MobiLogger - Your Mobile Blogging Tool -------------------------------------- 1. Few words from the MobiLogger author: MobiLogger intends to do one thing perfectly: Allow you to post blog entries, consisting of various media types, to your blog(s), wherever you are. From my personal experience in maintaining and posting to a few weblogs, I have noticed few major pain points. * You need to carry your laptop (or sit in front of your desktop) with you if you intend to post new blog entries to your blog(s). I have tried to post blog entries using a smartphone or by SMSing them to the online provider's SMS service, but it's just a major pain to maintain the blogs with a device that can fit in your pocket. Well, until now that is. MobiLogger intends to make maintaining your blogs on your Android-enabled phone easy and fun. * There's rarely enough time to concentrate in writing a blog posting. When you feel like you have something to share with the world, then the baby starts to cry or you need to hurry to a meeting or need to catch a bus or something like that. MobiLogger is designed to be run on your Android phone, so now you don't need to sit in front of a computer to make notes of your ideas. MobiLogger won't change the baby's diapers or attend the meeting for you, but now you can make note of your idea quickly, and then when you really catch that bus, you can start working on your posting while in the bus. * Would you like to maintain a blog which has nice photos or other pictures? With traditional blog authoring, you need to take the pictures with your camera and transfer them to your computer, upload them to the image service web server and then link them in your blog. MobiLogger allows you to do this, but also let's you blog them directly from your Android phone's camera. Same applies for video, audio and other media content. (BTW, not all of these features are available in this first release, but they are going to be when they are done&tested!) * Do you have multiple blogs which you maintain concurrently? One with Google, one with LiveJournal and one with wordpress? You can use mobilogger to maintain all of them from the same user interface. MobiLogger, like every other bit of software I write on my my free time, intends to make my life easier by solving problems I have had. Like this pain of maintaining blogs, for instance. Hopefully it can solve your problems like it will solve mine. Best regards, Juha Kervinen joker@iki.fi MobiLogger developer 2. Mobilogger 2008 features and roadmap Plan is to release the software with an open source (Apache) licence. Then I intend to do 5 major releases per year and intermediate bug fix and security fix releases as often as required. * Release 2008.1, end of March, Android Developer Challenge: - Save, edit and delete quick memos - Save, edit and delete blog entries - Save, edit and delete user blog service settings - Support for publishing to Google Blogger blogs - Support for publishing to LiveJournal blogs - Support for publishing to Wordpress blogs - Support for basic rich text editing features (bold, italic, links...) - Support for embedding images from random URL - Support for embedding HTML - Edit and save system settings - Reset MobiLogger to "factory defaults" * Release 2008.2, during April-May, Publish software under Apache Licence - First public open source release - Codebase cleanup - Further testing - GUI enhancements - Establish project site (sf.net or code.google.com or similar) - Establish public bug tracking - Establish project mailing list - Establish project master TODO list - (Hopefully recruit developers and testers to the project) * Release 2008.3, during summer 2008 (Jun - August), - (depending on the availability of Android phones) On-Device testing - Support for languages other than english - Support for youtube video embedding - Support for embedding images from the device camera to blog postings - Support for embedding audio links * Release 2008.4, during autumn 2008 (around october 2008) - Two way blogging support (load the entries to your phone and send them back) - Support for embedding audio from device (podcasting) - Support for embedding video from device (video blogging) * Release 2008.5, Last release of 2008 - Enhance image, audio and video formats with more metadata (geography information and author information) - Support other android applications to "blog this" by sending an intent which is received by MobiLogger. From end of 2008 onwards, the release planning is done by the committed core developers (hopefully others will join the effort) based on the top most requested features. 3. Using MobiLogger 3.1 Installing and running the application The application database is created when the application is started the first time, so no manual installation tasks, other than the obvious, installing the MobiLogger.apk to the device should be required. For MobiLogger to be really useful, you need to create a least one blog configuration, which you can use to post your entries to. See next section on how to do this. All of the features of MobiLogger can be accessed from the main menu either by using the menu button of by using a hotkey. 3.2 Creating blog configurations Select the blog type using the "Type of this blog" widget. Currently, MobiLogger supports the following blog configuration types: 3.2.1 Google Blogger Over GData API (Blogger / API) You just need to enter your Blogger (Google Login) user name and password, and press the "Fetch" button. All your Blogger blogs are retrieved and you can select the one which you want to use from MobiLogger (by repeating the process you can configure multiple Blogger blogs). After selecting the blog to configure, just enter a name which makes sense to you and then press the Save button. This method is tested against: - BlogSpot.com website 3.2.2 Google Blogger Over HTTPS (Blogger / HTTPS) In the case that Blogger API fails for some reason, or is just too slow to use on your device, OR you don't have a fixed price deal from your operator and want to save in bandwidth costs, this Blogger interface implementation is provided for you. You first need to go to Blogger and find out the sequence of numbers which describes your user id. You find this by going to the blogger profile page and looking at the url (something like http://www.blogger.com/profile/[userid]. !!NOTE!! The limitation here is that you are only able to have one blog configured in Blogger! In the case you are maintaining multiple blogs in Blogger, you need to use the API interface. There's no technical reason that this would not work with many blogs, but since having only one blog is probably the most typical case and digging through the data of all of your blogs would increase bandwidth costs, this interface currently only supports one blog. This method is tested against: - BlogSpot.com website 3.2.3 MetaWeblog compliant posting This posting method can be used if your blog service supports the Metaweblog API. In this case you need to provide the XML-RPC URL address which is used for posting. The username and password are your blog's username and password. This method is tested against: - Wordpress.org website blog, where the post URL is of format http://yourblog.wordpress.com/xmlrpc.php - Wordpress version 2.0.9 installation (other versions should also work) 3.2.4 LiveJournal API This method of posting works with your LiveJournal blog. Just enter your LiveJournal user account name and password and press the Fetch button to select your LiveJournal blog to use. This method is tested against: LiveJournal.com website 3.3 Creating Memos This feature is accessible through the main menu. Memos are just quickly editable bits of text which you can use on the go when you need to make a note of something. For example "Remember to blog about X!". You can edit and save memos, use the menu options to save. If you want to use a memo as a base for your blog entry, select "promote memo" option from menu. This will make a blog entry out of your memo. 3.4 Creating Blog enties This feature is accessible through the main menu. Creating blog entries are the real beef of MobiLogger. You can edit the title and content of the blog entry, and also add basic text styling to the text. From the "Embed" option you can select to embed various items such as images, URLS and random HTML to your posting. *** NOTES ABOUT EMBEDDING - Embedding video and audio (podcasting and videoblogging) will be supported in the later releases of MobiLogger. - Embedding invalid HTML may lead to publishing failures. The validity checking is still lacking. This will be fixed very soon. Blog entries can be saved locally to your device by selecting the "Save" selection on the menu options. In case you have created blog configurations as instructed in the section 3.2, you can publish the blog entry to these blogs. First, invoke the "Publish" option from the options menu, and select the blog configuration you want to use for publishing. After this you will see a preview of your entry and when you push the publish button, the entry is published to the configured blog. When an entry is being published, it's also saved locally to your device. Current version of MobiLogger cannot yet be used to republish some already publised blog entry (that's in your web log), but in the future the plan is to support also this. 3.5 Managing saved data From the MobiLogger main menu, invoke "Manage Stored Data" to edit or delete Memos, Blog Entries and Blog Configurations that are stored to your device. 3.6 Managing mobilogger settings From the MobiLogger main menu, you can invoke "MobiLogger settings" to configure some of the global properties of the application. In the current version not all of these have any effect, but hey, at least the feature is there.. =) 3.7 Exiting MobiLogger This option quits MobiLogger and returns you to the device's main menu or some other application that is running under MobiLogger. 4. Known issues and a TODO list for the application (see also the planned release/feature list in section 2) * The initial database creation is at times problematic. If this fails, it results in the application not starting) the best option in the emulator is to delete the emulator data and reinstall t he application. You can also try to manually create the path "/data/data/fi.iki.joker.mobilogger/databases", this some times helps. If everything else fails, create the DB using sqlite3 command from the command line. The db is a file called "mobilogger.db" in the databases directory, and the Create statements can be found from the MobiLogger's db package, class DBUtil. If this happens during the ADC evaluation phase, I would like to be contacted for support... =) It's a SDK bug if the createDatabase method fails... =) * The "rich text" editing features of blog entry editor don't always result in a validly formatted xhtml to be send to the server when publishing your blog entry. This can result in a publishing failure. It would be desirable to use an external rich text editor if such an application would be available to Android at some point. * There's issues with the embedded version of the Blogger API. It sometimes fails to fetch the blogs, especially if run two times in a row. In this case (make sure that your username and password are ok and) keep trying. You may need to close MobiLogger and retry. * Blog configuration type X is not supported. Well, the plan is to support all the possible blog system types and APIs, but this will happen when people present these as a requirement to the project. * Blog configuration editing has issues. It's generally safer to delete old config and reconfigure new blog rather than to edit an existing configuration. This is a top priority fix! * A more thorough ToDo list will be provided for the developers when MobiLogger is released to the general coding public!