Blogger JavaScript Library Release and Blog.gears Offline

A new Blogger JavaScript Client Library has been released by Google a few days ago. I'm just quoting the announcement below:

The Blogger GData JS Client library enables developers to read and write blog posts using calls to our JavaScript library. This is a full client library, with support for authenticated access to private data and read-write capabilities. Now you can create Blogger applications and mashups that can read and write data from your Blogger blogs. No server-side programming is required. Your application can run on any domain, too. No proxying is required.

Sounds nice. Some samples are available here. One of them is blog.press, a sample Blogger app that allows you to create, edit and delete blog posts while online, using only client-side code and the JavaScript client library. Another more elaborated sample, blog.gears, adds offline capabilities to the Blogger app by combining the Gdata JavaScript Client Library with Google Gears. Even more nice.

I'm writing this post using blog.gears and I'm currently offline. Let's save it now and see how blog.gears handles this... - Saving post and putting network back - Ok, I'm online again. I've just reopened this post, everything looks in place. Good. I'm going ahead.

This was a really quick and simple test but still very interesting. Think about Google Docs. We know Google will continue to roll out the JavaScript client libraries to other services as soon as they can. We know offline mode is a requirement for Google Docs for real world usage (and competition with Microsoft). So, how far from this feature do you think Google is now ? Import/export would require Gears to support a more high level language than JavaScript so I'm not expecting it soon but what about a "basic" offline mode ?

Enough for now, let's post this.

Publishing code snippets to blogger

I'm using blogger for some month now but was still looking for an easy way to post code snippets. Of course, I'm not the only one looking for such a feature. It's somehow amazing that blogger doesn't offer better support for this.

But tonight, I discovered Alex Gorbatchev's SyntaxHighligher which seems to be what I was looking for. I googled a bit more and found this HOWTO: post code (thanks gPowered.net). A few minutes later, the SyntaxHighlighter library was uploaded and my blogger template updated to enable it.

Let's try it now with a classical HelloWorld sample :

 
 /**
  * The HelloWorld class is an application that
  * displays "Hello World!" to the standard output.
  */
  public class HelloWorld {

     // Display "Hello World!"
     public static void main(String args[]) {
        System.out.println("Hello World!");
     }
  } 

So, how does it looks like ?

Oh, by the way, Thomas Walloschke created a neat extension for Apache configuration files. Nice. I might use his "brush" too.

Do you have your Blotter graph ?

According to Blotter's home page

Blotter (Blog Plotter) is a new service from Dapper that graphs a blog's popularity over time. The popularity statistics are gathered from Technorati using the Dapper service.

The graph below gathers the statistics over time for my blog :

Well, I guess I should say "DOH!"...

But anyway, if you're a Technorati fan, you may like it.