MarkItUp

Chris Frazier pinged me this morning to let me know that he has written an HttpHandler to expose SUB via that MetaWeblogAPI - woohoo!

This means that users will certainly be able to connect to their SUB blogs via Chris's PostXING tool but will hopefully mean that they can post from other MWB enabled tools such as w.bloggar and BlogJet.

Here is a blurry picture (sorry Chris, didn't really do you justice here) of SUB being managed from Chris's new V2.0 version of PostXING:

I'll be adding Chris's MWB HttpHandler to the core SUB Solution so it will appear in the next release within the next couple of days.

Last night I added another metadata related feature to this site to display the list categories that a post appears in against the post.  Here is a small image that shows what that looks like on this site:

This is an important feature as it allows users more options to discover content that they may be interested in - especially for somebody who has just stumbled across your site from a search engine query.

Post metadata is something that Mark does extremely well and I'm hoping that I can emulate his "see also" links in some way too.  Often I've used the category and see also attribution on Mark's site to sift through his content and reminisce over some of his previous entries.

Now that I've implemented the hierarchicy of categories on SUB I've created a little user control which allows you to display the category tree and to select one or more items by checking a checkbox next to the category name.  The user control exposes the chosen categories through a SelectedItems property.

I also aggregated the CategoryPicker and the post entry user interface into a single user control called PostEditor.  Here is an image of the PostEditor UI:

I created this control because post management can be done from a couple of places.  You can either go through the Administration / Post Management path or, you can actually do inline editing on a post when it is displayed on the site.  This is really useful as it allows you to quickly do things such as fix typos and re-categorize a post without having to navigate away from it.

The PostEditor control exposes strongly typed events for things such as PostAdded, EditCancelled and PostError.  This allows the hosting page to work with it more easily.

One of the features that I've really missed in .Text and CommunityServer was the ability to seamlessly upload images whilst writing a post.  Having this feature means that you can write the post and add images from your hard-drive without having to either: A) Ftp the image up to the server or B) navigating away to another page to perform the upload.  Here is a small picture of the image upload dialog in SingleUserBlog:

At this stage I've kept it all pretty simple.  You just upload the image and it will store it in the \Data\Images folder with a guaranteed unique name.  After that it simply returns the url of the image to the screen so that you can copy it, close the dialog and use it in your post.  No AJAX here folks :-)

As I just mentioned, the images themselves are all stored in the \Data\Images directory.  I had thought about storing them in the post folders but that would require extra effort as I would then have to maintain an index of the images and it would also be harder to share images across multiple posts.  One of the next tasks will be to create an image gallery so that the administrator can quickly view and maintain all images in that directory. 

Ultimately I plan to make the UploadImageDialog smarter.  I'd really like to have some basic controls on that window which would allow you to optimize, rezise, compress, etc images.  This would make it much easier for graphics impaired users such as myself to take a quick screen print and ensure that the resulting image which gets displayed on the blog is small and fast to load.  The dialog and image gallery viewer could even warn you about images which are large and offer auto-optimizations.  The code that I'll be using to do the image manipulation will be the same code that I wrote to manage project icon images on the ProjectDistributor site.  There's a demo of that code that you can download and play with here:

    http://www.projectdistributor.net/Projects/Project.aspx?projectId=125

Last week I mentioned that I was planning to make the categorization on SUB hierarchical.  I quickly implemented that this morning and have uploaded it to this site to play around with it.  Currently I just added a simple ParentId to each Category so that they could be linked together but next I'll add an attribute that allows me to differentiate between "Folder" categories and "Content" category types and then display the appropriate icons for each type.

I also uploaded a sample to ProjectDistributor that shows how to create hierarchies such as this in a "no-brainer" fashion.  Download it and have a play.

    Grab the OrderedHierarchy project here

Over the next little while there are 3 features that I'm planning to implement, which are:

1. Add support for hierarchical categorization by allowing you to specify a "parent" category for each category. 
2. Add support for automatic image uploading.  This will allow the user to upload images while they are managing posts.  I envisage that this feature might use some form of "AJAX" technology to allow the user to select and upload an image without affecting their current work operation.  This feature will probably accept and store an uploaded image and return the url of that image to the user so that they can paste it into their document.
3. Code highlighting.  Not quite sure how I want to do this but I envisage doing something very similar to what Chris Frazier did with PostXING where he "pops" a dialog which allows you to colorize the code and then automatically embed it back into the post.

I'd also love to move to version 3.x of FreeTextBox but I just didn't have a "plop-it-in" experience with it so I'll wait until I have more time and retry that one I think.

Here's a couple of the little features that I added into SingleUserBlog (SUB).

Category Creation
When you are editing posts, you can select which categories the post will appear in by checking the checkboxes.  You can also create a new category while you are editing the post.

Inline Post Editing
When you are logged-in to the application, posts appear with an [Edit] link which allows you to edit the post right there and then without having to go to a different page.

The Rss feed for SingleUserBlog now includes several extra nodes which make it play better with good Rss subscription tools.  The new nodes include the wfw:comment and the wfw:commentRss nodes which provide links back to the location of comments on this site.  Specifically the wfw:commentRss node allows your aggregator to do a lookup and bring the comments back to you so that you don't have to go to my site to read them.

I also added the slash:comments extension which contains number of comments made to the specified blog item.  This is the thing which allows your aggregator to display the number of comments against each item.

You can read about the CommentAPI here: http://wellformedweb.org/story/9 and here http://wellformedweb.org/news/wfw_namespace_elements/.