This an update to SharpMT and Pocket SharpMT 2.01 and 2.0. The 2.02 release makes a couple of minor fixes to the Upload Media dialog to both platforms and to the Edit-from-Server functionality for the desktop version – if you use either of these features you’ll want to get this update. The 2.02 version, which includes the fixes included in 2.01, can be installed over an existing 2.01 or 2.0 installation without any known issues.
Download the desktop version:
SharpMT 2.02 (Windows)
Download the PocketPC 2002/Windows Mobile 2003 version:
Pocket SharpMT 2.02 (ZIP file) | Pocket SharpMT 2.02 (CAB file)
Bug Fix (desktop and Pocket): Upload Media and where the file goes. The problems that I’ve seen with this are either User Error or caused by a Confusing Design (without which there wouldn’t be User Error.) This dialog always shows the base URL that the image will be uploaded to; in the “path and file name box” anything that you enter will be relative to this base URL. Having said this, if you direct this to a relative directory, the image will go there, which is what’s supposed to happen. Also, the whole reason for this edit box is to upload the media under a different name – if you have a picture of the day, it might always be day.jpg even though you store the picture locally as IMG_001.jpg.
Some caveats to the above: If you leave out the file name of the image or if you point it to a directory that doesn’t exist, the upload will succeed as far as MT is concern but the image will never make it to the server’s hard drive.
Given the above, what did I fix? Well, I made it work better, actually, by automatically inserting the local file name into the remote edit box. This will respect any default remote directory options that you have set (via the Options dialog) and should help save any accident uploads that are missing file names.
Bug Fix (desktop): When you pull down an existing post from a server for editing, line breaks should now be included in the Entry windows.
Download the desktop version:
SharpMT 2.02 (Windows)
Download the PocketPC 2002/Windows Mobile 2003 version:
Pocket SharpMT 2.02 (ZIP file) | Pocket SharpMT 2.02 (CAB file)
I just downloaded your app and thought I’d say good job. It installed cleanly and worked right the first time. I noticed that you haven’t been able to afford integrating a commercial spell-checker into the final product. Have you tried looking into the open source NetSpell engine written in C#? It’s located at http://www.loresoft.com/Applications/NetSpell/default.aspx
It seems to offer all the features you’d need at the right price. Just thought you might be interested. Thanks again.
I’ve looked at a few and the one that I want to include is $200/project. I contacted the developer and he’s declined a free project even if the package is shareware. The donations that I’ve been getting for the application/site have been going to nothing but the SpellCheck Fund which still needs another $140 before I can buy SpellChecking. The reason why I’m intent on this package is b/c it’s already coded and included in the application – the version that I run with has it for my own uses – but I can’t distribue it so I take it out for the public builds.
I will take a look at Loresoft – I don’t think they were around when I started #MT, but I can’t make any promises… thanks for the feedback!
Ok, as long as you mentioned User Error… :p
I still can’t get the upload image thing to work (I’m using the desktop version).
If I specify /images/ as the relative directory (and it is a valid directory on the server with images already in it), the file never gets uploaded. If I put the full url, it still isn’t uploading. What am I doing wrong?
Try it with just images/ (without the leading /) as that would make the URL http://yourside//images and I’m sure MT would yonk on it. Same is true of the Pocket version, as they share the same upload code :)
Nope, that didn’t work either…
Got me. I know I can upload from the simulators of 2002 and 2003 and from a iPaqw 1940… you running 2002?
Yeah but I’m doing this from the desktop.
Well the most I can tell you is to try to upload something and please email me the trace of it… the desktop has always worked the same, more or less, and should have anything odd happen to it. Or I can try to upload to your server. Speaking of – are ya running IIS or Apache? I’d rather take it offsite – should speed things along…
Been a while since I’ve posted, and I bet you covered this one some time ago.
But I can’t figure out where in the program I can set “blank” to be the default target for links.
Almost all of mine target a new window, so it would be nice to just “set it and forget it.”
Again, sorry if this has been covered, I just wasn’t able to find it in a site search (or maybe I gave up too soon).
@Promo: I don’t think that it has been covered because the feature’s not in there. There’s defaults for the options on the Advanced tab, custom tags, font and the format of music player information but not for the Links dialog. I’ll add it to the things to do list for future releases… welcome back, BTW!
Glad to be here. Thank you for adding it to your “to do” list.
On a related note, I am traveling to Anaheim Sunday for a few days and will be trying out Pocket SharpMT.
I don’t have a wireless card, so I will only be using it to write offline and move drafts into the desktop to post upon my return.
I should have lots of feedback for you by then.
Sorry so late replying, this month is gonna be hellacious with the flight schedules, it looks like.
Anyway, the blog server is running Apache yes. If I have time when I get back home in a few days, I’ll try to play with it a bit more and post the results.
Randy…looks like the upload/download of links is not working properly. When I save a draft and upload it to the server, then re-download it at a later time, all the line breaks are lost, spaces are inserted in the form of those annoying square icons, when there is no character in the current character set to represent the ascII key code and sometimes the “‘” is replaced with a “?”.
Any thoughts on what the problem might be?
Greg
@Greg – a couple actually. The ASCII is a combination of how MT wants their files transmitten and how #MT is storing them. When I store the files in UTF-8 (which stores all the funky ASCII correctly) MT rejects it, which means I have to thunk down to the lower set. This ties to the international complaints that have been reported here.
As to the line returns, this should have corrected with 2.02 as it was specifically targetted for fixing – please email me if it’s still broken with some draft settings… could be text filtering is hiccuping.
I tried using Pocket MTSharp. It works, except for one weird problem: when I stop the application and then reload it, it has lost all of its settings (blog URL, username/password, etc). Any ideas? This is on a Toshiba 750 with PocketPC 2002.
What version are you using and how are you stopping it? If it’s through the Memory screen it might be getting cut off in a point where it isn’t closing properly – you might consider showing the Exit button on the application so you can tell it to close, rather than leaving it to the whim of the PPC. That option is in the Options dialog…
I use FeedDemon and there are command line options it can pass to preload fields. For example, I can set up a blog tool as a call to the MT entry routine as:
http://www.healthfulhands.net/mt/mt.cgi?is_bm=1&bm_show=&__mode=view&_type=entry&title=$ITEM_TITLE$&link_title=$ITEM_TITLE$&link_href=$ITEM_LINK$&text=$ITEM_DESCRIPTION$
Zempt is setup as: zempt:newPost?title=$ITEM_TITLE$&body=$ITEM_DESCRIPTION$
Is there a way for SharpMT to be loaded with those fields on the command line?
Finally, any plans to support more than one domain for blogs at a time? Thanks!
Rick@Leaders.net
@Rick – There is a way to pass in a file name that will open a draft. If you want I can send you the XML file format for the drafts and that can be passed it. Or we can talk about other stuff for it – plz send me an email if yer looking form more info. I’ve talked to Nick over at FeedDemon before but we sorta lost the thread over the months.
As to multi-blogs, probably not. not much demand for it and it’s sorta supported already…
Just thought of another potential option or, whatever. *Something* happened to my blog, and I wound up having to totally reset MT to its default, and am in the process of rebuilding the blog entry by entry.
I just noticed that for entries I wrote and posted immediately, therefore using Server Time, the .smt gets saved with Server Time – meaning in a situation like I have now, I have no reference to when I actually had made the post. Ideas? (Other than me learning how to have the system make routine backups! lol)
Thought about it actually, as I had to completely reload my blog a while ago… not much for it actually. The only way around this is to turn off Server Time for the new drafts as you type them or use MT’s Import/Export system which works OK, actually. It got the majority of my blog entries back in – if I didn’t have deletes between the existing posts, it would have been seamless actually but anyway…
Not much to do for it, I’m afraid – at least the content is there, though, which will be more valuable than the date long term… sucks on the crash though!
Thanks for this software – it’s really quite good and I love the tabbed interface. I’d like to ask:
* can you add a dropdown list to change blogs, in each tab so we don’t have to go “dig” ? That would make it easier to use the multiple tabs to sort of brainstorm accross multiple blogs!
* if you can possibly make it easier to paste in the HTML for the image URL of the image we just uploaded. The upload is fine, of course, but afterward the technically-challenged among us need to remember the path, and the HTML. Perhaps MTSharp could put the posted image’s path in a tag, feed that to the clipboard.
Thanks for listening!
@Rick – Glad it helps out! Not too sure about what you mean by adding a drop down list – at log stuff has to change with the blog change (Filters, Categories, etc) so I purposely put it a bit out of reach. As to the easier URL for upload images, that’s a pretty neat idea! I’ll add that to the laundry list… I don’t when the next release will come up but it should be in a couple of months… thanks!
Yeah I was less than thrilled at the crash (or whatever it was) :)
Anyway, two weeks later, and I’ve got it all back up to date, except for all my templates.
How about an option to set the timestamp in the .smt rather than leaving server time checked? That way even if I post something “live” (server time) the .smt itself is saved with the timestamp of when it was actually saved/posted. Just leave it an option so users who’d rather have Server Time left alone can do so?
The other thing I noticed is that #MT appears to use numeric values for categories? Or something like that? I recreated my blog with the same cats I had before but since I had #MT there, I created them in alpha-sorted order, whereas originally I did not, so all the entries I re-posted I also had to reset them to the correct cat.
The .smt file is saved with the time it was saved/posted – shows up in the file system as the list time it was modified, which is usually when it was posted. From there the time/date can be set in the post. Like I said earlier, #MT is not meant to be a backup/restore utility so it won’t help to restore a crashed MT site – the MT import/export, however, will.
As to the categories, MT uses a numerical value for them so #MT has to. The fact that the order of the category values in the new blog are different than the original blog needs to be worked out on the server and then refreshed in #MT if you want the old values to be used (and even that will take some trial and error). This was actually one of the reasons why a) I’m a little shy about announcing the multiple blog support and b) I was leary on sorting the category list (even though I do now in 2.x).
Ah ok, didn’t realize MT used a numeric value only. The text value must be stored in the db then?
Problem I had was my author dbase (at minimum) was wiped out, so I couldn’t login to run the MT backup thing. MT-Medic was of no use – it can fix an author, and add authors, but there has to be at least one author already in the dbase or it errors out.
But anyway, I managed to reconstruct everything (except all the comments/trackbacks) manually, and the new blog actually runs better/faster.
Yep – it has it’s own table that MT joins to everything… I also think that their import/export utility does include the comments and trackbacks but I’m not sure. I know my biggest problem on my own rebuild was the permalinks – since I had deleted entries, the numbers were now all outta order… but at least things are running again too!
Yeah I screwed up my whole site royally. I don’t think I used too many permalinks – I know I fixed at least one that I found anyway.
Btw – I’ve tried and tried, still having no luck whatsoever with uploading from #MT…
Scott – Anyway I can get a test account on it? I’d like to see what’s going on thru the sockets… I know it works on non-apache servers so I’m wondering if that could be it? Email if you’re interested…
Success!
I loved w.bloggar but for some reason it will not run with my new Movable Type Server. I have switched…
I like a lot of things about this program. I’ve tried all three of the major MT blog tools — w.bloggar, Zempt, and SharpMT — for my typepad blog, and SharpMT is almost the best. It works great with Typepad, by the way. (I remember seeing some comments asking about that.) Not only that, it is the only tool that can consistently edit previous Typepad posts, no matter how they were originally posted. Zempt doesn’t pretend to be able to, and w.bloggar can do it only occasionally. I also find the tabbed interface absolutely essential, as I usually have a couple blog entries open to work on at any one time. And the links sidebar is brilliant, not just for editing old posts but for pasting in links to them.
Two things would make me delete the other tools from my hard drive: One, make it an option to not show the “extended text” portion, and have the main text editing window take up most of the space. I don’t usually use the extended text, and I don’t want to have to type in a five-line window just in case I might.
Second, create one or two more “slots” for custom tags. For example, I use /blockquote a lot, and I never use underlining, so I put the blockquote tag into the slot for underlining. But that’s all I have room for. A few slots for custom tags, a la w.bloggar, would be sufficient.
Congratulations and thanks for an almost-perfect tool.
@Mark – Glad it’s working out for you! So #MT is compatible with Typepad? COOL. I know that some of the dasBlog people were working with me at some point (and I made some changes) but I haven’t heard from them as to whether or not it works… MT is always my top priority (selfishly, of course) but it’s great to hear that other Blog engines support the same API.
As to the two feature requests: the size of the Text windows will be addressed in 2.1 (assuming I get to working on it) so that will come some day. The custom tags too I was thinking about since seeing them in a couple of places; I’ll throw them on the to do list.
Thanks for the comments though – always makes a coder warm and fuzzy to see their apps get some use :)
Editing your blogs offline — not ready for primetime.
I’ve been looking for a good offline editor for posting entries to my Movable Type blogs. There are several exceptional freeware and donationware editing clients available for MT, and a few are useful when disconnected from the internet, so long…
Editing your blogs offline — not ready for primetime.
I’ve been looking for a good offline editor for posting entries to my Movable Type blogs. There are several exceptional freeware and donationware editing clients available for MT, and a few are useful when disconnected from the internet, so long…
Editing your blogs offline — not ready for primetime.
I’ve been looking for a good offline editor for posting entries to my Movable Type blogs. There are several exceptional freeware and donationware editing clients available for MT, and a few are useful when disconnected from the internet, so long…