I have finally implemented HTTP authentication (totally insecure unless used with HTTPS) and SSL certificate error ignoring in Blam. This means you can get a file in a folder protected by an .htaccess file and that you can access feeds in sites with a self-signed SSL certificate.

The latter only happens if you activate "Ignore SSL certificate errors" in the preferences. If you don't it will crash (definitely something to be fixed before long).

Whilst I was writing this entry, and being inspired to by Jorge, I have finally implemented using the clipboard's content as the default URI for a new feed. And now a feed's name will contain the URI until we receive the feed and can parse its title. This should bring the bug count down a bit.

Labels: blam

I released blam 1.8.3 last night. The only thing that has changed since pre1 is the addition of a manual page and the version number. The 1.8 releases will stilll have Mikael as author, as he has done basically all the work.

The Debian package has hit unstable so it should reach your local mirror soon, which means this version should still make it into Etch (Debian 4.0).

Development will slow down, as the exams are coming, and I will be busy during the next couple of months. I will hack on it more next year, but I don't know how much time I will have.

Labels: blam, debian

Due to a few strange turns of events, I've come from not being sure if I could tackle being the package maintainer for blam to inheriting it.

Mikael has fallen in love with google reader and has stopped developing it, so I though "Why not?", asked a few questions, and got a list of things to do with it. I will be adding a few of my own to that list, but the existing one should keep me quite busy.

The one I've been tackling since Tuesday is the themes. There is support for them in the code, and you could choose which one to use by using gconftool and editing the key "/apps/blam/ui/theme", but that's not really user friendly. What we need is a pull-down menu that lets you select the theme you want from a list. Michael (It seems every big contributor to the code-base is called some variation of that name. My brother's name is Miguel, does that count?) had already tried, but "failed miserably" according to his comment in the code. I have succeeded.

It's definitely not pretty and there is room for improvement, but it is working, which is what I'm interested in right now. For some reason I can't get access to the theme manager the proper way (and the same call later does succeed, so I don't know what to think) so I had to put a function at a higher level to search the themes for me. As I said, it's a mess, but it's a working mess.

I also fixed an infinite loop which I'm told people don't like. It triggers when you select a theme. This will change the gconf theme entry, which will call the notify handler, which sets the new theme and in the way makes sure we have the proper theme by setting it in the gconf, which calls the notify handler, which sets the new theme... I think you get the idea. I had devised a very complicated and fragile way to work around it, but in the end I decided to actually fix it and only set the theme in the gconf if it's different to the one we have (some may think it's a work-around, but I call it a fix).