Using Blogtk

This looks more promising that drivel or gnomeblog for posting, looks to have a nicer feature set too. =\ still not as good as scribefire though. Oh well.

Improving the functionality of some of my favorite apps

Just a few ideas I’ve been tossing around to improve the functionality of several applications I use frequently.

For one it would be nice if Drivel or Gnomeblog became more scribefire-like (except well, working that is), that is having categories, ability to write new pages, upload media, apply tags, etc.

The big thing though, which I would like, is the following functionality to be added to deskbar. Deskbar is allready god, it has replaced my start menu. In fact, I’ve even edited the icon to look like a “start button” for Ubuntu. However, there’s one problem, sometimes when you’re looking for a file, deskbar only really wants to do one thing with it. Lets say we have file foobar.py, well you could potentially want to launch it, or open it in gedit, or scribes, or your favorite text editor of choice. Or if it were a rather big python project, maybe you’d want to open it in an IDE of some sort. It would be nice if you could tell deskbar what you want to *do* with the file.

I propose something that uses a “commenting out” system: so /*gedit*/ foobar.py, or */open.folder*/ foobar.py, or conversely: foobar.py /*gedit*/ the commenting out prevents deskbar from trying to display and further search for a pattern match.

Yes I know you can *kind of* do this allready with deskbar: gedit /path/to/foobar.py. But this defeats the point of deskbar, namely not having to care where your files are actually located in your file tree.

Idea for a web anti-spam technique…

    You might have noticed on my contact page, that I use an image to show my email rather than any text (and I have the alt-attribute set up for an obfuscated text attribute for my email as well for the sight impaired or those using lynx or w3m). It pains me that this is really a sub-optimal arrangement. I mean, it avoids spam spiders well but it doesn’t allow a “click to mail me” feature.
    So I was thinking, Spam Poison is a very powerful anti-spam tool. In fact, it works too good. If you use their link, not expect any of the spiders to index your page at all. In fact, if it’s anywhere directly on your site, you’re likely to get blacklisted from their spiders. However, it gave me an Idea… It would be nice to turn my image there into a link to a separate web page, with the no follow attribute added to the link, and have the separate webpage contain both the spam-poison link, and an automatic script that executes a “mailto:” link.

Lets try this again: Scribefire (using CSS formatting rather than xhtml)

    Scribefire is a suprisingly light weight firefox exentsion that allows you to post to your blog (and even work offline) without opening your blog page. This is incredibly useful of course, especially if you’re doing a write-up about something.

    For instance, currently I’m rather pissed at how bloody impossible it is to find any source distribution of Metisse. Which is the window manager for Mandriva currently, Mandriva has gone out of their way to make Metisse impossible to find, so that you have to download and run their distro. This is despite the fact that Metisse is licensed under the GPL. As such of course they’re required to provide source code…but not necessarily make it easy to find.

Just seems kind of sneaky and underhanded if you ask me.

    Anyways, back to the functionality of scribe fire. It is literally one of the most responsive applications for firefox I have. It literally takes longer for my del.ici.ous tag-search to pop up than scribe fire. And scribe fire has a nicely featured editor in it. Additionally it actually has an access page to my del.ici.ous bookmarks. It has a note-book scratchpad for writing quick notes. A sorter for multiple blogs, category listing (and the ability to add new categories) History, and access to my pages.

    Also there are three view panes. A “word processor” view, an html data view, and finally a “this is how it will display as” view. It also allows me to add technorati tags, bookmark it to delicious, post as draft, and add trackback URLs.

    And the best part is? It’s a single intuitive interface that is more responsive and easier to use than WordPress’ interface. In fact, of all 3 of the applications I’ve allready listed, it is by far the most superior.

You can get it at: http://www.scribefire.com/

Oh, by the way? It supports extensions and themes to itself too

Test using Drivel

Evidently I was wrong, and Drivel *does* support WordPress, although its layout options are something to be desired. I think the formatting tools should be a visible toolbar rather than a collapsing one. Although…it may be primarily shorcut key driven…which is actually something of a plus. I’m going to check out it’s manual real quick…

Great…no listings of the keyboard shortcuts… I know that ctrl+b and crtl+I put the tags for italics and bold respectively., but it would be nice to have shortcuts for the other options. Like lists, insert links, insert images, etc. It would make drivel quite a bit more useful. Also additional features that would be nice:

• Increasing/decreasing font size.
• html/xhtml view and normal view
• WSIWYG bulleting and numbering
• Support for tables and object insertion, menu driven or toolbars

Allright, lets see how this shows up in my blog.

Test using gnome blog entry poster

Just a general test using the gnome blog entry poster…. Drivel does not seem to support word press at this time

IMified Test

This is just a test to see if IMified posts to my blog correctly, you can find IMified at http://www.imified.com/ it allows you to post to your blog via IM Clients…supposedly it’ll let me do it over gtalk/jabber too, but I couldn’t get that to work.