Ya know, this .NET architecture rules. Within an hour I’ve been able to create my first DLL – I’m usually more of an applications guy – that supports the IBlogExtension interface and is “seen” by SharpReader. Already. Within one hour. The question is where to go from here…
I’m way out of my element on this one: I see RSS readers as one application and Blog writers as another separate application. Not that I’m opposed to joining the two applications together – I just don’t see them that way. But thanks to feedback [and my own jobless-induced boredom] I’ve diddle a bit or two and now I’ve got the shell of a plug-in… I just don’t know what to do with it!
I know I can pull back the URL of the current article and the title – don’t know about the body or even if I should care. Do I launch SharpMT with a new draft and put it in the Entry Body? Or the Extended Entry field? Or do I just launch another instance of SharpMT and that’s it? Not sure… in fact I have no freakin’ clue! I know that I can create a new draft with it behind the scenes and launch it in #MT… I just don’t know what people want to see.
Hence, to all the people that want to see #MT as IBlogExtension-enabled, post a comment here as to what you’d like to see in future releases!
You’re awesome.
I’ll try it out straightaway
Sorry. Premature exuberance.
There seems to be differing approaches to this. Minimally, open SharpMT with the URL of the article encoded as an href, the title embedded – a la MoveableTypes bookmarklet.
I personally would like to see a template that the user could populate an HTML fragment (which I can’t post in a comment):
(a href=”$post.url”)$post.title(/a)
(i class=”quote”) $post.description (/i)
(substitute parens for angles)
The one interesting thing that I experienced when playing around with BlogTalker http://www.manicwave.com/blog/archives/000121.html was that depending on the blog reader and the internal transformation it performed on the XML before exposing it through the IBlogExtension call the contents may vary slightly.
First step though is just to push the title/url into a new SharpMT post.
thx
OK, here’s what I’ve got:
– A plug-in that reads in a TXT from the #MT “working” directory.
– Said TXT file has formatting options for the following tags: [RSSLINK], [RSSTITLE], and [RSSDESCRIPTION] (they can repeat so you can show and link to the same URL)
– Went activated it will open a new instance of #MT, with a new draft open, and this filled in format structure pre-filled.
– A setting in the #MT Options for where to put the resulting blurb from the RSS aggrigator: Entry Body, Extended Entry, Excerpt, Keywords, or Title.
How we feeling about that? If that suits, I think we’re ready for Beta 1 of 2.2.
Sounds good. I’d be willing to try it ASAP.
One other thing I’ve been thinking about:
Currently the options pane in #MT lets you set up the web server and cgi-bin path, credential etc for a single MT installation.
I’m facing a situation where I’d like to configure multiple MT installations (my public blog and an internal blog @ work).
Any plans or thoughts?
-jeff
OK, so I’ll get together a release tonight (since everyone else seems to be busy elsewhere!) and we’ll see how it goes.
As to multiple blogs, that topic has been covered many times over via the comments on the prior releases, including a possible workaround with XP’s multi-user support.