Blogging to Manila from Flock.

If this works, I will have successfully blogged from Flock. To get posting to my Manila site working, I had to bypass Flock’s blog autosetup and hand-edit the configuration file, which on my Windows machine is saved in my Documents and Settings directory under Application DataMozillaFlockprofiles[default]blog_alpha.rdf.

The problem with Flock’s autodetection technology is that both the Blogger and Metaweblog API attempt to use the GetUsersBlogs API call, which is not implemented on Manila. All I had to do to get it working, though, was to save a profile that called Blogger using the Metaweblog API, then edit the RDF file to set all the correct user ids and URLs based on my RSD file.

A few things I like about the blog editor—the built-in Flickr topbar is cool, cool, cool. And the UI for the actual editor is pretty nice. I especially like the option to show me the HTML of my post. I have used enough “WYSIWIG” editors that end up generating nasty HTML that I don’t really trust them anymore. —Flock is no exception to this rule, btw; rather than wrapping paragraphs in <p></p>, it ends a paragraph with a <br /><p>. Bad bad bad, particularly if your blog is HTML 4.01 Transitional. But once you drag up the splitbar to get to the raw HTML you can edit to your heart’s content. Which is good, because Flock totally mangles HTML entities. I put a curly quote in the HTML view with & rsquo;, which turned into the proper ’ in the preview; I then went and copied and pasted that into another place in the preview, but it pasted as a high ascii character rather than an HTML entity. Bad, bad, bad. And when you hit Italics in the preview, it formats it as <span style=”font-style: italic;”></span> rather than the more semantic <em></em>. Bad, bad, bad, bad. Forget what I said about the blog editor; it needs work, and I will be posting some bug reports.

Also, the draft functionality is weird. When you save as draft, your post window closes, and you have to open a new blog window, switch to the Draft account, open the Blog topbar, and click on the saved post to get it to open. Then you have to mouse down in the text field to enable the Publish button. Not intuitive.