iBlog load time poll

If you use iBlog, read this entry, and have a spare moment please
cast a vote in the iBloggers.net forum about how fast iBlog loads on your
machine. Link: http://www.ibloggers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1504

[Edit: corrected the URL. Thanks,
Rich!]

iBlog 2 preview released

As of today Mac users can finally get a glimpse of the upcoming iBlog 2.

After a few delays in the past months, it missed the official alpha
/ beta transition point by a week. It honestly was a close call. A pair of
recently discovered necessities, together with the strong pursuit of maximum
flexibility, slowed things down.

The good news is that the road
ahead is brighter & shorter. I know all too well it has been a long wait.
But, iBlog 2 has come a long way. Rebuilding from the ground up with absolute
emphasis on flexibility, customizability & user friendliness - based on v1
user feedback and new trends - takes a lot of thought and effort. So, yes, it’s
not complete just yet, but it’s close. There are a few more exciting features on
the drawing board, which I’m sure will be well received. So, if you have a spare
moment, download it, have look, share some thoughts in the forum and give Sarat
a thumbs up

iBlog v2 preview - also known as beta 1 - is available
from Lifli at ibloggers.net

Now Playing iPod Color themes

Here are two iPod Color images to use with Now Playing, discussed earlier this week.

Just
save the image to your hard drive in the Theme subfolder of Now Playing and
rename to theme.png.

The first is a 150px wide blank iPod Color
screen:

The second is a 150px wide blank iPod Color with a slightly enlarged
screen area. A regular scaled down iPod’s screen is too small to contain text at
a decent size (plus small fonts often render bad), so I bumped the screen up by
a few %

Enjoy!

Display iTunes music info on your blog

MacDude pointed out that you can use Now Playing to display iTunes track info on your
blog. Now Playing is a little widget that checks iTunes every 15 seconds and
then can upload the track data to any FTP, .mac or WebDav location. You can
either use one of the default themes or build a custom one, which is music to my
ears.

Unfortunately the documentation is in Japanese only and to
make matters worse their example XML file does not contain all the needed code
to make it work. Existing themes only address font styling. So, it took me a
while to find trick to get positioning sorted out, by adding an extra variable.
I don’t know all the ins & outs of how to customize this particular Now
Playing xml file; but this is what you need:

Create a subfolder under
Theme. In that folder you need a theme.plist file with xml info and a theme.png
image as
background.

The
first two # for PosAlbum PosArtist & PosSong indicate the left & right
margin. The third # is the vertical spacing from the bottom.

Add any
custom PNG image you wish to use for background, (set spaces & align
accordingly) and you
get:

I wrote the author asking about some English documentation.
Babelfish didn’t want to help translate.

iBlog 1.4.2

Lifli made iBlog 1.4.2 available with the
following updates (it’s not announced yet):

1. Uses the latest .Mac
SDK from Apple for iDisk publishing.
2. Added support for printing entries
from the Add/Edit entry window.
3. The next and previous buttons in the
photo entry window circle through the photo collection.
4. Fixed some
issues in the RSS 2.0 feed file.

This update should help with
podcasting & photo publishing.

Max - a 7 style iBlog template set goes live

Still using the standard iBlog template because you don’t really have a
“green thumb”?

Suffer no more. Thanks to our fellow iBlogger, Robt
from naafront.com; you can now put the standard iBlog template set aside and use
“Max“.

Max is
Robt’s latest masterpiece; which features full screen width with fluid blog body
and fixed side column; 7 color schemes and lots of CSS goodies to spice up
paragraphs & images. To make sure anybody can use his design, he created a
tutorial site: Blog By Numbers, which covers the design’s
background, all the features and a quick start guide. Check it out!

I hope a few people think it’s worth promoting Robt’s work by “word
of blog”, ( I certainly do,) as he put a lot of effort into it to benefit all
iBlog users & iBlog. Do you know anybody that still uses the default
template set? Give ‘m a nudge in the right direction

iBlog 1.4.2 b2

Lifli announced an interim build towards iBlog 1.4.2
at iBloggers.net.

You can now print
entries, next & previous buttons have been updated and publishing to .mac now uses the
latest
.Mac SDK (version 1.1) - which may be of interest to those with
certain publication issues.

RSS headlines in your blog with RSS Digest

During a quick “google” to answer a question at the ibloggers
forum; I came across RSS
Digest this afternoon.

It’s a donation supported website
where you can create a customized headline version of any valid RSS feed. You
copy/paste the RSS (of the site which’ headlines you would like on your
blogpage), click create the code, choose a few options, copy/paste the resulting
javascript link in your template and voila.

Example:
———–
MacCentral
Headlines

Certainly
a nice extra tool for our toolbox.

iBlog 1.4.1

Lifli released iBlog 1.4.1, which fixes some outstanding small
issues: jpg attachment preview, extra .jpg files on the iDisk are no more,
support for RSS2.0 with enclosure tags, all templates are visible again, etc and
better menu layout.

Installed the update. No issues noted.

dotmac.info pinging issue resolved

I posted a request over in the dotmac.info forums today, so that we could find
out what the issue is with so many iblogs not showing in the recent entries.
Turns out it was the ‘ in for instance icerabbit’s blog that was not accepted.
Big thanks to August for looking into it so promptly and adjusting the code to
accept ‘. Just made a test entry, and it was properly listed as updated on the
dotmac.info
homepage. Hope other people have the same success.

If your
blog now shows in dotmac.info as updated, but you don’t see your icon / image.
Double check the URL you registered. Search for your own .mac username, then
view the details of your registered page. On the right you’ll see a link to
“update this page” where you’ll have access to the URL. Also make sure the
blogname on that page, matches your blogname in iBlog.

Good luck

iBlog 1.3.8 released

Lifli
just released iBlog 1.3.8, a critical update for iBlog 1.3.7,
which fixes an issue that may cause loss of blog data under some
circumstances.

iBlog Backup script

If you are using iBlog, then Paul Baily’s iBlog
Backup is likely THE must have tool.

It automates backing
up and restoring your iBlog data and preferences into a few clicks process. I
helped a little testdriving it, and it’s really a handy tool. No need to
struggle with the finder, iBlog Backup will do it for you.

So, don’t
risk losing your entire blog, … keep a compressed backup around which is just
as easily restored as it was backed up.

iBlog 1.3.6 released

Another welcome update with a few new features.

iBlog dream

I was actually dreaming about iBlog last night. I know! I
must have been thinking about it a little bit too much? It was actually great.
In my dream, I woke up, to my greatest surprise out of the blue update 1.3.9 was
out and it included ALL these features that so many others & I had given
feedback about. It was very polished, intuitive, … and a scream to customize.

That said, I heard from Sarat about some of the 1.3.6 features and
it sounds like it’ll be a nice update. I’m tickled already.

Extra buttons for your blog

I created a few extra blog buttons for my blog, to
replace some of the different credits & “powered by” images into something
more compact, uniform & coherent. The buttons are based on the design of
existing buttons for blogorama, blogwise, etc.

Available new buttons
are: iBlog - Haloscan - Apple - Mac OS X - Mac.com - JAlbum - Activetopic -
based on their known icons or logo. I also have Valid RSS HTML XHTML CSS
buttons. Some other buttons were refitted to size & received a lick of
paint.

If you like any of them, you may download them here, from my
site to use with your blog. (no direct linking please)
All I hope I may
ask for is a little link back.
And, if you can’t
resist, I have an icerabbit blogbutton!

Please note that I’m
still working on these buttons a little bit when I have some extra time.

PS: I’m aware of a few point RGB difference in the grey background
shade, but I’m not sure what causes it; as they were all created with the same
template. Maybe the PNG-8 compression causes it? I’ll try fixing it ASAP
though.

iBlog webring code (solved)

Ed.: The iBloggers webring panel (somewhere down the left
column) is now positioning properly.

Big thanks to Randall who pointed me out how I
can view the external JavaScript code. Turns out it’s just HTML with an
invisible 250 px table around the nested iBlog webring table. Table 1 forces the
DIV to expand. Table 2 is centered in the 250 px and you get the odd padding
effect. Easy fix. I currently don’t call the external script. I just have my own
little stripped down HTML code there.

… it’s just great to see it
properly positioned.

iBlog 1.3.5 released

Available via “iBlog - Check for updates” and at Lifli
Downloads.