I've been working on a major overhaul of RapidBlog -- Before you get too excited I need to be clear that (so far) the changes are all internal -- I'm completely re-doing my syncing & back end communications to blogger. The old engine actually worked pretty well but I had a defect come in (the dreaded 404/resource not found) and I spent about two days looking at the code for the best way to fix it. It was then I realized that

1. I was scared to touch the code
2. There were sections that were there for reasons I don't remember why I did it.

This was a sure sign to me that I needed to do what we call refactoring. Basically I decided to re-do the entire engine taking all of the learnings I had to make it into something more stable & robust. The upshot of this is that I have had my head down pretty low working on the internal guts -- I hope when 1.2 comes out to add a bunch of new/requested features but for now at minimum I want to roll out my new engine. -John

Buy any 3 plugins and use the coupon code RW36ROCKS

Sale Ends May 25th 9:00pm Pacific Time

By the time you read this RW3.6 will have landed. I've been testing it for a while and overall I think you'll be happy with it. I wanted to comment on a few specifics with regards to my Plugins and RW3.6

• All of my plugins should work fine with RW3.6. The one known problem is that the SiteMap plugin will not show blog archives -- I'm working on a fix and hope to have one out eventually but I wasn't able to resolve the issues around it in time. Download 1.38 or greater and enjoy trouble free sitemaps in RW3.6 and RW3.5
• I do plan on enhancing RapidBlog to take advantage of the tag clouds

So while I have been testing against RW3.6 there is a possibility that something is not right -- If you do find a problem please let me know.

Just a short note -- I just discovered that somehow I'm missing some emails -- I don't know where the problem is (yet) and I think I've found all of the missing ones but if you sent me a note and haven't received a response please go ahead and resend it. Sorry for the problem. -John

I want my Chumby, if you haven't seen it run over and a take a look. It's a very cool alarm clock and is Exactly what I've been wanting for a while.

I've been watching the chumby site for what feels like a year now and they have stilll not released it. Comeon guys, release the chumby to the world!

-John

Parts of blogger were down over the last 18 hours. It now is back up. If you have experienced RapidBlog problems (blog now showing up, strange errors, etc.) it should all be working now.

I've been working on improving my FAQ's for the last few weeks. In general I've added quite a few entries and gone for a more 'traditional' FAQ layout (questions/answers).

I was using Accordion which is a fabalous plugin but it made doing searches on the web site a little tough, let me know if you like these new 'web 1.0' style FAQ's.

In order to avoid total loss of eye candy I've also included a comment and rating to each entry. check it out

PlusKit
Lockdown
RapidBlog
SiteMap

I'm always interested in new web development technologies or software on the mac for (ahem) the obvious reasons. I was pretty interested to see a blog post over the weekend from the guys at Panic that they would be releasing a significant product on monday for folks who do web development. So it's released, it's called coda and it looks to be designed for guys who design by hand (?) I haven't tried it yet since I'm at my day job (thanks to RapidBlog I can comment though) It looks pretty interesting, they include a text editor/shell/refernce/css editor. If you code your own sites (or need to debug sites) it's probably pretty valuable. I'm not sure, however, that the average RapidWeaver customer would use it much (but maybe I'm wrong) -- Probably power users will find it valuable for the last minute 'tweaking' or for those of us who write themes or plugins it'll be great to debug but I'm not sure it's a general purpose development tool (unless, of course, you like to do it all from scratch) Anyway I'll play with it tonight and update this post as appropriate. [Update] Well I've spent about an hour with it. It sure is purty. No doubt about it it's the slickest edit your site with raw HTML tool ever produced. Will I use it? Probably.... I'm a junkie for tools like this and it'll come in handy often enough. Of course I'll probably continue to do most of my editing with HyperEdit

If you use RapidFlickr I wanted to pass along a note that I just discovered that Flickr implemented a new method for constructing photo API's. What does this mean to you? New pictures will now start occasionally returning 'photo not found' I'm not sure when the exact cutoff date is but I believe anything before April should still work fine. I'm working on a fix that should be available in a few days.

Well I did it. I had been debating for a long time about WWDC. Honestly it's a big commitment. I need to take a week off of my 'day' job and it's a $1300 ticket. Fortunately for me I live very close to San Francisco so I can commute in every day (~1.5 hours) or (more likely) I will stay with my wifes parents who live in San Francisco very close to a train station (I can get from their house to Moscone in about 10 minutes!) Anyway, yesterday I got another promotional flier and noticed the early bird discount ends sometime next week (I don't offhand remember the exact date) and decided to buy a ticket. So I'm now $1300 poorer but hopeful that by the end of WWDC I will have completely forgotten that. As I've mentioned before I'm still relatively new to the Mac (maybe 2 years at this point)so I'm not really sure what to expect at a WWDC. I'll get to watch his Job-ness give the 'note which will be fun and I'm looking forward to the various lectures & labs but we'll see if it ends up being worthwhile. I will, of course, report back (what I can anyway :-) )so stay tuned to the blog during WWDC week. Oh, and here is where I get to start a unfounded rumor. Apple will announce 3rd party support for iPhone at WWDC and in an attempt to jumpstart development will hand out a phone to all attendess!