Tag: kblogger

Categories
General blog entries

Bilbo, the new blogging program for KDE4

The experimental ebuild for Gentoo worked like a charm: I am typing this on Bilbo. The editor seems to Just Work ™, the previews are functioning (both rich text and the website preview) and the account creation worked out of the box.

The only thing that took some time to figure out is the fact that the auto-config option did not configure my site. In fact it started looking for a xmlrpc.php file to talk to, which results in a 404 as Joomla! does not have a file but rather a folder with that name. So after setting it to the correct location and switching to the metaWeblog API in the Advanced settings I hit ‘Fetch blog ID’ and voila, we are up and running.

Well, kind of: the plugin I use to provide the blog API on the site is incomplete. I have been tweaking it for months now, adding missing functions as I went. So when I wanted to select a category, I got an error stating that the XMLRPC function was not found.

After enabling the debug info on my server, I saw that Bilbo tried to access metaWeblog.getCategories – which is unimplemented in the original version of the plugin. So after adding the missing function, everything came to live and here we are…

Now if you excuse me, I have a virtual machine to dispose of as I can retire Windows Live Writer now ^^

Categories
Linux / Gentoo Linux

Kblogger coming to KDE 4.3

In a previous article I wrote about KBlogger and its nomination for a vapor-ware award. Most of the commits up until then seemed like KDE global search and replace changes, rather than actual work on the KBlogger application itself.

On the Kblogger page on kde-apps, an anouncement was made that the 3rd alpha was released in Febuari 2009. After installing and playing around for a bit, it felt more like a working blogging tool than it did before.

The downside was the numerous features which didn’t work:

  • Settings autodetection leaves you hanging and makes setting up a blog account more of a guess than anything else
  • If kwallet is not installed or activated (the service needs to run), kblogger crashes
  • If you try to read the category list on a Moveable Type API site, you get a ‘Method not supported’ error
  • Reading previously posted articles works (sort of) unless you have media attached in which case it crashes

The biggest problem is not the continuous crashing of the application but rather that I haven’t been able to post one article on any of my sites using Kblogger – it truely is an alpha quality application, if that.

It seems like the development is still going, even if the kde-apps page and homepage seem to be dead. Hopefully, they will work out the crashes and get it going in some form before KDE 4.3 ships out in June 2009.

Because of the current state this seems doubtful but according to the plans, it is still a part of KDE 4.3 PIM-libs – although it was on the schedule for 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2 as well.

In a desperate attempt to make the KDE 4.3 deadline, the current Kblogger feature plan seems to have dropped support for media management. This means that a lot of the current issues become a problem for later on and the core of the program (the blogging engine) is the only thing that needs to be fixed.

Lets hope this June we get a pleasant surprise but I am currently putting my money on KDE 4.4 or even KDE 4.5 as a release platform. On the bright side, perhaps the SVN versions become stable enough to use in the mean time.

On a side note, I am still looking for a blogging program for KDE 🙂

 

 

Categories
General blog entries

KBlogger moved to KDE 4.3

And yet another epic fail for KBlogger, the new blogging tool that was supposed to be in KDE 4.0. After KDE-PIM was not ready for the 4.0 launch, it was postponed to KDE 4.1 – understandable but as anyone running a blog and a PC using KDE4 knows, we don’t have any decent blogging tool on linux.

After an early alpha (which was a step in the right direction) is became very quiet around KBlogger. So when KDE 4.1 was released I was surprised to see the lack of info about the new blogging tool.

When I found KBlogger on the KDE 4.2 release schedule I sighed – another half year to wait on a decent replacement for Windows Live Writer (which is still – in my opinion – one of the best blogging tool out there, even when used in VirtualBox).

Now, at the dawn of 2009 and the coming of KDE 4.2 I found it weird that the beta of 4.2 lacked a preview of KBlogger.

I just found these mail conversations on the KDE mailing list pushing KBlogger to KDE 4.3…. which is supposed to come out end 2009. Once again a huge let down for the KDE fans.

Despite the statements that KDE 4 is feature complete it keeps lacking vital programs: KDE PIM has a screwed up Kitchsync support (which in itself is half broken if you ask me), power management just arrived in 4.2 (Powerdevil) and KBlogger is still not here (even though its core component KBlog – a WYSIWYG editor – is working pretty well for some time now). I am still using KDE 4.x but so far the thrill has become quiet the waiting game. Yay for open source I suppose…