Blogging with ecto

Mark Hinkle has been exploring Flock (Mac OS X) for use with the forth-coming Zenoss blogs, and that reminded me of a brief conversation with radix about a year ago where we were discussing blog editors. Thus re-motivated, I did a little research and evaluation of blog editing/posting software. The one that seems to be the most complete and featureful (to me) is ecto. Getting it set up with the new blogger seems a little awkward (the default "access point" doesn't work), but there's another version in the works where the kinks will be worked out (or be moot).

Here's what I had to do to get it (version 2.4.1 Universal + blogger beta support) to work with the new blogger API:

• Hit the "Add Account" button on the Accounts window
• Give my blog URL, as requested
• Set the System as "Blogger"
• Set the API as "Atom"
• Set the Access Point as http://www.blogger.com/feeds/default/blogs
• Be sure that all the RSS feeds are "full" (blog settings in Blogger admin UI)

ecto was then able to get a list of my blogs for various account names as well as recent entries for each one.

One problem I have run into, however, is the multiple accounts thing. I have to quit ecto and restart it in order to post to blogger under a different user name. It seems to be caching login info and not using the user name and password that the particular account is configured with.

Despite that minor inconvenience, I will probably purchase the full version of this software and begin using it extensively. The single driving motivation for this is the multiple account management feature: seeing all the accounts and blogs I have within one application acts as a reminder; I will be more likely to post to my other blogs now :-)

Technorati Tags: macosx, blogging, software

Back at Zenoss HQ

For part of this week, I've been flown back to Annapolis, MD for a few days, ostensibly for the holiday party, but in addition, to coordinate in-person with Mark Hinkle and Rusty Wilson on the infrastructure and code needed for the next 6 month community push. In an effort to jump-start a whole set of community tools that Zenoss wants to provide, I've finished up some pretty sweet (yes, unit tests are sweet and so it automated web application/form processing/monitoring) additions to Zenoss Core and I am now switching gears to integrate community communications and work on the Super Secret Zenoss.net project (lots of Zope3 + Five + Plone hacking). Pretty fun stuff.

It's been really cool being back with the Zenoss core team this week -- lots of changes have happened since August: additional (and pretty sweet) office space, lots more people, lots of awesome code being produced by Erik Dahl, Eric Newton and Chris Blunck that I haven't had a chance to see until now. There a bunch more stuff that I can't let out of the bag yet, but is most excitimentful. Well, it is if you're into monitoring and systems/network management... and the software that helps you do that :-)

Technorati Tags: business, software, zope 3

Google Projects adds Wiki Support

Well, Google has supplied the last little piece of functionality that will allow me to move all of my projects onto their infrastructure.

The best part about it is the integration they've done with svn. I've rigged up rsync scripts in the past when working on SourceForge projects that allowed me to maintain the content in svn. With Google projects, I now get that for free, without any extra overhead or maintenance.

To test this new feature, I began migrating content from the old pymon project page to the hosted project page on google. The wiki syntax is the one many of us have been using for years -- first with MoinMoin and then with trac. Everything worked flawlessly.

The only minor bone I have to pick is the view on the wiki page -- it lists the pages instead of taking one directly to the main page. The listing is good, but I'd prefer an actual page as the default. I've added a link on the main project page to the WikiStart page, though, and that helps a bit. Another nice-to-have would be an automatic "return to parent: ParentPage" link generated at the top
of all new child pages.

All in all, I'm quite excited by the new feature and am looking forward to no longer having to host my own trac/svn anymore!

Technorati Tags: documentation, management, software

Twisted Web Site Gets a Facelift

I'd like to take this opportunity to invite folks to the new super lucky special auspicious yum-yum Twisted web site. And to offer massive grattitude to Huw Wilkins for donating the design and his time to this much-needed effort. As most people know, the Twisted site has been the ghetto boy for a while now, we're all quite delighted to have made it out of The Projects.

We've still got a large number of tasks on our collective plate to polish everything up, and there will doubtless be new issues that need addressing. However, we will all be much happier looking at the site during the on-going work :-)

Technorati Tags: community, twisted, web