BlogSchlager WebTech

Archive for December, 2011

Major Revision of this Review

Blogsy is an awesome new app for the iPad. As I originally wrote in my first review, Blogsy is a vast improvement in blog authoring for the iPad.

Here is my evaluation of a new version of the Blogsy editor for multi-platform blog authoring and administration. First off Blogsy has an awesome interface, the buttons are obvious and it only took a quick glance to get this app. The editor window in rich text mode is really nicely done. The default font is about perfect for the iPad. Images are a bit more tricky but with just a little practice it becomes pretty intuitive. The first thing you have to get used to is that you don’t insert the image into the paragraph like you would do with most WYSIWYG editors. Now on first glance you might think that this would be awkward but in fact it works better the way that Blogsy has implemented it. So you insert an image between the paragraphs, above the paragraph that you want it to appear in and then you select the image and align it. So far it has been flawless and what I like about this method of image handling is that you don’t have the frustration of trying to hold and drag an image into a paragraph and having the text sliding all over the place. I have often had to flip other editors into HTML mode and manually code my image position or at least have to add padding (a gutter) around the image. So A+ on images.

So now it is time to try publishing my article. I have already setup my BlogSchlager WebTech blog credentials so let’s go!


Perfect! This is a five-star app, the WordPress folks have some serious competition for iPad editor apps and in my opinion Blogsy has it over them now.


I definitely recommend Blogsy, go out and get it.

IT WORKED!
 
The LibXML2 Fix plugin did the trick. Finally after 4 or 5 days of frustration, I found a fix for my server issue. It all started when I downloaded a new iPad 3rd party blog editor named Blogsy. I started my usual play-by-play of the new app, was very very impressed and when I published my review with it everything went wrong. All of the HTML tags were stripped off, and that is how they went into the database too.  
 
So I started with the output and had to figure out what went wrong. Well that is what the google machine is for, so I started with a couple of ideas from experience. First I figured I screwed it up somehow, that is a good place to start so I undid everything I had done to my WordPress install, turned off all the plugins and reset it to the default template. That was not it. Next, I searched around to see if there was a new feature in WordPress 3.3 with some sort of new shorthand code. OK, that was out there, but I figured go to the extremes first, it was me or it was WordPress. Having eliminated me and WordPress I was left with the server as the issue.  
 
Turns out that it was the server and I had not done enough publishing since I moved my domains in the fall to notice. The fix started with a Google search for WordPress stripping HTML and after clicking around a bit I found links to folks having what looked like my problem. Come to find out my host has a build of PHP with libxml2 that causes fits with the XML-RPC requests mangling the output. Luckily as with most WordPress problems, someone very cleaver built a plugin to address my issue and it is called LibXML2 Fix available through the WordPress Plugin Directory.  
 
I installed it and, YES, it worked out of the box. Here is the proof, I have been writing this with Blogsy.  
 
Below is my test post that actually worked, phew! 

What a mess, sorry folks but this one is a real head scratcher. I have chased some funky web things in my day but this RPC/XML bug is killing me. I am all about 3rd party editors and I am hosed with a bug that only seems to effect 3rd party XML/RPC based editors.

Below is the output I get from all the editors I own, it really bites, oh hey, Happy New Year!!

Richard

table width=100%tbodytrtd class=norm colspan=2 style=margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-right: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.5em; padding-left: 0.5em; span class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;Your password must:nbsp;
/spanul style=margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 2em; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; li style=margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: initial; span class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;be at least 6 characters long/span/lili style=margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: initial; span class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;contain at least one lower case letter and one upper case letter/span/lili style=margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: initial; span class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;contain at least two numbers/span/lili style=margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: initial; span class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;contain at least one special character ( one of !@#$%^*?_~,./lt;gt;?-=_+()[]{};:`|\)/span/lili style=margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: initial; span class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;not be the same as your username/span/lili style=margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: outside; list-style-image: initial; span class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;not be the same as your recent passwords/span/li/ulspan class=Apple-style-span style=border-collapse: separate;Wenbsp;a href=https://secure.ipage.com/knowledgebase/article.bml?ArticleID=1287recommend using a mnemonic/anbsp;to generate a password that will be unique and hard to guess./span/td/trtr/tr/tbody/tablenbsp;

OK,

Sorry to my friends on LinkedIn and Twitter who saw this post last night as I tried desperately to get the promising app Blogsy to work on my WordPress 3.3 blog. Well, nope! If you look at the example below you can see that even a text-based post does not work as advertised. Blogsy adds   or non breaking spaces between paragraphs. I have to say that is just annoying. It is bad enough that it is not handling images correctly, but text, ugh!

I’ll keep looking but for me Blogsy is a bust!!

-Richard

Below was posted by Blogsy:

This is a text only check.nbsp;
nbsp;
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using Content here, content here, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for lorem ipsum will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Here is my evaluation of a new version of the Blogsy editor for multi-platform blog authoring and administration. First off Blogsy has an awesome interface, the buttons are obvious and it only took a quick glance to get this app. The editor window in rich text mode is really nicely done. The default font is about perfect for the iPad.

Images are a bit more tricky but with just a little practice it becomes pretty intuitive. The first thing you have to get used to is that you don’t insert the image into the paragraph like you would do with most WYSIWYG editors. Now on first glance you might think that this would be awkward but in fact it works better the way that Blogsy has implemented it. So you insert an image between the paragraphs, above the paragraph that you want it to appear in and then you select the image and align it. So far it has been flawless and what I like about this method of image handling is that you don’t have the frustration of trying to hold and drag an image into a paragraph and having the text sliding all over the place. I have often had to flip other editors into HTML mode and manually code my image position or at least have to add padding (a gutter) around the image. So A+ on images.

So now it is time to try publishing my article. I have already setup my BlogSchlager WebTech blog credentials so let’s go!

Houston, we have a problem. I am finishing this post up on my MacBook in the native WordPress 3.3 editor. Blogsy has some serious bugs when it comes to adding images to a WordPress 3.3 install. Everything was awesome until I hit the publish button, and everything went pear-shaped. I spent the last half hour trying various things to get Blogsy to correctly display an image to no avail. Ugh, I really do hate it when things like this happen, because I actually do route for the apps I evaluate.

But the Blogsy editor could not get the image code to work on WordPress 3.3, all I could get was a broken div, no opening < anywhere I stuck an image. I tried, left and right alignment, no alignment but nothing worked, so I switched to HTML mode in Blogsy and had all the code correct, pushed publish and got the same messed up div and junk. I added a screen grab from my blog to the left.

So much promise
I really hope that the developers of Blogsy are working on this because I really do like what they are doing and I definitely will look forward to future updates to see if they get the WP 3.3 bugs fixed.

For now I cannot recommend Blogsy but I reserve the right to change my mind and I hope that the developers of Blogsy do get this app polished up, it would be a gem!