[Kde-pim] KDE & Blogging

[techno_plume-coding at yahoo.com]

Hi.

Between the mailing list and #kontact IRC channel, there's been a lot
of discussion about KDE and blogging/journalling lately. Allen Winters
and a couple've others suggested I mail the list and go over these a
little. Please fill in any missing stuff! :)

KLuJe, is a KDE client for the blogging journal site LiveJournal.com
and sites based on LiveJournal.  Pretty stable. It's been around for
some years, with over 15,000 downloads of the packaged version. I
haven't been involved with it for all that time myself though. =)

Pradeepto got in touch with me a little while back and proposed moving
the sources into KDE SVN (from SourceForge.net).  He explained as he
saw things we could move it to trunk/playground/pim initially to expose
it to more developers; then, where necessary address any bugs and
extend features for the KDE 3 series, and make a separate module for
porting it to Qt4/KDE4. I imported it into playground/pim in the last
day or so. It might also be worth placing the sources somewhere in
/branches/work/ for work on the 3.x series, if there are no objections?

Christian Weilbach's been clearly working hard lately on the KBlog
library, which supports the Blogger 1.0 and MetaWeblog API. He is also
responsible for KBlogger. KBlogger is a pretty simple kicker applet,
and  supports the Blogger 1.0 and MetaWeblog APIs. Its docs say it
won't be around in KDE4. Recently Christian brought up via the list the
possibility of porting it to KDE4 – perhaps making a similar plasmoid
for KDE4 users.

Mike Arthur, is interested in working on a Google SOC project involving
blogging and KDE-PIM. URL (again, quoted with his permission) with a
description is here: http://mikearthur.co.uk/sockontact2007.pdf.
Briefly, Mike has talked about adding the ability to Kontact to post to
blogs/journals with some richtext support & image insert functionality.

My own thoughts are an integrated app could work well. See, the
KBlogger applet gave quick access to basic but useful features such as
body+subject. But there are further things any blog client offers e.g
ping custom servers like weblogs.com/technorati, LJ-specific stuff like
custom friends groups and similarly for other portals. 

There are basic client features: post body+title. There are extra
features: Rich Text / HTML editor, and spellchecking. There are further
features: Such as image uploading & manipulation, save draft
functionality. And, there are advanced features: multiple
categories/tags, comment options, insertion of details for currently
playing music/mood/reading or other metadata, templates, pinging to
custom aggregator URIs e.g. weblogs.com, support for custom anchor tags
from the various blogging portals, etc., etc. It could all be
integrated but perhaps is a lot to incorporate into Kontact under the 
Korganizer framework.

Example blogging clients are w.bloggar, KLuJe, and ecto. When talking
about these they can post to both hosted blog services and
run-on-own-server solutions: MovableType, TypePad, LiveJournal based
sites, WordPress, Drupal, etc. So both can be taken into account.
Usually some sort of API lets you post.

The good thing about standards... is there are so many to choose from.
Blogging is no exception. APIs: Blogger 1.0, Blogger 2.0, LiveJournal
Flat, LiveJournal XML-RPC (LiveJournal also supports Blogger/Atom APIs
for some features), MovableType API, MetaWeblog, b2API, Atom 1.0. Right
now KDE has support for the two APIs mentioned earlier.

One of the main questions in the air at the moment is a sort've 'text
editor or word processor' one. While thinking about this on the train
the other day =), it seemed different bloggers have different needs, to
say nothing of the breadth of APIs (some worth supporting, some I think
less so). One thing talked about was some blog posting ability in
Kontact versus bells and whistles. Allen Winters also said blog posting
ability through KOrganizer was desirable. Maybe there is a need for
standalone app for those wanting extra/metadata features, there's
definite benefit to catering for users who want something with a small
program footprint to do something simple. Similarly, if software you
use a lot can do more things you want, then it becomes easy to see why
you use it a lot.

Hope I remembered most things.

Kind regards,

Richard.
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