pyBloggerU now has a GUI

Yesterday I sat myself in front of both Qt 4 Designer and Wing IDE and didn't tear myself away from my computer until I finished a GUI for pyBloggerU.

For those who didn't read my original post on the matter, pyBloggerU is a script I made that will upload an html file containing your Blogger post and images to your Blogger account for online publication. The script deals with the weirdnesses inherent in how Blogger mangles the HTML code so that what you see in your HTML editor is not what you get on Blogger.

Unfortunately it still is not programmed to handle HTML files generated from WYSIWYG editors, as they create too many complications for me to be able to handle with this script. But I've found that creating blog posts in an HTML editor called Quanta Plus to be easy enough. Quanta Plus has lots of buttons that shoot out HTML code for you, code and tag completion, and even a Visual preview mode if you're interested.

Once you've created your blog post in an HTML editor, like Quanta Plus, you just double click on the pyBloggerU_GUI.py file, press Run at the next window and enter in all the details shown in the picture below:






Be sure that any images referred to in the HTML contain their full file paths (the one above is "/home/inkhorn/Pictures/pyBloggerU.png") so that pyBloggerU will be able to upload them from your computer to your Blog's picasa web album. When everything is set, you can press the Upload button and your HTML file will become your blog post! When pyBloggerU succeeds at sending a blog post, you'll see a "Success" information window pop up a few moments after pressing the Upload button. Also, you'll be able to save your Blogger account info by pressing Save after filling out all the fields. When you have a new post to upload to blogger, you can then double click on the entry in the list to the left and your email, password, and blog title will appear in the fields to the right.

If you would like to download pyBloggerU, it's easily acccessible as a Bazaar branch on Launchpad. Even if you don't know what a Bazaar branch on Launchpad is, go to your terminal, and type in bzr branch lp:pybloggeru. This will create a directory called pybloggeru in your home directory and will store the python files for the program and all of its dependencies therein.

Of course if you would like to report a bug, ask a question, or contribute to the program, use the web utilities on the official pyBloggerU launchpad page.

Tis a Gift to be Simple

Today I got interested in trying out a few different blogging sites (wordpress.com and tumblr.com) to see if either one of them provided a better/easier interface to work with than blogger. Going on Wordpress, I saw an interface that was both sophisticated and nice looking. Wordpress seemed to have everything.

Unfortunately there were a few drawbacks:

1. Wordpress seems to intentionally set the width of your "Content Column" (the column within which your blog post appears) to be too narrow for my liking. Resultantly, the bigger pictures that I post appear to be cut off :(
2. After investigating possible solutions to my first problem, I found out that I would need to pay a fee to customize the width (along with other features) of my blog to my liking. I don't like that at all.
3. Even if I was to live with the narrow width thing, I am surprised that Wordpress doesn't automatically size your pictures according to the width of your content column.

Oh well, I probably won't be switching to wordpress! As for tumblr, I found their registration to be super easy, but the exact method to customizing your blog using CSS eludes me. I admit I know nothing about CSS, so tumblr may still be an option to investigate further.

Until then, "tis a gift to be simple". Thanks Blogger!

Linux Blogging Solution?

I don't much like writing to this blog from the New Post interface that blogger provides.  It's too small and restricting.  So, I've done a lot of googling to find out the best way of writing to a blog from Linux.  One option I found was using Google Docs to create a text document (replete with rich text and images) and publish it to blogger.

I like the format of Google Docs and would certainly continue using it if it weren't for weird formatting incompatibilities between Google Docs and Blogger.  In other words, when writing a blog post from Google Docs and submitting it to Blogger, what you see is not exactly what you get.  I find that the text spacing and alignment become perverted when you submit a Google Docs text document to Blogger.

So, that's where the Google Data Python Library  will come in handy!  Using this set of Python modules, it's possible to upload photo media to the Picasa Web Album associated with your blog, get the associated URLs, and upload new blog posts containing your newly uploaded photos.

Using this functionality, I should be able to make a script that will take an HTML file that you create with any old web page editor, replace the links to images on your local hard drive with links to images on your picasa web album, and post your HTML file to Blogger!

Stay tuned.  I'm hoping this ends up being better than Google Docs or Scribefire (I have issues with both platforms).