More Blogging Software Experimentation
Once again I found myself wandering around the net when I stumbled upon BloGTK another blogging client. This particular client seems to be even closer to what I had in mind when I started to consider writing Boof.
This time I’ve (thankfully) found less of a WYSIWYG interface and instead found something much more “geek like” that I can edit the source code directly. BloGTK has spell checking, is able to save and open blog entries, can edit entries that are already submitted, has some basic preview functionality, and generally looks pretty good.
Looking at the goals and constraints that I have written on the Boof project page BloGTK is only short in a couple areas:
- Syntax Highlighting
- Gallery Support
- Plug-in System?
- Support for multiple categories on a single post.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that the codebase is completely modular already because I haven’t really looked. Syntax highlighting is a matter of getting a gtksourceview element in there. Gallery support would be much more of a doosey.
At this point I’m quite curious if I should be looking at starting a new desktop blogging project, or if I should be contributing to someone else’s project to get the functionality that I want.
Right now I’m undecided. This program is very close to what I’m going for.
Update: This entire post, including this after-the-fact update, have all been submitted with BloGTK. I’m quite impressed. This would definitely be the first one of the desktop blogging applications that has behaved as-desired on the first try!
I’m definitely going to be downloading the source to this application and checking it out.
March 28th, 2005 at 10:17 pm
Thanks for the compliments!
The code to BloGTK is a bit rough. And by rough I mean “I have no idea what I was thinking when I coded that.” The next version may end being a full rewrite that makes things much more modular than the old version.
I’m working on getting AtomAPI support in BloGTK, but the AtomAPI is an ever-moving target. Already you have to essentially write two versions of any Atom interface, one for MovableType/TypePad and one for Blogger. It’s a real mess right now, which makes it a pain for developers.
On the other hand, implementing the XML-RPC based APIs for Python is pretty straightforward, which means that WordPress, DruPal, and the others are much easier. And of course, PyGTK is an exceptionally easy way of creating UIs without much hassle - and it’s much better than it was when I started.
Good luck on Boof, and feel free to hack apart the BloGTK sourcecode to help figure out what (not) to do!