Posts

AvantBlog Authentication Work-around

I’ve posted details of an authentication problem work-around for AvantBlog. Basically the problem arises because AvantGo appears to expire sessions after about 24 hours whether you want them to or not (correct me if I’m wrong here anyone…)

To get around this, you can easily configure your AvantBlog channel to pass your username and password along with each request for the channel, as per these instructions;

  1. Go to https://my.avantgo.com/home/ and log in using your *AvantGo* details
  2. Click the “My Device” tab on the left
  3. Click your “AvantBlog” channel to modify its settings
  4. In the “Location” box, add the following onto the end of the address “?username=USER&password=PASS” (no quotes), where USER is replaced with your Blogger.com username, and PASS is replaced with your Blogger.com password.
  5. Save the details (“Save Channel”) and exit AvantGo’s website
  6. Synch your handheld again – you should find that you are now automatically logged into AvantBlog, and this should continue each time you synch, whether you post or not!

I’ll also post my warning that went with the mailing list email I sent out here;

Obviously, this method means that your channel is defined using your actual Blogger.com username and password, in plain text. These details are passed ‘over-the-wire’ in plain txt, so this is not particularly secure. The chances of someone exploiting this are minimal, however if your blog contains any sensitive information or is of a secure nature of any sort, I do not recommend that you configure AvantBlog using this method.

Enjoy!

CSS2 Selectors

I am using CSS2 selectors in the style sheet for the new Dented Reality website to try and avoid some of the problems in layout/sizing that I was having between Mozilla (Netscape), Opera and IE6. I haven’t tested on IE5.x yet, but according to some of the “css hack” sites I have been looking at, I will need to include another hack to make it work on that.

So far, so good.

This whole site is now presented using XHTML and CSS, with no (layout) tables at all. If you view the source, you will see that the code is quite clean as well – I have laid out the source in a manner which makes it more friendly to people using text-only browsers like Lynx, or to people with no style sheet support in general. I have put the content first, and then worked from there, towards the less-important navigation elements etc.

XooMLe-Lite?

I’ve been playing around with the idea of creating a “lite” version of XooMLe, which would have less information passed back in the resulting XML, making it easier to work with for simple projects, and probably quite a bit quicker as well. The system would be based on the current one, but for the search, things would be cut down, so it might just be that I end up making a /search-lite/ method available via the normal XooMLe server.

If this happens, it will probably be a chance for me to clean up the code on the entire project, and then I might also release the code so that you can “install” your own XooMLe server 🙂 Information will be posted here if that’s the case, and I’ll also post to the XooMLe-News mailing list (sign up on the XooMLe Project Page).

Anyone else hanging out for an even simpler version of the XML results? I am thinking of having something like this;

{sample removed}

Comments? Suggestions? Please use the comments link below (to the right).

Dano = AvantBlog-friendly

Slight update on my post about AvantBlog working now – it appears that only blogs which have been converted to the new Dano system are working, if you are still running an older version, then you will need to upgrade before you can use AvantBlog apparently. If anyone finds out anything to the contrary to this, please let me know!

AvantBlog Having Problems

Thanks to changes in the Blogger.com API, AvantBlog appears to be failing to post on all blogs now. I plan on re-writing the Blogger API code that I have available for download which will be used to upgrade AvantBlog and hopefully bring it up to speed with the recent changes.

In the meantime, sign up to the mailing list to be the first to find out when it’s available and working properly again.

Thanks to those who have emailed me to let me know that it wasn’t working 🙂

webpad 3.0 Under Development

I don’t know what the heck prompted me to actually start this project now, but I have started coding/planning on version 3.0 of webpad. The first release will be webpad 3.0 Personal Edition, which will only have a single user function, and will require manual modification of a configuration file for the username/password and other options. Following that, I will also release a separate, more powerful version, which for now I am calling webpad Pro 3.0. This version will include multi-user support, a complete administration and installation interface, and will be targetted towards power-users and businesses.

webpad Personal Edition will remain free for everyone to download and use, but webpad Pro will attract a small licensing fee which is yet to be finalised. I will also be slightly changing the balance of features in each version, so you will find that some features you would like to be available may only be in the Pro version, although I will keep as much as I can in the Personal Edition.