Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

Sadly, blogging APIs have never been the first-class citizens in blog engines. Sure, most people just use web interfaces to post to their blogs, but there are a lot of people who prefer desktop applications like BlogJet.

WordPress 2.6 is going to join Movable Type in discriminating against blog clients—they are going to disable XML-RPC APIs by default. Users will have to enable them manually. (Movable Type requires you to use special API key instead of your password.)

Daniel Jalkut, developer of MarsEdit, the excellent blog client for Mac OS X, has a good post on this in his blog:

In my opinion, an entire class of problems with WordPress (and other blogging systems) stems from this interface bifurcation. Establishing a single interface to WordPress would be comparable to the “pin code + card” interface at your bank. You pass through it by car, on foot, and even at the counter when they ask you to swipe before doing any transaction. If you’ve only got one “real API” that touches the critically important data, then you’ve only got one door to secure. Furthermore, when all views into the blog are required to share the same API, suddenly none of them is deprived of functionality that the other has. Imagine if the API that the web interface uses to access all features of a blog could be just as easily employed by MarsEdit or any other application you authorized. The end result would be lots less work “playing catch up” for the XMLRPC and Atom developers, and more time focusing on innovative and cool features for all blog users.

Read it now and come back.

Did I mention that most blogging clients (except for one) are made by tiny software companies, and that they spend a huge amount of time answering to support emails from their users who have various problems configuring their server software?

We do our best to make our software as easy to configure and use as possible: just enter your blog address, login, and password, and let the program do configuration as needed. Disabling API by default will throw this work away; it’s a way to increase the number of support requests, therefore, the amount of time we spend on support rather than perfecting our software.

Time to move on and develop other types of software? Or make our own blog engines? ;)

P.S. I have nothing against WordPress developers; actually they have one of the best implementations of the API, and I want to thank them for their work. However, I do not understand how disabling API will increase WordPress security.

Update: WordPress developers handled this issue with care: WP provides a meaningful error message and instructions on how to enable API. Thanks again, guys!

Today we released BlogJet 2.0.0.10. This is mostly a bug-fix release.

Here’s what we fixed:

• Fixed: bug with Flickr.
• Fixed: error when getting recent posts from Blogger blogs.
• Fixed: unable to upload images with ampersand in path or filename.
• Fixed other small issues.

BlogJet 2.0.0.10 is free upgrade for those who purchased BlogJet 2.0 or upgraded from previous versions. You can get it from our download page.

Customers switching from PCs to Macs ask us if we’re going to release BlogJet for Mac OS X. The answer is — we don’t have such plans at this time, sorry.

But if you’re looking for a BlogJet replacement for Mac OS X, look no futher than MarsEdit.

Daniel Jalkut, a fellow shareware developer, released a new major version of the great blog client for Mac (congrats!).

You can download a free trial version, and if you like it, it’s yours for $29.95.

For Windows users: stay tuned for the next version of BlogJet.

Watch and listen to what Steve Jobs and Bill Gates think about client applications vs. web applications

Continue reading: Are client applications still important? →

New feature!

Look: BlogJet is the 1^st blog client to include this super important feature. See? No?

Look here, again: 1^st.

Yeah, really — 1^st! Not 2^nd, 3^rd or 5673856^th. See? Bingo!

(Works automatically when “Use typographic characters” turned on.) Amazing, huh? We love typography!

OK, no more features for you. After all, it’s a bug-fix release.

Bug fixes

• Fixed not showing categories for TypePad and Movable Type blogs in Recent Posts window.
• Fixed errors with autodetection of dasBlog blogs.
• Fixed error when viewing statistics with no received posts.
• Fixed various Access Violations when getting posts from Blogger (recreate your account in BlogJet!)
• Fixed “TStruct.GetString(category Id)” error when getting posts from WordPress 2.1.
• Fixed error “Could not convert variant of type (OleStr)…” error when creating account for Community Server.
• Workaround for Community Server not returning full URLs of posts.
• Fixed not saving password after changing it.
• Fixed repeating punctuation marks (!, ?, etc.) after autoreplaced words.
• b2evolution API changed to Movable Type API (with file upload support). (Not complete, bugs submitted to b2evolution developers.)
• A few other small bug fixes…

We’re bug killers! Want us to kill your favorite bug? Let us know about it!

Download BlogJet 2.0.0.9 here.

• We quickly fixed a bug with new Blogger — sometimes you could get “400 Bad Request” error when publishing post. If this happens, please, download the updated version from http://www.blogjet.com/download/ (2.0.0.7) (We know — too early for a new release, but this is a major bug, so we decided to update it). It also fixes a few things with Community Server (now you can upload files without FTP) and Subtext.
• Blogger users will have to create new accounts in BlogJet to make it work with blogs migrated from the old Blogger.
• You can get rid of the feature that turns every “BlogJet” into link by deleting the rule in Tools > Auto Replace. (Actually, this supposed to serve as a demo of this feature.)
• A long requested feature to sort categories is actually available. Just click Refresh and — boom! — they are sorted.
• BlogJet 2.0 doesn’t start a new post after publishing (now publishing works like printing of documents in word processors.) We think it is a much better way, since you can immediately edit your post. However, if you still prefer the old behavior, click Tools > Preferences and select Start a new post after publishing.
• You can change the appearance of tags in your posts or hide them completely, since they are surrounded by DIVs with class .bjtags. More on this later.
• Those who received our newsletter has been prompted to reconfirm their subscription, since we moved the newsletter to a new platform. Only a small fraction of subscribers did this, so I guess a lot of you didn’t read the message down to the end . You can subscribe here: http://www.codingrobots.com/newsletter/ . And of course, we have an RSS feed.
• As promised, those who purchased BlogJet after October 30, received a free update. If you didn’t receve your key, please, let us know.
• About licenses:
  
  1) Single license allows you to use BlogJet on as many computers as you like provided that you are the only user. (For example, it’s OK to use it at home, at work, and on a laptop).
  
  2) Family pack license covers up to five members of your family.
  
• Thanks everyone for posting announcements on their blogs! (If you didn’t, what are you waiting for??? )