n\nwith</p><p>\n. I think should be</p>\n\n<p>so that the post still looks damn good when one goes into the web interface to edit it.
These are little things, of course, so I don’t think there’s anything so far that would keep me from hacking on gnome-blog a little bit to see what’s up. It’s just definitely not ready for me to be using it as my primary blogging application.