Sunday, August 2, 2009

HackWeek IV: Fun with BlogPost (a blog publisher)


As part of Novell's HackWeek IV, I decided to learn and develop a GUI application that allows me to post blog entries quickly, without much effort (without using a browser).

Why I wrote this?
  • I wanted to make myself capable of developing desktop applications (as a Kernel developer I have spent very little time/no time on GUI development). Learning new stuff is always a lot of Fun!
  • I have always found using browsers for writing blogs is time consuming and takes little more effort for me.
  • None of the existing applications convinced me.
What it is , what it is not?
  • BlogPost is a simple, easy to use blog that is aiming to make blogging experience better. It
    currently support blogger.com only.
  • It's a alpha software and tested to limited extent only so it will have rough edges (use it with care :-)).
  • I wrote this application for Fun and Learning (actually I learnt GTK/PyGTK and Python when I developed it). So don't expect it to be bug-free or quite solid.
  • It's a GPLv2 Software.
  • It's not a feature-rich a.k.a bloated application that is intended to replace web blogging.
  • It's aimed at developers/users not for professional bloggers who might need more features.
List of Features
  • support posts to blogger.com
  • Offline blogging (save drafts locally and send later)
  • Basic formatting
  • Select blog names to post
  • Labels/Tags support
Screenshot


Want to try BlogPost?

Prerequisites:
  • python-gdata (gdata api's) package
  • python-base and python-devel if not installed already (which usually are present in the default installation of openSUSE).
Once you have the prerequisites installed, grab the BlogPost rpm from here:
(Currenly x86_64 and i386 rpms available)

BlogPost x86-64 RPM
BlogPost i386 RPM

Install the rpm the usual way:
$rpm -ivh

The tar ball can be found here:
BlogPost tar ball

To install from source tar ball
  • Extract the source: tar -xvjf blogpost-0.1.tar.bz2
  • cd blogpost-0.1 and run ./setup.py install
  • Run `blogpost' to launch the application after install
I had Fun; Hope you'll like it!
Feel free to leave your comments, feedback!

3 comments:

Johnny Jacob said...

Try using webkit for rendering / editing .

Suresh said...

@Johnny: Sounds like a good idea. I need to lookup and see how to do it.

Chax said...

awesome !