Charismatic Dog

I’m going to hit up the fair today and I’m angry enough to pop that weirdo gopher mascot of theirs right in the face. I tried to use my parking pass (that I pay way to much for each month) to come over to the St. Paul campus after a later lunch after a noon hour meeting to finish up work.

I ended up having to drive back to Minneapolis and made the mistake of getting on the State Fair shuttle instead of a campus shuttle. I ended up on the other side of the stinking fair from the campus and had to walk around it. It took me an hour which I’m now going to have to make up this weekend doing work that needs to be done by Monday. Rarrrrrr! Even after I move away from it that no good fair keeps on getting me down! Well, sadly enough, I’m still off to the fair. Catch you all later.

I realize that moving away from LJ has some consequences for our little interleaved community of friends. I’ve been using an RSS reader to access most of my friends journal/blog-whositry for a while now and haven’t much looked back at my “Friends Page” on livejournal in a long time, but I had been logging in to post comments there and it did provide a simple way to link back and forth. Still I’m happy in my little space here and have no intention of going back.

Along those lines: here is the source for the scripts I use to write these posts

New Post


tell application "SubEthaEdit"
activate
set toDay to (year of (current date) as integer) & (month of (current date) as integer) & (day of (current date) as integer)
set cleanDay to {}
repeat with eachItem in toDay
if eachItem is less than or equal to 10 then
set eachItem to (0 & eachItem) as string
else
set eachItem to eachItem as string
end if
set cleanDay to cleanDay & eachItem
end repeat
set toDay to cleanDay as string
set postTitle to text returned of (display dialog "Title?" buttons {"OK"} default button 1 default answer "")
set documentName to (toDay & "." & postTitle & ".html") as string
set name of (make new document) to documentName
set contents of document documentName to ""
set docLocation to (path to home folder) & "Documents:log:" & documentName as string
save document documentName in docLocation
end tell


Post to Log


property username : ""
property userPassword : ""

tell application "SubEthaEdit"
set postContent to contents of plain text of document of window 0 as string
try
tell application "http://etherbob.com/xmlrpc.php"

set postId to call xmlrpc {method name:"blogger.newPost", parameters:{"", "1", username, userPassword, postContent, true}}
end tell
--on error error_message
--display alert error_message
end try
try
set contents of plain text of document of window 0 to postContent & "

"
end try
end tell


If you register with log it should get you an account with the board that you can login to with the same password. It took me a while, but it works. The board is as simple as it gets. I may tweak it to match this site, but I need to get this site styled to my liking first anyhow so consider that a ways off. Feedback is good so go register and give the board a spin.

I’ve found a new way to do comments that would tie nicely with a new bulletin board I’m planning to add to the site (details at happypoet.com) . I miss the old DT board John had going and thought this would be a good way to get it back up and running again. This is going to take a while, but I’ll keep you posted as I work on it.

Alright boys and girls. I’m loosening up comments a tiny bit so you don’t have to register. It would still make me happy if you did, but I know it’s a pain and only for my site. I’m working on getting a bulletin board up and running in the style of John’s old dt board. I’ll see if I can have the two use the same auth system.

This is at least the start of progress. Maybe I’ll put my scripts up here for comment/edification. We’ll have to see how it’s going as time rolls on.

So what would I want from a blogging app if I were to roll my own?

Basic Features:

• Basic text editor with inline spell check
• Post Button

Realatively Easy

Advanced Features:

• Integrate with iPhoto (select images and upload)
• Insert HTML tags
• Import URLs
• Preview
• Manage/delete/update existing posts

Maybe I could spare myself reinventing a wheel some by using TextWrangler or Subethaedit as the editor and just call the scripts to roll it up and post (and grab the photos can’t forget the photos)

A little test of Journler (http://journler.phildow.net) as a blogging tool. Not as blog specific as Ecto or MarsEdit but certainly fancy. Lets see if it takes images….

Well that was quick. It seems to hand-off to iWeb, but I’m not using iWeb so… Still that’s a plus for being able to pull from the iLife apps.

On further review it doesn’t publish.

However my applescript test published every time even though it was dropping errors left and right.

Hell it published this one…

AppleScript Posting Test (Hello World!)

Man feels sick. Man has to work. Guess where Man is. If you guessed work you get a gold star from man.

Still work has been going well lately and despite the insinuation that I can’t be getting all that much done if I have time to post this, I’m actually getting a lot done.

Meanwhile I’ve posted this note to let the kids know what’s what over at lj. I’m not 100% about this whole wordpress eating up my blog thing, but it was certainly quick and painless to get setup over here, and I imagine I’ll have a nice personalized look and workflow going soon enough.

The title of this little endevour is no longer a pitiful sigh, but more or less  what it should have been all along “log”. I fully intend for it to be a happier read. We’ll see what we get.