There’s a new build of Windows Live Writer available now from Microsoft.  This version includes a very nifty tagging system as shown in the screenshot on the right. It works really well with BlogEngine.Net, but you need to have the latest build installed in order to see this functionality. One thing I have noticed is that I finally have the complete set of tags available to me from Live Writer.  Before now, when I clicked on the “Tag” button I was seeing only the tags that had passed the minimum post threshold specified for display in the blog.  So, if you can’t see it in the tag list on the left then I can’t see it in the software.  Its a minor irritation that requires me to open the blog in order to post to it, which is of course what this software is trying to get you away from. Now I can at least view them by typing the first few letters of the word.  Its not perfect, but its certainly getting there.  So, bitching about BlogEngine.Net aside, lets get back to Live Writer.

Other improvements are the ability to upload an entire Windows Live Photo album.  I’ve not used Live Photos much, as it has one major disadvantage.  There’s a cap on the limit you can upload in a month.  I reached it after having uploaded some photos and immediately stopped using the service. I honestly couldn’t be arsed fucking around with something that is so limited.  I would pay for extra space and an unlimited upload quote, but it wasn’t available.  Flickr however is available, and right now too.  I am in the process of uploading all my photos there, but it is very slow.  I have about thirty gigabytes in roughly ten thousand photos that I want to store there, and I’ll organise and share some of them as soon as they are all uploaded.

Windows Live Writer 2009: Release Candidate - Windows Live

Carrying on from last night, I was going to tell you about Wave 3 of Windows Live Writer.  Microsoft has recently released a whole slew of their Live apps.  Writer and Photo Gallery are both programs that I use on a regular basis, and I’ll give you a quick overview of Writer here.  Writer is a cut-down word processing package that is used only to create and edit blog posts.  It does this with a range of different user interface styles, and it works with your blog’s theme to handle styles.

There are three different modes of editing and writing posts – one each with and without your blog’s theme, and one raw mode.  Editing and composing with your theme applied is as close as you can get to WYSIWYG composition as I have ever seen.  The fonts are rendered as you would see them on your web page, and the HTML elements are mostly perfect.  I say mostly only because some of the options aren’t completely compatible with my theme.  For example if you right align a paragraph then you end up with a perfectly normal html <p align=”right”> tag at the start of the paragraph.  However, that doesn’t work properly with XHTML where all of the decorative layout is done using CSS.  I could potentially change the mark-up to transitional XHTML 1.0, but that seems a little excessive just to me.  In all fairness I don’t ever actually align my paragraphs to the right anyway, so it really makes no difference. 

Where there is a slight issue that does make a difference though is in how images are posted.  You can insert pictures into your blog posts and they work perfectly.  Writer however doesn’t allow easy justification of those images.  For example if I want to align an image to the right then it automatically adds align=”right” to the image tag and that isn’t XHTML 1.1 compatible.  So I have to manually edit the mark-up before posting to use my method of getting an image to align on the right – I add class=”photoright” to the tag and strip out the alignment before posting.  Its clumsy but it works.  Writer also uploads a couple of different versions of the images to your blog.  So, if you click on the image to the right of this paragraph, you will see a larger version of the same image.  That one will be the original sized screen capture that I took, while you only see a small thumbnail on this page.  It saves bandwidth and makes it easier for the author as you don’t need to resize images manually before posting them to your blog. That one feature was enough to get me to switch in the first place, and it has only gotten better over the subsequent versions.

One of the neater functions of Writer is the Preview Mode.  This mode takes your post and puts it into the context of the rest of your blog as you would see it if you had browsed to it.  I’d do a screenshot but there’s no point really.  If you’re reading this post through a web browser as opposed to an RSS reader then you’d see exactly what I see when looking at this post in Preview Mode. There’s a bunch of other fun things in there too, such as an on-screen word-counter for those who get paid by the word, and the ability to save drafts either locally or straight to a blog (if that’s supported).  Naturally enough you can also embed a variety of objects in a blog post. Writer makes it easy to embed images, maps, Technorati tags and videos of many different formats.  It is also extensible with plug ins that can be downloaded or written from scratch should you have the desire.

All in all I have to say that its well worth taking a look at.  The newest version, in addition to being slightly faster and looking better in Windows, is also much more robust. Despite my previous reports about having technical problems getting it setup correctly with BlogEngine.Net, once I had it up and running the issues evaporated.  I have also been in contact with someone from Microsoft who has assured me that they have the problem fixed and will post a hot fix soon.

I interviewed recently for a really interesting job.  The position is ostensibly called “Web Architect” which doesn’t tell you much until you realise that some of it is about putting web solutions together for a company and specifying the technologies used.  There’s an element of coding too, some administration, some presentation and some marketing.  All in all it struck me as perfect, and I want it.  There might be another interview soon, so we shall see how it pans out.

During the 30 or so minutes I took me to write the previous paragraph I encountered some issues.  Firstly, the latest version of Windows Live Writer comes with an interesting bug in it.  It is a late beta, so that’s pretty much expected.  However, this is one that I have never seen before with this product, and it only happens under a specific set of circumstances.  Your blog must be using the MetaWeblog API as an interface, and you must not have upgraded this version from a previous build.  When you try and detect the blog, it will take you through the entire process before throwing an exception.  I haven’t gone to the trouble of running a trace on the XML conversation, and to be honest I think this error happens in the code after the conversation is complete.  I was talking to Joe Cheng who works on the Live Writer team at Microsoft, and he said they had found the bug and would release a patch soon.  Can’t give you an exact timeframe on that though.  So, if you are thinking of installing the latest build of Live Writer (the “Wave3” betas) and use BlogEngine.Net then make sure that you upgrade rather than fresh installing. 

The second issue was that the ping services tab in BlogEngine.Net was all of a sudden empty of entries.  I don’t know why, but they had all been erased.  While trying to update them, I discovered a problem with the identity field for the table that holds the ping servers – it was setup incorrectly.  I think something happened when I copied the data from my dev to the live server a few weeks back, but because I was only posting from Live Writer I hadn’t noticed it.  At some point I have to draw up a smoke test for BlogEngine.Net that goes through testing for ALL of the functions before rolling out live.  Anyway, in addition to the table issue, I had to go and get a new list of ping servers as I noticed that a few have gone inactive.  One thing that I noticed is that Microsoft still don’t have one for their live search, though they do allow submission of a site map.  However, the transaction causes a nicely handled exception which dumps out the results to a log file.  Anyway, here is the new list of ping servers I have gathered:

http://api.moreover.com/rpc2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rpc2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/rpc2
http://rpc.pingthesemanticweb.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.twingly.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/rpc2
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://www.bloglines.com/ping

If it seems like I haven’t posted anything here in a very long time, then that’d be a fair assessment.  There’s no real excuse, just a bunch of little things have gotten in the way.  So, instead of a single theme for this post, there’s going to be a bunch of them.  The biggest news at the moment, apart from the financial crisis in the US is of course the death of Rick Wright.  If you don’t know who that is, then shame on you.  Rick Wright was the keyboardist for Pink Floyd, and responsible in a very large part for their unique sound.  He died on Tuesday after a brief fight with cancer.  There have been many things said about his untimely death around the world and the web, and I don’t feel eloquent enough to add anything new.  Suffice to say that his musical brilliance will be missed dearly.

I had to re-install Windows on my laptop last week.  Vista was getting a little slow as a result of all the crap I had installed on it. So I backed up the last of the bits and formatted it a couple of days ago.  Everything is all back up now, though I still need to install some minor apps.  I posted a few weeks ago about my search for a new password(s) and I think I have a viable solution.  There’s an open source app called KeyPass Password Safe that manages passwords, and also has a fairly comprehensive password generator built into it.  It allows me to generate very random passwords with as many characters as I like, in addition to specifying the characters that can be used.  So, I could generate one with upper and lower case letters, and then another which is the same but with added symbols or extended ANSI characters. They’d look like dkBaQ3iDwAlAKnmqV5Df, or 0h-y_PiWVaeKn3H3LTkO or even 5^Zl-uexa*\]YaD:jKFJ)"U%F.Y(7+bE$nxs<zN".  This makes it very useful for web stuff, as there are so many different combinations of what can and can’t be used on different sites.  Portability is something I’m still working though.  For now, I have the app installed on two PCs and simply synchronise the databases if I make a change.  However, there’s an option to synchronise over the web which might be a good idea.  The program will also run from a USB key, so it is portable.  Nicely enough, there source is completely open, so the trust issues inherent to software like this don’t exist should you decide to crack open the code.   Although it is a Windows program, there’s a Mac port, and if you have Mono installed it seems to mostly work on Linux.

There are a bunch of new builds of the Windows Live apps were released today into open beta testing.  I haven’t done much with them so far, but it should be noted that the latest build of Windows Live Writer doesn’t work with BlogEngine.Net.  I’ve mailed someone about it and been told that there’s a hot fix in the pipeline for BL.E users.  Very unfortunately the crash occurs when trying to detect the style of the blog, so you never actually get a chance to get in and create a post with it.  I’ll update more when my contact in Microsoft gets back to me. I had some nice screenshots to go along with this post, but of course I can’t actually use Windows Live Writer to compose in so they had to be removed.  The alternative would be to hand-resize the images and then manually upload them.  Damn this program makes blogging too damn easy.

My sister arrives here in a couple of days.  We had a friend from London over to stay last weekend too, so everything is a little chaotic at the moment.   Emma is going to be here for the beginning of the Oktoberfest, though I'm still not sure if we can get in anywhere.  We may have to take her there during the day and sit outside the tents if things keep on going as they are right now.  It seems that you have to book tickets for Oktoberfest well over a year in advence. To add a whole bunch of interestingness to the mix I have an interview tomorrow (now today) for a job that appears to be perfect.  Its a combination of web development, product management and internal marketing all rolled into one package called “Senior Web Architect”, and the more I think about it, the more I want it.  It has all of the functions I’m looking for in an “ideal” job – though of course I have no idea how the paper description would actually relate to the real job.  I guess I’ll find out tomorrow eh?

Microsoft have just released a new beta build of Windows Live Writer.  Changes include updates to image handling (there is now lightbox support) and some UI / editing changes.  Most of the difference is under the hood though.

Writer Zone: Technical Preview: Now Available for Download

According to a recent post on ReadWriteWeb, a couple of Gartner analysts have pronounced the death of Windows.  Its an interesting read, but not anything I think of relevance to us in the real world. I believe this is the fourth or fifth or millionth time that the desktop has been pronounced dead, and yet it still lives on.  There's an awful lot to be said for being in an office where your connection speeds are high enough that you would predict the death of the desktop in favour of internet apps (or cloud computing as we call it these days). The thing is, outside of our cosy existence with fast broadband links, there's a lot of reason why it just doesn't work. 

When I work on entries for my blog, I do them offline.  I used use notepad, and while that served me well for many years, I have started to use Windows Live Writer more and more.  It allows me to write a post for this blog offline and do it in a WYSIWYG manner.  I'm sure we have a more fashionable name for that too.  Anyway, there's no reason why I couldn't do this online with the exception for my fear of a lost connection.  While I was using the online editing page of my blog for posting, if my network went down then I would have lost this post.  However, now I don't worry about it anymore.  Actually there's a three hour gap between the second last and last sentences.  Try that with an online service. Sure, some of them could handle it, but not all.

Next other reason is the interface. If I should accidentally close this window, it will prompt me to save my work before exiting.  My browser won't do that.  It also won't present me with the slick experience I get with this offline app.  Its not that it can't, its just that it doesn't.  Most of the web apps I have seen where there is a "user input" type area tend to suffer a little from lack of love.  They tend to be functional rather than beautiful.  Me, I like the beauty.  I have a PC that is powerful enough to be able to present me with beautiful things, so why the hell shouldn't I use it to do just that?  To hell with web-apps and their inherent minimalist approach to doing things.  I want the fat client experience!

There's a new version of Windows Live Writer, and I like it so far.  They have provided the ability for posts to be made with XHTML as well as HTML.  I don't know yet how this is going to play with my blog system, but we're getting very close to the point where I will take apart the interfaces to the database and replace them with something much more standard.  As a general rule, I display new paragraphs with <br/> as opposed to <p>...</p>.  There's no reason why this has to continue now - HTML has come a long way since I wrote this system first, and its time, you know? So, tomorrow we're moving house.  I'll get that out of the way first, and then start working on LPC version... er... 20?  25?

So, in nine years of having a blog, with one exception I've never used another tool to edit my posts with the exception for the back end pages of the blog itself.  The exception is a little application that I wrote on my PDA about four or five years ago that allows me to post and edit entries.  Now, my PDA is a pain in the arse to get information into, but it can be done, albeit slowly.  The problem for me has always been that I needed to be live to make a posting to this system, or I would save it in a text document somewhere and post it later.
Recently, Microsoft brought out a program called Windows Live Writer (WLW) which is basically a WYSIWYG editor for creating posts on a blog system.  It was supposedly compliant with all sorts of standards, and it actually looked like a very interesting product.  So I downloaded it, and it didn't work of course.  My blog system is proprietary, a so-called "Roll Your Own" blog.  So yesterday I set about writing an entry point page for WLW to access my blog.  It worked, kinda, and there's still some to go.  The previous post and this one were created in WLW though, and I'm getting a hold on how it all comes together too.  I use an interface schema called the MetaWabLog API to give it access to my system, and it seems to be pretty basic and work up to a point.  The point in case being that the documentation on it all is horribly sketchy.  For example, the date "Sun, 1 Jan 2007 11:23 AM" should be a legitimate date as far as this program is concerned, but it doesn't seem to work properly. There are a bunch of little niggly things like that that I have yet to sort out.
So the point is, I had to create a non-standard interface to handle it all.  It was going to parse the expected input from WLW, using everything I knew to expect from the MetaWebLog API, and give me full control from any external app that uses this interface.  Shame it doesn't seem to work.  Some bits of it are good, but some are just a pain in the arse.  So, I have to have functions that clean up the code and change it so that it fits with my way of doing this.  This is nasty, and not the way that things are supposed to be done.  Case in point if the function below.
Now, I don't know about you, but that's not how I think things should be done.  And if you go with that logic, then one of two things needs to change.  Either the whole world has to change and do it my way, or I'm going to have to change some very basic functionality on this site.