Chris Anderson: BlogX

Radio is gone!

Mon, 17 Feb 2003 00:58:28 GMT

Note This is the last post to my old RSS feed or Radio site.

Wahoo! BlogX is now my primary software. I think this is good enough. You can get to the old homepage here, and all the comments, etc, are still live there - however I won't be adding new entries.

My new RSS feed is here.

I just tried (for the first time) using my WinForms front end across the internet. Queries are a bit slow. Running off local host is almost instantaneous, so I have to imagine that this is due to network issues. I'll probably have to tweak the application to do more automatic caching.

I'll post new source once I get the bugs ironed out from my live dogfooding!

BlogX 1.0.0001.0003

Sun, 16 Feb 2003 21:14:57 GMT

Lots of changes here... Added a CRUD web service front end and a query web service front end. There are now 7 projects in the sources:

BlogCmd - command line radio to blogx converter
BlogXRuntime - data model, shared by all
BlogXServiceProxy - hand tweaked web service proxy
WeblogX - ASP.NET front end & web services
WinBlogX - WinForms front end (talks to web services)
WinBlogXControls - Shared controls between WinBlogX and WoodBlog
WoodBlog - "Legacy" WinForms front end

WoodBlog was done to directly whack on the XML files. This was more effiecient but it introduced the problem of two places you can edit (through the web and client). I decided to just go with a single data store, on the server, and then rewrite the client to talk through web services.

BlogXServiceProxy was needed because I wanted the objects seen on the client to be from BlogXRuntime. Since all the data model is XML Serializable, I just removed the XSD generated data classes and viola!

The WinBlogXControls currently contains an HTML editor and viewer. Both are actually the same control, and require VS.NET to be installed to use. I'm going to search around for the write code to do these correctly, but for now it works for me.

I have two web services exposed now - BlogXEditing and BlogXBrowsing. The browsing service is basically all the entry points you would need to write a browsing application. Including categories, etc. Right now it is still missing a "post a comment" on the browsing service. The editing service is a simple CRUD api set for manipulating the blog entries. Today it is secured with a crappy password argument on all the methods. I'll work on real security later.

Once I can get reliable FTP working for uploading new versions, I am ready to switch from Radio. My plan will be to keep the existing Radio HTML files up on the server so that permalinks work, but all new content will be on the BlogX version. However, I still can't make the switch because I'm having difficulties uploading my software.

License for BlogX?

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 18:32:26 GMT

Dare asked a good question in the comments below. What is the license for BlogX? I put a copyright at the top of each file, but I didn't think about enough of what I really want here. I guess I'm looking for a license that provides the following:

Free (no charge) use by anyone with or without modification (free)
Anyone using the source or binaries I provide must hold me harmless (no warranties)
Any product that uses the source or binaries can use any license they wish (no viral licensing)
No limitations on usage in acedemic or commercial spaces (for your use anywhere)

Given that it only took me ~15 hours of coding, I can't imagine there is all that much IP in the source, but I don't want this to come around and bite me in the ass. :)

Any suggestions on a good license? GPL won't work because of the viral stuff... MS Shared Source won't work because of the acedemic limitations... other suggestions?

RSS 2.0 as my native format...

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 11:20:52 GMT

Gary makes an interesting point... at a minimum why don't I use RSS 2.0 as the native XML format for my blogging tool... hmm...

At this point i'm convinced that the "per-day" or "per-entry" debate is largely moot... either way I'll end up with a cache for the other direction...

BlogX source code

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 10:56:24 GMT

I'm not happy with the source, it's mostly slapped together on various late nights, but I figure there is nothing like a little peer review to clean your act you. You can download the source and binaries (one zip).

There are no instructions, almost no comments, no support, and no warrenties on any of this - it works on my machine, and that's all I can say :)

Please post feedback in the comments for this, or, of course, on your blog! :)

BlogX 1.0.0001.0002

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 10:46:35 GMT

More web frontend work... referrers are now being tracked. I just write out the UrlReferrer and Url from the request when pages are hit. This seems like the wrong model... is there a better way to track referrers?

Also did some minor HTML cleanup (more divs, etc.) and also added support for navigation links like Radio has.

BlogX data...

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 10:42:12 GMT

One of the designs that I'm not happy with is how i'm handling file path resolving. Right now I've got a static (re: global) delegate that is called to resolve files. This allows me to map this to a Server.MapPath in the web case, and a Path.Combine on the client. The problem is that the "map" ends up being per app domain - which works great for ASP.NET, but sucks for WinForms... At this point I'm not going to rewrite it, but I'm just not happy with the design.

Note I've created a BlogX category for tracking progress and comments on this specifically.