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indigojo posting in

Hi everyone,

My name's Matt Smith and I'm the developer of the QTM journal editor. I've been developing it since 2004, initially targeting Blosxom on Qt 3, then moving to Qt 4 and Movable Type, then Wordpress. I've got self-hosted Wordpress and Drupal sites, and have recently set up a DW blog.

I'm posting to offer my services. My client has a Quickpost feature (so you can copy/paste a web URL and build a post around it) and perhaps you might like that ported to Qtxpost.

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From:

catness

Hi Matt!

Welcome! :D I guess a Quickpost feature would be cool, and the cooperation in general could be just the thing for rekindling my interest in the project. I must admit that I haven't touched it for half a year, being sidetracked by other interests (mostly writing) and never got around to implementing a lot of stuff I had initially planned, such as crossposting to other platforms - mainly because I don't use other blogging platforms on regular basis, and when I do, I do not crosspost between them. So the source remains rather messy, with LJ-engine-specific parts being hardcoded and not cleanly separated from the generic parts - been meaning to refactor it while adding at least Wordpress and Blogspot.

I see that you're a lot more organized than me anyway, even providing packages for different platforms. Just downloaded your program, it configures and installs just fine (under Gentoo) and I see a lot of neat menus and configuration options (which my program doesn't have ;) Will have a closer look tomorrow, have to dig out some of my Wordpress accounts.

So do you have any idea how we can cooperate?

From:

indigojo

Well, there are a few features which could very easily be ported from QTM to Qtxpost - things like my auto link feature (meaning, you can set it so that when you highlight a particular phrase and select "Auto link" from the menu, or use its shortcut, it will always link a particular site). I have some dialogs for inserting image links and a rich text preview function.

I could certainly help packaging the app for Ubuntu - you need to create a Debian package then a package archive on Launchpad. There's also the OpenSUSE build service which I use to build packages for SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva. I use CMake for building QTM, but I guess I'd have to re-learn qmake for building packages of this app.

Not sure if it's any use adding support for other platforms. LJ has features Wordpress doesn't; it's a social blogging platform while WP just hosts lots of blogs. Although they're both XML-RPC, they use totally different methods and WP uses far fewer methods, even with the new WP API. If we could achieve feature parity between QTM and QTXpost, there would be no need for one app to support both. Most people use one or the other, after all.

From:

indigojo

I took the liberty of setting up a Mercurial repo on Bitbucket - I know you've got hosting on Google Code, but I couldn't find a source repo so I set one up. I checked in the v0.3.3 source code and made a few changes, namely:

- Commented out the bit in main.cpp which hard-codes Plastique style and Helvetica font (because the font doesn't look nice, and Qt 4 should blend in with the desktop; I use the GTK style and qtxpost looks fine in it)
- The text formatting buttons (bold, italic, strike and underline) now add the tags around the selected text rather than replacing them
- My image entry dialog copied from QTM, so they can supply the URL, alt text, title and alignment

The repo is https://bitbucket.org/IndigoJo/qtxpost - obviously your original code is all still there if you don't like my changes.

From:

catness

Wow, thanks a lot! The GUI buttons look great, font/style is fine too except that now the multiple journal icon boxes are for some reason misaligned when part of them are unselected, but it's a minor thing. (This reminds me that size constraint on the main window was a wrong thing to do - it appears to be too big for a netbook screen and has to be moved manually to access the "post" button...)

I had never bothered with making a repository on Google because nobody had expressed interest in participation (and because I have very little experience with version control systems, at least where maintenance/contributing is concerned). Set it up just now and committed the project with your changes, also increased version number to 0.3.4 and added you into Authors. Think I can add you as a project member? It seems to require a Google account. Didn't make a new tar file yet, in case there will be more quick changes :)

Just got around to trying out your program with my old Wordpress blogs. (It doesn't seem to have a "select/edit post" function?) Maybe you're right and there's no need for an universal client because of the inherent differences between LJ-based sites and standalone blogs - incorporating both sets of features (e.g. icons for LJ, categories for WP) is guaranteed to make it bloated and overcomplicated, and indeed WP API is more limited. Gotta think more... :)

From:

indigojo

Do you mean editing posts that are already stored on the blog site? I don't have a feature to do that yet -- I'm not sure I will ever. I am concentrating on enhancing editing entries on the desktop, particularly as what will be downloaded will likely be different from what it looks like when first composed (as in, a whole lot of formatting tags, particularly if it's been processed with Markdown). I've got a couple of features I'm working on, including hierarchical categories, rich text editing and enhancing syntax highlighting, that have priority over that.

My Google ID is indigojo.uk - you will probably be able to add me as a committer or project member through Google Code.

From:

catness

Added, have fun!

Hmm, editing posts which are already stored on the site was one of my first priority features - I often obsessively edit at least the latest post, and it was driving me crazy to update three crossposted entries on three different sites instead of doing it all in one place. The rich text editor, on the other side, is something I never use, but I know that this feature is widely appreciated by non-programmers.

From:

indigojo

I pushed a couple of changes this afternoon, one of them was to fix the resizing problem you mentioned (by simply undoing and then redoing all the layouts in Server.ui) and also, I fixed a bug whereby when you selected an icon and then none, it kept displaying the old icon, instead of empty.png.