Thanks to those who downloaded the script yesterday. Bruce D’Arcus pointed out that I made a stupid error before I published it yesterday that made it, um, inoperable. I will find a way to post the fix shortly–I seem to be having trouble getting to my iDisk over our dial-up line.
Category: Software
Scripting OPML for OmniOutliner
I got tired of complaining about OmniOutliner not having OPML capability, so I hacked a quick AppleScript to make it happen. It’s very beta right now, but it works for outlines that aren’t too deep. Currently it’s choking on my outline for the sitePref documentation, so I’m trying to go back and figure out why. You can download OmniOutliner2OPML from my scripts page.
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New Applescript Studio in beta
A new version of AppleScript Studio appears to be available for developers at the Apple Developer Connection (register free). Still in beta, but it appears to address some really significant issues, including native support for the User Defaults framework in Cocoa and some other stuff…
Someone made a derivative work from MY script!!!
Saw this via mac.scripting.com: Will Wade has released a new AppleScript based on my iTunes2Blog
that posts the currently playing iTunes track to Blogger. I’m flattered and happy that my early script was helpful to someone. Interestingly, I don’t seem to be able to find Will’s blog anywhere, or I’d point to it…
Progress with Manila Envelope — and a hold up
I’ve made more progress on the next version of Manila Envelope. It will now cache department names retrieved from a Manila site.
There’s one lingering issue — the problem with spaces in department names. If I can get that fixed I’ll be home free.
Problem with manila.siteprefs.get
Another issue with sitePrefs.get: the format in which the results for news item departments are created can return malformed XML if the department name contains a space.
Unfortunately, this will cause a delay in the next release of Manila Envelope until I either figure out how to work around it or work with UserLand to get it fixed.
More Manila stuff: sitePref.set funkiness
So I’m having problems setting site prefs from my application. I was going to add a quick feature to allow managing editors to change the tagline of their site from within Manila Envelope, but I can’t get sitePref.set to work–it either complains about something not being a valid address or responds “true” without doing anything. I’ve put a detailed description on the XMLRPC discussion site.
Don’t know how I missed this: permalinks in Manila
Frontier News: New Manila feature: permanent links for News Items. I always wondered how I could get people linking to a particular item on my page. Now it’s under the # symbol after each item. Thanks, guys.
Oliver’s Cross-Posting Manila Plug-In
Check this out: Oliver’s crossPost Plug-In. “This simple Plug-In installs XML-RPC handlers to post news items to a Manila site and retrieve a department list of that site.” My question: how does this compare to calling newsItem.create in the standard Manila API?
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What I’ve been up to
It’s been quiet on the programming front. I’m getting smarter in Cocoa and AppleScript. Here’s a feature that’ll be coming in 1.0.3 – a News Item Department drop down list that syncs with your Manila blog.
Here’s where I am:
- The RPC call works
- I can basically parse the XML that gets passed back (though all the department names are lowercased and I’m not sure what’s up with the vertical bars around one department)
- I can populate the dropdown
- The above three steps are triggered temporarily from a button. I need to add UI to get the departments in the first place, cache them in the prefs file so I don’t have to hit the website every time, and add more UI to refresh the categories if they get out of sync.
So it’ll take a while longer for me to finish up. But I thought this would be the hard part and it’s done already. Now I have to figure out how to use some of these Cocoa functions to write a list into a plist file as an array. Dig we must…
A note about department names
I’m still working on the issue, but it looks like if you name your News Item departments with spaces in them that you can get errors from AppleScript when parsing the resulting XML output from sitePrefs.get (“newsitem.departments”). I don’t know whether AppleScript isn’t parsing the XML correctly, or whether Manila is outputing malformed XML, but consider this a word to the wise.
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Small progress
Looking again at the Manila RPC spec, I see I’ve missed something that might enable populating a drop down list of news item categories. Comforting after I’ve hit so many walls with other feature implementations over the last few weeks. I’m now looking at “manila.sitePref.get” which allows retrieving named portions of site preferences. I can grab the department list using “newsitems.departments” as the preference name, but now I have to see how to parse the reply using AppleScript. Dig we must…
RadioService.app
I’m looking at the source code for RadioService now. The author took an opposite approach to mine–most of the code is Objective C with just one AppleScript. But he did answer some of my questions about how to address the keychain and other tricks with Objective C. The answer is it looks really hairy and I’ll be figuring it out for a few days.
The competition: RadioServices.app
Watch this guy. Unlike yours truly, he can really program Cocoa. RadioServices.app looks like it may be the “post from anywhere” model I dreamed about in July of last year.
On the importance of modeling Manila
I did the preceding UML (Unified Modeling Language) sequence diagram with a little tool called ObjectPlant. It’s a shareware UML tool that just became my new best friend. There are times when you have to stop and draw what you’re doing in a project, even a moderately complex project like this one. I’ll be posting some more pictures like the one below as my version of the “Busy Developer’s Guide to ManilaRPC” that Daniel put together.
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