Nightly builds was not exactly what I had in mind, but there’s been a lot of good things – and a couple of bad things – that have caused me to post what is yet another Beta: Beta 5. I spent a good part of the day working with Jeremy‘s Apache based server and after a few hours of denting my desk with my forehead, I have fixed that problem. Right now the only outstanding thing that I know of is the Registry issue that seems to happen on non-XP machines, and that’s things aren’t being saved in the Registry. More on that later in the post – with tonight’s build notes – and you can download Beta 5 here.
First, what’s still broken: The registry. I have no idea as to why it works on Windows XP and not Windows 2000. It’s the same code – and what’s worse, it’s the right code according to all the doc’s I’ve found – so if it’s not working, I fear it might be a Windows 2000 issue. I did put in a couple more “write to registry” settings in a couple of different places, rather than waiting to the end of the app to save the settings. I’ll continue to work on this.
Now what’s fixed: Posting to Apache servers. The more I see of Apache the less I like it. Today’s Apache problem comes from their implementation of XML parsing within MT. Because items like Entry Body can have embedded HTML within it, it would make any XML parser yonk on itself and quite rightfully so. <br> is allowed in HTML/SGML but it breaks XML-RPC/XML. That alone should speak volumes to what could happen wit this type of post. So I put all of the Entry-type fields in an XML escape tag – <![CDATA[non-XML data]]> – and my IIS server ate it up and proclaimed it good. So did other people’s IIS server. Not Apache, though! On an Apache server it made a new entry and left all of the Entry-type fields blank. The wankers. SharpMT now builds a temporary file on the local drive, reads it back in, and posts that to the server. I opted to go this way rather than trying to encode the “five forbidden XML characters” that I know about. I do delete the temp XML file when I post to the server, but who knows when one might stick around. Just FYI.
There was also a problem with the AddURL’s dialog where it caused a crash if there were too many items in the drop down. This has been fixed. I also cleaned up some of the initial painting/sizing of the main window on launching.
And now for what’s new: Tweaked the Options dialog a bit – this from user’s feedback. Also added a checkbox there that allows SharpMT to minimize to the system tray, also per user requests. Tracing has been beefed up a bit – at least it’s a bit easier to deal with. Still needs to be copy and pasted to notepad, but at least it’s not word wrapping anymore!
Also from user’s requests: There are now splitter bars between the Draft and Link List Views and details windows. FYI, an undocumented feature: if you want to “drill down” on the details windows, double-click them. The Blog Links list now has a right mouse click menu option for opening that link in your local explorer – a small thing for an offline Blog writer, but useful. Another undocumented feature. Once you install and run Beta 5 for the first time, in the registry you’ll find a “UrlPrefix” string value. If you want something other than http:// to appear as the default in the Add URL’s drop down, close SharpMT, change this value, and restart. Couldn’t come up with a decent UI for this, so it’ll stay undocumented.
Lastly, the version number has been changed to match the Beta number.
There’s a local launch event for Windows 2003 Server – anti-climatic, I know, but it’s at Foxwoods Casino in CT, so I’m all for it! – so no, there will probably not be a Beta 6 before next week… at least that’s the plan.
Thanks for all the wonderful efforts.
Any chance of getting a file upload dialog sometime? Maybe as a Donationware feature like spellchecking? That is the Only thing missing to make this a complete MT web interface replacement for me!
FYI, I tried to ping this entry from within SharpMT and it didn’t work.
Also I am sorry for bunging up your comments but I just thought of another suggestion. Add a Target field to the URL Link Dialog. Lots of MT users have specific target like _blank added to thier links and a dropsown or text field would be a nice feature.
Anyway, Guess I’ll go ping from inside MT so You get the proper trackback.
Thanks again, As soon as I get my paycheck you can expect a donation from me!
More on SharpMT
I just cannot gush over SharpMT enough. The developer is very responsive to user feedback, and is pushing out the betas more like nightly builds. Trackbacks, keywords, and a default settings dialog have all been added. He is working on adding spellchec…
The URL tool does not allow a paste. Nice start and If you get a spell checker built in it will become pretty popular
Any idea what could cause this error, I’m sure my cgi-bin bath is correct:
The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occured on a receive.
Please verify that your CGI-BIN Path is correct!
My site is hosted on an Apache server, my computer is Windows XP. I tried the change to the HTTP.pm file, but that still didn’t help.
Thanks!
@Doc – Upload? Never planned on it, but I can look into it. As for Spell Checking, it’s a one size fits all. If I got enough cash together to add spell checking, everyone benefits. I’ve done Shareware software for about 8 years now – I don’t want to go through a two-version release, ever. If was going to do that, I would have charged from day 1 :) As to the Pings, I tested that by making sure they showed up in MT, but I don’t know that they’re “working” correctly – can you email me what you put into the field?
@GeekNews – Not sure what you mean by pasting into the URL box… I just pasted the URL from this page into the combo box, so that was working – email me if there’s something on there that’s not working… I’ll see what I can do for it.
@Harldz – That error message usually comes from MT when there’s a problem. Please email me your MT version and what your two settings are for host name and CGI-BIN directory… I can hit the mt-xmlrpc.cgi script without a valid loging; it will just tell me I have no access but it will also tell me that it’s the correct path.
Would there be any advantage to placing the version number in the title of the download file?
I’m sure there would be no reason for anyone to keep old betas around, but a file called “sharpmt_v1b5.exe” might assure testers we had the most current file.
Off to test it right now!
SharpMT worked like a charm when it came to setup, downloading list of blogs, categories etc. Still, I created a draft & tried to post it but SharpMT got stuck saying “Posting new entry…” for 5+ minutes now. No posting showing up yet on the blog…
Tips: including a “Stop” button to stop posting if it gets stuck (or have some kind of timeout; OR doing post “replication” in the background, allowing user to edit other posts etc in the mean time?
Great news!
My configuration settings were saved this time in Win2K!
Whatever you did differently worked!
Oh I forgot to mention that when I format (bold, italic, etc) or make text a URL, there is no “un-do” (aka CTRL+Z).
Thanks for the “tray” option and the URL prefix!
Hmm. Previous comment showed up twice despite your webserver giving me a “Permission denied” the first time. Ah well…
I’m using MT 2.21 btw; if it makes a difference to SharpMT…?
Jeez – ya leave for a few hours to go scope out VS.NET 2003 (my copy is still backordered) and play some Pai-Gow Poker and ya get a bunch of message :)
@Promo – Yer shittin’ me, right? Now it’s saving settings? Bah! I hate bugs that don’t make scene, even if they do get fixed. As to the file name, I thought about doing that, but having the same name works well for sites like NeoWin and Tucows that offer a download link for it – that way the refered user always gets the latest. No worries about the features – they were good add ons!
@Anders – Sucks that it got stuck like that… not sure why it would, either. I know that from my own posts, that easily takes the longest. Once the post is done the Categories setting and Rebuilding of the index pages seem to go quickly. If you can, please turn on the Tracing window and see if there’s any activity on the socket layers. As to shutting down the UI while posting, that usually saves me stress in the long run – there’s always the chance that a Draft could get delete by accident and cause posting problems or somet other snafu’s. Also, as an FYI, remember that SharpMT is just a “poster” – you can edit drafts, but if you post a draft twice, you’ll get two entries in the blog…
I’ll clean up that extra comment, too – blogging is more of a “process” than a science, in my experience.
@Anders – Just saw the comment on MT 2.21. I have no idea what that would mean – in all my docs I’ve claimed support for 2.63 because that’s what I’m running against, but I have no idea when they added XML-RPC support and to what level it was developed at 2.21.