After a number of sleepless nights (and foggy days) a new beta is ready. Main thing for this release is that SharpMT will only allow one instance of itself to run at a time now. The run-as-differnt-user for multiple blog support “hack” still works, though; only one instance can run per user. What this means is that if SharpMT is already running and your double click on an SMT draft or send data to SharpMT from an RSS Aggregator via the plug-in, it will open in a new tab in the already running window.
Other than that, there’s the usual bug fixes for things found as I worked with the new feature. Of course this latest thing is extremely experimental, so I’m curious to see how well it performs in the real world – please let me know if something blows apart on ya.
Download: SharpMT 2.2 Beta 3
Read: SharpMT FAQ
I just tried to open up a SMT draft while #MT was running, and also create a new post via NewsGator while it was running, and it worked great – only one instance of #MT was ever running. Very nice. :)
Thanks! I consulted with a well versed coder (FurryGoat) when I was having trouble last night… he responded this afternoon with “use a delegate” which what I did this morning. Best validation I know of, so it shouldn’t crash, and it’s the right method to use.
Minor feature request/bug report (depending on how you look at it): would it be hard to make the “ignore all” command (selected from the right-click popup menu on a misspelled word) apply to all the edit boxes on the screen, and not just the current box (which is what it does now) ? I can’t think of a situation where this would not be preferable.
That’s not really up to me, that’s up to the spell check control. What you can do is add it to the user dictionary which instantly takes effect on all edit boxes…
Yeah, but sometimes I want to deliberately misspell a word or something, thus I don’t want it in the dictionary. Would it be hard to say something like (hideous pseudocode ahead):
void handleIgnoreWord(String word) {
bodyControl.ignoreWord(word);
extendedBodyControl.ignoreWord(word);
}
Oh, I understand why it would be useful in some cases – it’s just beyond my control so I thought I’d offer a workaround.
I tried reading the specs on the IBlogExtension and it was a bit over my head.
Not necessarily asking for this feature yet, just more of a “can it be done?” situation at this point.
Right now we can select a single item to be forwarded to #MT. Any chance of more than one, or is that simply now how the extention functions? Sometimes it seems handy to forward perhaps both Title and EntryBody, or _whatever_ combination a user might find preferable.
Along the same lines, is something along the lines of the custom tags ‘doable’ for the plugin items as well? ie. Say a user _always_ wanted the
EntryBody to be block-quoted, so he’d like somewhere in #MT to put the [blockquote] tag that #MT would always surround the EntryBody with, and so forth.
Just thoughts…
Hm. Well IBlogExtension is just a pathway; a contract if you will. So what comes through there is an XML snippet of RSS information – the RSS reader decides what that will be. For example RSS Bandit and SharpReader send two entirely different things (both XML of course) which forces me to do some XSL-Translation on it before I can handle it. So I know I’ll always get Title and URL – I try to get Description but even that’s not promised… the IBlogExtension simple describes how I’m supposed to open a hole for other applications to poke into.
As for the custom tags, that’s what the RSSFormat.txt file is for – it’s in your User Directory. So say if you want only the description and you want it italicized, you could have: i[RSSDESCRIPTION]/i in that file… in that way, it works like the Now Playing tags.
Unless I missed what you were looking for – lemme know if that’s what you meant…
Basically I just meant that if a user _always_ wanted any item (EntryBody for example) to be blockquoted, he could put the blockquote tag in a textbox, and every time the IBlogExtension forwarded to #MT it would be surrounded by the blockquote.
I’ll see if the RSSFormat.txt handles that… never knew about that file.
Yeah, RSSformat can do it. I mean it takes whatever is in that file (verbatim) and filled in the “fields” with the data being passed. It was introduced with the Plug-in (or the Beta after that) so it’s pretty new.
Sweet, so it does!
Is there a similar file for the Now Playing thing?
Sorta. Now Playing is done in the Options dialog under the Editor tab… I put the RSS stuff off in a file because… I forget why. Probably because it’s used by a process other than SharpMT and this way I KNOW it’s saved regardless of whether or not SharpMT is open/closed. I probably should have put it in the SharpMT root directory, but I also figured that users would be changing this and that meant it should be in a “user-level” directory. I should move previewHtml.htm (which is also editable) there but that could cause problems.
Hm. Project is large enough that even *I* don’t remember everything. I guess that means I should start working on a help system, but since that is often boring, I probably wont :)
Let me know, I can help with one in my spare time. I have experience with both .hlp and .chm authoring and development.
Already got one started, sorta. Just a question of taking what’s in my head (and the 50 some odd posts) and putting them down on paper. Erm, in HTML. Will be a barebones system, of course, but at least it should be something worth compiling.