iBlog 1.3B6 - Conversion Secret Revealed, Along With a Major Flaw


Here we go again. I fired up iBlog 1.2 last night to add a short entry and the program notified me that Lifli has released version 1.3B6. According to the release notes, this version has:


1. Improved FTP facility.
2. Improved publishing speed.

I for one am very happy to hear about the improved publishing speed since, as my blog has grown steadily larger, version 1.2 takes longer and longer to publish the blog.

Unfortunately, 1.3B6 still shows the same problem as previous 1.3 versions and would not convert my 1.2 based blog to 1.3 format. I got no error when opening my blog in 1.3B6, and it makes a copy of the blog source files in their new location at ~/Library/Application Support/, but when I attempt to Preview the blog, 1.3B6 still throws the following error:


I had a brief communication with Lifli technical support the last time that this occurred, and they told me that it was a "conversion problem." This got me thinking: I had opened my 1.2 blog in a much earlier version of 1.3beta and it converted just fine; what if I again opened my 1.2 blog in an earlier version, let it convert, and then opened it in 1.3B6? The only old version of iBlog that I still had lying around was 1.2.6, so I gave it a try. After opening the blog with 1.2.6, I then opened it again in 1.3B6, made a test entry, and performed a Preview. Voila! No error this time! Looks like the conversion mystery is solved.

Naturally the first thing I tried in 1.3B6 was using the HTMLCode tags. Although it's a bit of a hassle to have to put the tags on their own line, and doing so sometimes adds extra blank lines in the entry text, the tags work well and are almost a workable solution for things like indenting paragraphs and other formatting that doesn't translate from iBlog's paragraph formatting toolbar to HTML. Why do I say "almost?" Because there's a monkey-wrench in the works: the "a href" tag. "a href" is the HTML tag responsible for creating hyperlinks. When you use the Hyperlink tool in an iBlog entry, iBlog creates the hyperlink using the HTML "a href" tag. But here's something you may not know: iBlog will create a hyperlink if you type text containing <a href....

What this means is that if you write any blog entries that contain HTML listings (as many of mine do), and if any of those listings contains any "a href" tags, then iBlog is going to try and turn your listing into a live link. This is an easy problem to solve in iBlog 1.2. Instead of using the characters < and > to sandwich the text, you can use the HTML character entities &lt; and &gt;.

iBlog 1.3B6, however, does not resolve the entity codes; it leaves them in the text as they're typed; ampersand, colon, and all. If you type the listing using real greater-than and less-than brackets, then iBlog 1.3B6 attempts to turn the text into a hyperlink. Likewise, if you try and fool 1.3B6 by using the character entity codes sandwiched between HTMLCode tags, 1.3B6 still attempts to turn the text into a hyperlink.

So basically, almost all of the "Using iBlog" entries I've posted that contain HTML listings are impossible to convert to 1.3 format because the <a href> tag is not handled the way in which all other HTML tags are handled in iBlog. With any other tag, if it falls outside of the HTMLCode tags, then it's interpreted as plain text. IMHO, this is the way that the "a href" should also be handled. There should be only two ways to make a hyperlink:
1. Using the Hyperlink tool from the toolbar.
2. Using "a href" enclosed within HTMLCode tags.

And if the &lt; and &gt; entity codes are used anywhere, even within HTMLCode tags, they should not be interpreted as real < and > characters. I've reported the problems to Lifli tech support, hopefully this will be something they can fix quickly and easily.

Posted: Sun - September 7, 2003 at 11:37 AM          

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