Well, call me crazy, but I had some time off work, so I went ahead and worked on webpad Personal Edition 3.0. I got a lot done in the week or so that I was working on it, and it’s nearing a point that I will be happy with, barring one major hurdle: blog operations.
In version 3.0, I’ve decided to attempt to support 3 platforms for blogging, namely:
- blosxom (what I use)
- Blogger (what I used to use)
- MovableType (which I’ve never used)
This isn’t a problem in itself (apart from the complexity it adds to those operations :), but I don’t want to release anything for Blogger which is based on the current Blogger API, because they are planning on implementing the Atom API in the near future, which will be much better than what they’ve got now. In the meantime, blosxom is easy to support (filesystem-based, what could be better?) and I think MovableType is also going to be changing their API structure in the near future (as mentioned here).
I’m leaving all the blog operations until as late as possible in the development cycle for this version of webpad, but basically if the blog vendors don’t sort themselves out, I’ll just release this with blosxom support, and perhaps support for the existing APIs, then extend support and release a patch once Blogger and MT have implemented their new APIs.
This version also has some more advanced features like renaming and deleting files, creating new folders and XHTML compliance on all HTML that gets created directly by webpad. The interface has been updated as well to make it a little slicker, and hopefully load a little quicker (more reliance on CSS). The big news though, is that this version will be compatible with Mozilla browsers as well as IE (still working on some of the HTML tools for Mozilla though…). Coming along, coming along. Get on the mailing list at https://beaulebens.com/webpad/ if you’re not already, because I’ll be sending an email to that list with notification when webpad Personal Edition 3.0 is released.