Well I was browsing over my WhosOnCFCStats today, as I usually do, just to get a casual glance at the sites referring browsers to me. I have seen a few queries coming from people working on getting WLW working with BlogCFC. I have spent quite a bit of time covering XML-RPC related issues but I suppose a quick recap could not hurt.
I finally had a few minutes to sit down and get some updates done on my ColdFusionBloggers.org mobile page. I implemented the search feature Ray just added in as well as making some minor cosmetic changes to the site to make it look more "ColdFusionBloggery." It is still caching the post query unless you perform a search and even then it will return the top 50 results.
If you want to check it out point your mobile device to http://www.kisdigital.com/cfbloggers.cfm.
Yesterday Ray gave me permission to use CFBloggers.org's click.cfm to redirect browsers to blog posts. This way, the total click count gets updated when you view an article from my mobile feed. Nothing fancy or new, I just thought it was cool.
Also, yesterday Ray added in the ability to search CFBloggers RSS feed which I plan on getting implemented shortly.
Well, I am fairly happy with the current version of the ColdFusionBloggers.org mobile feed I have written. Currently it will update the last 50 posts available on ColdFusionBloggers every five minutes. If you are interested in checking it out, the mobile feed has moved to its new home at http://www.kisdigital.com/cfbloggers.cfm. If you are using an iPhone, iPod, or a Windows CE mobile device and view my articles you should automatically redirected to the mobile version of the site.
Have a great day everyone!
The original blog entry I posted neglected to take into account SES url's. This is an attempt to right that. The code should read:
<cfif findNoCase("Windows CE",CGI.HTTP_USER_AGENT) or
findNoCase("iPhone",CGI.HTTP_USER_AGENT) or
findNoCase("iPod",CGI.HTTP_USER_AGENT) or
findNoCase("BlackBerry",CGI.HTTP_USER_AGENT) >
<cfset mobilePath = rereplace(cgi.path_info, "(.*?)/index.cfm", "")>
<cfif not len(CGI.QUERY_STRING)>
<cflocation url="/mobile.cfm#mobilePath#" addtoken="false">
<cfelse>
<cflocation url="/mobile.cfm#mobilePath#?#CGI.QUERY_STRING#" addtoken="false">
</cfif>
</cfif>
This will automatically redirect a mobile browser to the mobile.cfm page and bring over the path variables correctly instead of ignoring them, as it was doing.
Going mobile seems to be my theme for this week. I know Ray has added a page for iPhone users to view the feed, but when I try to view the page from my Treo's 240x240 screen I have to shrink my browser's text to smallest just to have it remotely readable, otherwise the text is HUGE.
Hopefully this will not be as big an issue once SkyFire Beta 2 is available for download, but that may be a long time in coming. In the interim, I have designed a mobile page for the feed if you are in the same boat as myself. You can find the page here, at the moment: http://amary.kisdigital.com/3/. It will be moved once everything is finalized.
The page cache's for five minutes because I did not want to hammer CFBloggers needlessly. If you want to check it out please feel free. I also welcome any comments or suggestions.
Well, I ran across a few user agents people have used to view the site today and added them into the mobile user agent list. I changed the user agent for Pocket PC's from "PPC" to "Windows CE;". It would see that it would detect some Mac's as PPC because of the user agent string, such as this one: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10_5_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.13. Needless to say that has been changed.
Also, I added in support for the iPod and BlackBerry, since those are two other user agent's I have come across. If there are any others out there please let me know!
Well, I think I am about ready to wrap up the mobile pages for BlogCFC. Trying to keep in theme with the blog, I just created a layout_mobile.cfm page that is almost an exact copy of the layout.cfm file shipped with BlogCFC, minus the navigation pane. This will leave all your default look and feel of your blog in tact.
Also, I created a mobile_comment.cfm since my mobile browser did not play well with pop-ups. This basically removes the pop-up related code and just links the pages directly. Also, all the basic functionality of the comment form is preserved such as the Captcha, Remember Me and Subscribe functions.
Installation:
Installation consists of adding a block of code in the index.cfm file and copying three other files to the blog.
Step 1:
The only real change to the code base is done at the head of the index.cfm page which will redirect mobile browsers to your mobile page. Just include this code underneath Ray's header:
<cfif findNoCase("PPC",CGI.HTTP_USER_AGENT) or
findNoCase("iPhone",CGI.HTTP_USER_AGENT)>
<cfif not len(CGI.QUERY_STRING)>
<cflocation url="/mobile.cfm" addtoken="false">
<cfelse>
<cflocation url="/mobile.cfm?#CGI.QUERY_STRING#" addtoken="false">
</cfif>
</cfif>
This will automatically redirect Pocket PC and iPhones to the mobile page. I do not have an iPhone to play with, but I have tested it out with my PPC and it seems to work just fine.
Step 2:
Copy layout_mobile.cfm to your BLOGROOT\tags folder. This is the layout file for your mobile browsers.
Step 3:
Copy mobile.cfm and mobile_comment.cfm into the BLOGROOT and that is pretty much all there is to it.
Update: The files are now available for download at http://www.kisdigital.com/downloads.
Well, first I would like to say I hope everyone is happy a happy and safe Easter holiday.
About a week ago I finally got with the program and upgraded my cell phone to the newer Treo 700wx. I love the built-in web browser and I tend to use it more than my laptop when I am at home since I am generally too lazy to pull my laptop out. The downside to this is the fact that most of the web sites I browse on a daily basis are not Pocket PC friendly (read: ColdFusion blogs).
To that end, I have started working on a Pocket PC viewer that works with BlogCFC. I have a tentative page up at http://www.kisdigital.com/mobile.cfm for Pocket PC mobile browsers, although I suppose it could be modified for other browsers as well. Please be advised it is still a work in progress so comments are not working correctly at the moment, but I expect to have it all ironed out soon. When you open the main page of the blog it looks for "PPC" in the browser's user agent, if it is found it will automatically redirect to the mobile page. Also, I added some spaces into the post categories since the browser does not wrap text correctly if all the text runs together.
If anyone is interested in adding mobile support to BlogCFC just let me know and I will package it all up when I get it done.
I had an interesting question from Roger, another BlogCFC user. He wanted to know if I had tried using my modified XMLRPC files with ScribeFire, the FireFox blog editor add-on. Using the Custom Blog settings with the Moveable Type API using the standard BlogCFC XMLRPC files, categories were not showing up for some users and some post's would not be posted to the blog. Roger does not want to switch blog software for a minor technical glitch and personally I don't want Roger to switch either.
So for Roger's sake I tested my XMLRPC files against ScribeFire and here are my results. First off, FireFox 3 is required for ScribeFire to work correctly with BlogCFC. Time stamps do not work with ScribeFire in prior versions of FireFox which will lead to BlogCFC throwing an error when you try to post.
I tested using FireFox 3 Beta 4 and ScribeFire 1.4.7 which were the newest versions of both applications I could find. I setup ScribeFire to "Custom Blog" and set the API type to "MoveableType" and everything worked just swimmingly. All the categories show up as you would expect and you can easily edit and repost older articles. The Post as Draft option works as well.
That being said, there are a couple things I do not like about ScribeFire using the MoveableType API. First, there is no way to split a post or if there is, I did not see it off hand. The editor seems a little clunky after using WLW as a blog editor for such a long time. Also, time stamp on the post seems to have a mind of its own. It doesn't seem to default to the current date and time so you had best check it before you post. Those are really my only major gripes I suppose.
Well, hopefully this post addressed some of Roger's problems. I am always open to supporting my XMLRPC files and BlogCFC any way I can. And again, sorry for spamming CFBlogger's this morning. It was for a good cause!
