wOOt! A new mini-feature and a bunch of annoying bug fixes makes for a sub-release of a pre-release of a beta release. Or Beta 2, for short. The bug fixes in the installers and some dialogs/version numbers was for my own benefit, but the mini-feature is a first shot at this bookmarklet stuff. This first cut works very similarly to the way the RSS Aggregator works: click a link and the test will appear in one of SharpMT’s text boxes… in theory. More on this in the article…
And after a 12 hour day at the office I just felt compelled to spend some quality time with a compiler. Made for a 17 hour coding day, truth be told, but I grabbed a hold of some good Geek Karma for a change and thought I’d abuse it for as long as I could!
Anyway, the bookmarklet stuff. It’s my understanding that if someone adds a URL to their web site that you – as the reader/blogger – want to click it and start a new post within SharpMT. If that’s correct, that’s what I’ve coded – sorta. If you create a link on a web page (or type it in a browser) as: sharpmt://Look at me! I’m some blog text! then that text will mystically appear in a new SharpMT document. It will get URL-Decoded on the way in, so you shouldn’t see any strange characters but, well, I don’t know for sure… international testing always behaves weirdly.
But that’s it – the new URL Prefix is self-registering on startup – but, I haven’t checked this out on FireFox or Mozilla or Netscape… that’s for y’all to find out for me! This is a beta after all…
Download: .NET Framework, version 2.0 – Beta 2 (required to run SharpMT 3)
Download SharpMT [3.0 Release]: EXE | MSI
View SharpMT FAQ: FAQ
so… Does it run on Tiger?
;) (you had to know that one was coming)
It would if Apple would support the .NET Framework and didn’t refuse to open up their OS a bit :)
Besides, Ecto already runs on the Mac (which was the inspiration for SharpMT since I used it when I had my PowerBook, back when it was Kung-Log).
Hi — Looking forward to bookmarklet, but these links don’t work.
Suppprts Word Press?
I dunno about WordPress – it might. I’d try SharpMT 2.6 first, since it’s using the same communication methods.
Mark – Um, could you be a little less descriptive? I’ll check again… I had it working the night I posted the entry and it’s pretty simple to set up…
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean that the bookmarklet doesn’t work. I meant that the links here to the .exe and .msi files don’t work! I get a 404 error if I click, or “this link could not be found” if I right click/save link as.
Sorry again for being vague.
Oops – THOSE links! Sorry about that – they’re fixed now!
Still the best blog tool there is, glad to see your still working on it. One funny thing about this beta: about half the time, it puts up the post twice, and once it posted the same thing three times. There’s no consistent pattern for when this happens. This is on typepad.
And the “sharpmt:” protocol isn’t registered for Firefox, so can’t do anything with the bookmarklet, but that’s no big deal.
Thanks for being so responsive.
Multi-posts? That’s odd. Very odd. I haven’t seen that happen at all yet!
As to Firefox, sorta sucks, that. I guess they register their own types somewhere else in the registry or in a file somewhere… that’s dumb, but such is life – guess I’ll have to install a copy before Whidbey ships :)
Lemme know if a repro case comes around with the posting – THAT’s gotta be annoying…
I get the multi-posts as well. It happens when I have more than one draft open at the same time. If I post one of them, it’ll post it for every draft that I have open at the time.
Oh crap. OK. Sounds like the Post is calling Post All by mistake or something…
Just a quick question, if y’all remember: are you using the toolbar, the menu, or the keyboard shortcut when you’re posting?
(Strangely enough, I remember testing single posting with one draft open and I remember testing multi-posting with multiple drafts open, but I don’t remember trying a single post with multiple drafts open… I must have had that scenario at some point, but it’s probably only ONE of the controls that posts multi (and not all of them))
I’m using the toolbar.
One other thing I’ve noticed with the lastest build… The preview still doesn’t work for me.
And one more thing… The sharpmt: links only seem to work if I have SharpMT running with a blank document already loaded. If it’s not loaded already, it will start, but no document will be started and the text will not appear anywhere.
I’m still a litle confused as to how you intend this to be used. With most bookmarklets, you can highlight some text on a web page, right click and choose “Quick post” or something similar, and a new blog entry will be created that contains a link to the web page and the highlighted text.
OK on the toolbar – that’ll be where I start to look. And preview not working… that’s odd. I mean I’ve had one other complaint about that but that was never explained and I haven’t seen that happen. That’s something I’ll keep an eye on.
As to the bookmarklets, it beats the hell outta me. It’s feature I didn’t understand nor get a specific informational about… nor do I use them with any application. So I did some research and found that most bookmarklets are doing what I do: register a prefix type and allow that to be an “in” into the product. I figured if something sharpmt://blob was clicked on then the blob would be shoved into a document, much like the “Blog this” plugins that I include for RSS Bandit.
The fact that it doesn’t pop the text into a document unless it’s already open is something else I can look into. At this point, I consider all bugs to be mine (and not the beta Framework) since this has all been re-written.
I’ll take a peek this weekend.
I had hoped that possibly by installing the Beta 2 of VS2005 I’d resolve the preview problem, but it didn’t help.
Interestinly, what I see on the Preview tab are entries for the title, the category, the extended enty, and excerpt. All of those work just fine.
What’s missing is the main entry.
Ah! Sounds like I accidentally included *MY* custom previewHtml.htm file and not the default one! Look for previewHtml.htm in the SharpMT directory and change the “Main Section” to be:
br/
div id=”mtTitle”uTitle:/u $MTEntryTitle$/div
div id=”mtCategory”uCategory:/u $MTEntryCategory$/div
hr/
div id=”mtCategory”uEntry Body:/u/div
$MTEntryBody$
hr/
div id=”mtCategory”uExtended Entry:/u/div
$MTEntryMore$
hr/
div id=”mtCategory”uExcerpt:/u/div
$MTEntryExcerpt$
That HTML file is what is used by the Preview control and can be customized: it uses the same MT-based tags for substitutions.
Sorry about that!
That did it! I’m sorry I didn’t get you more information sooner!
Thanks!