Apparently I am rapidly becoming 'Geo Guy'. I seem to be adding Geo / Gps support and plug-ins to everything I use...

I just finished adding 'Insert GPS Link' support to PockeTwit (a great little Windows Mobile twitter client - really, go and get a copy now...)
Previously I added GeoRSS support to dasBlog for individual blog posts as well as the RSS feed, and I also added geo microformat support to Windows Live Writer with my 'InsertGeoMicroformat' plugin.

So, what's next - have you got an app that needs Geo / GPS support added ?

Too much effort reading my ramblings ? Want to listen instead ? Now you can !!

Courtesy of the excellent odiogo, the excellent text to speech service. This is a free service that bloggers can use, it takes your RSS feed, splits it out to each separate post and then creates a MP3 for the post.

The text-to-speech quality is really good, only about 1 in 50 words is corrupt/unintelligible - easily high enough quality to get a good rendition of the post. Obviously it depends on the content of the post, I have not yet listened to a post with lots of sample code or the like, but I expect it would be pretty hard going.

Get the audio for this blog here. You can even subscribe in iTunes. I will also update the site to include the links in the sidebar.

GEO 51.4043197631836:-1.28760504722595

I have just completed a new Windows Live Writer plugin. This extension allows ease insertion of geo microformat information.

It allows the user to easily choose the location they want to insert (in microformat) from a Virtual Earth map and also configure how it is displayed (if at all on the post.

Recently I (with considerable help from Alexander Groß) added GeoRss support for dasBlog. The co-ordinates can be specified when adding a post via the web interface. This plugin is stage two of this support, stage three will be parsing the geo microformat when a post is added and using that to populate the GeoRss info.

The end goal being to allow the geo info to be entered when creating a post in Writer and having that info available in GeoRss format in the feed.

I started this plugin with the view to using Google Maps, however they require that you get an API key and that key is only valid for a particular web site / URL path. This foiled my plans to embed the map in a Windows Forms WebBrowser control (I did look at producing an html page that was served from my web site, and using it embedded in the WebBrowser - not scaleable and too much configuration for a normal user to do.

I hadn't looked in depth at Virtual Earth, but recently went to MixUK:07 and saw a couple of demos / presentations on it - a quick look found that it didn't need a API and was not tied to a particular URL / path - the JavaScript for it is pretty similar to the one for Google Maps so learning curve was pretty short. The only issue I have with http://local.live.com is that there is no (currently) facility to enter a GeoRss feed in the search query and just display the data (the current method of displaying this kind of data is to embed a map in your own pages and use their API to display the items as a 'collection').

You can get the installer for it here InsertGeoFormatSetup.msi (325Kb).

One of the developers on the dasBlog team (Nick) looked at this and found that there was a fairly easy fix we could do to dasBlog that would get around the Word 2007 issue.

The metaWeblog API states that the blogid parameter is 'the same as defined by the blogger API'
The blogger API defines it as :

blogid (string): Unique identifier of the blog the post will be added to.

As dasBlog is a single blog instance there is no real need for the blogid – we could simply pass back "0" which would allow Word 2007 to send us a blogid of "0" (which we don't even use anyway).
A fix (thanks Nick) is now in the latest source.

This post was published from Word 2007 and the $64000 question is – does it display this image ?

On 13 December 2006 I wrote this post demonstrating why Blogging from Word 2007 to Dasblog (and other blogs that correctly implemented newMediaObject) was broken. Recently I noticed a number of my referrals come from www.codesecurely.com (by Rudolph Araujo).

Rudolph goes one step further than I did with the Word blogging problem and actually outlines a FiddlerScript that modifies the Xml section of the submitted post to fix the integer/string mismatch. His article is here.

Well done Rudolph, thanks for the tip, I look forward to posting from Word now...

Today, I wanted to configure an Outlook 2007 rule to process RSS items as they are received. By process I mean I wanted to check for attachments/enclosures, if it had any MP3s attached/enclosed then save them to a folder on my desktop (that way I simply sync my Creative Zen Vision: M with the desktop folder and I have all my podcasts available for my commute).

 I could not seem to get the Outlook rules engine working correctly on RSS feeds, I wanted to run a script (a function I'd written in Outlook VBA) that was executed every time I receive a RSS item.
The 'Run A Script' action in the rules wizard will only list subroutines with a signature like this:

Sub Foo(objItem As MailItem)

Anyway this doesn't work for RSS items as their message class is IPM.Post.RSS (making them a PostItem object). So this is a bit of a pain and means I cannot process RSS items using a rule.
In the end I had to use the following code to do it - I just open the folder of the RSS feed and run this (via a custom toolbar button) and it does it all for me.

Public Sub SaveRSSEnclosures()
   
    Dim att As Attachment, objList As Object, objItem As Object, iCount As Integer
   
    Set objList = Application.ActiveExplorer.CurrentFolder.Items
    iCount = 0
   
    For Each objItem In objList
   
       If (objItem.Attachments.Count > 0) And (objItem.UnRead) Then
   
           ' iterate through looking for .mp3's
           For Each att In objItem.Attachments
    
               If LCase(Right(att.FileName, 3)) = "mp3" Then
             
                   ' save it
                   att.SaveAsFile ("c:\Users\kenh\desktop\podcasts\" & att.FileName)
                   iCount = iCount + 1
                 
               End If
             
           Next
         
        End If
        
    Next

    If iCount > 0 Then MsgBox "Saved " & iCount & " mp3 items"
    
End Sub

I have been using the new RSS feed feature in Outlook 2007 for some time now and absolutely love it - I'm in Outlook ALL day, it's the centre of my communication universe and having it collate my RSS feeds just makes sense.

I'm a regular listener to a few podcasts :

• Hanselminutes
• Dot Net Rocks
• The MicroISV Show

and until today TechNet Radio...

I have Outlook set to download enclosures automatically (so for the podcast shows I get the MP3 directly into my mailbox. Whilst this bloats my mailbox (as you'll see later) I work for an Email Archiving company (C2C) and my RSS feeds folder has an 'older than 21 days and is read' policy applied to it. We are also about to extend support for the RSS items making it even easier to identify them in a policy.

Anyway, today I got very annoyed with TechNet Radio. On looking at what I thought was new items in that feed I found that it was downloading all the feed items again (the same one's I already have). My status bar tells me that it's got 498MB to update  and it's going to take 8 hours.

On looking further I find that I already have 4 copies of most of this stuff...

So I go ahead and delete all the duplicates then examine the size of my 'Deleted Items' folder.

Almost 1.5GB

Okay, had enough ditch it all and delete the feed.

I mean, come on guys, what is going on - no one else gives me this hassle, the Pwop Productions guys (Hanselminutes and DotNetRocks) are fine, as is The MicroISV Show - never any errors or duplicates - and there MP3 have intelligent tags, like the name of the show and/or guest names instead of something like :

TechNet Radio - 21 December 2006

and their's is tagged with a Genre of Podcast not just left blank...

End of rant, end of my subscription to TechNet Radio.

Windows Live Writer is currently being a real pain for me. I have my 'My Documents' redirected to a network drive in our UK office (where I usually work), but I am currently in our Westboro, MA office so my 'My Documents' is now effectively on the end of an interoffice VPN.

This seems to be causing all manner of issues with Windows Live Writer (using Process Monitor I can see it doing file reads / updates every second or so for all the recent posts and draft posts – horrible). It hangs for minutes at a time (and causes Outlook to hang during this period also) – in summary it's unusable (when I'm connected to our corporate network, when I'm disconnected it's fine)...

So, I've been looking at blogging from Word 2007 – I've actually only just found that it can do it (whilst looking for the Save As menu). Just set up my account details – very simple...

The insert picture options and other formatting options are excellent (at least in Word they are, let's see how it turns out on the website). The picture to the left (there should be one) should have a kind of 3D perspective (similar to the new Aero Tab Switching in Vista)

Category insertion is a bit long-winded, I need to click 'Insert Category' and then choose from a drop down – so multiple categories takes a bit of time... Still, it does find all my existing categories and allows me to define others.

OK, fingers crossed, let's see how things when published...

UPDATED:

Unfortunately it didn't work !! Word could not handle uploading images to the metaWebLog API implemented in dasBlog - strange because Windows Live Writer handles it just fine. That's a real pain as the image formating options in Word 2007 are stunning. Here is the that should have gotten posted first time (and inline) above (added manually).

I am/was a big fan of RSS Popper - when using Outlook 2003 it allowed me to pull blog posts into a selected folder in my mailbox (I used cached mode, so it was also available offline). It is currently at version 0.36 and has support for downloading enclosures (great for grabbing podcasts) and a neat feature where you can subscribe to blogs containing iCal's (and RSS Popper automagically creates meetings in your calendar for the iCal events - sounds really cool, nothing that I've ever used though).

Anyway, I've migrated my work laptop to Vista and Office 2007 and as Outlook 2007 has built in support for RSS feeds I've not installed RSS Popper. The RSS support in Outlook (apparently) based around the new Common Feed Store of Vista - this allows multiple apps to access / store your chosen RSS feeds, for example if I mark the post as 'Read' in IE7 then that fact is reflected when I look at it in Outlook RSS.

It's pretty simple to define new feeds - it's accessed from 'Tools -> Account Settings...' and is configured in much the same way as you configure an email account.

 Items are added to the defined folder as posts with any enclosures added as attachments to the post.

One of the first apps I loaded onto my laptop (after paving it and installing Vista Ultimate) was Windows Live Writer (which I'm using to compose this post - on a plane at 38,000 ft on my way to Boston).

So it all installed OK, I ran it and it launches straight into the config wizard (setting up your blogs) - I entered my site, username and password and hit next... Bang it fails - apparently it timed out.

OK, maybe the wrong password or something - reenter it - same thing...

Check the website is working - Yes.

Run this same config on my WinXp machine - Works OK ???

Lets look at the logging - seems to be found at :

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Windows Live Writer\Windows Live Writer.log

This gives me an error message as follows :-

WindowsLiveWriter,1.2012,None,00001,27-Nov-2006 11:32:13.063,"Unexpected exception occurred while processing resource Providers.BlogProvidersB2.xml: System.Xml.XmlException: '--' is an unexpected token. The expected token is '>'. Line 31, position 3.
at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Throw(Exception e)
at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.DtdParserProxy.System.Xml.IDtdParserAdapter.Throw(Exception e)
at System.Xml.DtdParser.Throw(Int32 curPos, String res, String[] args)
at System.Xml.DtdParser.ThrowUnexpectedToken(Int32 pos, String expectedToken1, String expectedToken2)
at System.Xml.DtdParser.ScanClosingTag()
at System.Xml.DtdParser.GetToken(Boolean needWhiteSpace)
at System.Xml.DtdParser.ParseEntityDecl()
at System.Xml.DtdParser.ParseSubset()
at System.Xml.DtdParser.ParseExternalSubset()
at System.Xml.DtdParser.ParseInDocumentDtd(Boolean saveInternalSubset)
at System.Xml.DtdParser.Parse(Boolean saveInternalSubset)
at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.ParseDoctypeDecl()
at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.ParseDocumentContent()
at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Read()
at System.Xml.XmlLoader.LoadNode(Boolean skipOverWhitespace)
at System.Xml.XmlLoader.LoadDocSequence(XmlDocument parentDoc)
at System.Xml.XmlLoader.Load(XmlDocument doc, XmlReader reader, Boolean preserveWhitespace)
at System.Xml.XmlDocument.Load(XmlReader reader)
at System.Xml.XmlDocument.Load(Stream inStream)
at WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Providers.BlogProviderManager.ReadXmlBlogProviders(Stream blogProviders)
at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.ResourceFileDownloader.ProcessResourceSafely(String name, String resourceUrl, Int32 requiredFreshnessDays, Int32 timeoutMs, ResourceFileProcessor processor)",""

Looks like there is a error in the XML somewhere, so I pull my feed and validate it - looks like valid RSS2.0.

Turn OFF Vista's crazy (and plain annoying) Use Account Control (UAC) - the source for all the 'grey screens of iritation' I get when trying to do ANYTHING - No change.

OK, it's trying to get config data from/for me right ? - I have that config data on my desktop (WinXP) already so lets just copy it over. Examine the WinXP desktop for the config data - find it in the registry under : HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Windows Live Writer : a whole raft of reg keys.

Export the whole shebang - merge it into the Vists machines registry - rerun Writer - all the config data is in there (excellent I can now post) !!

Copy the reg setings away to another drive in case I have to pave the machine again.

Released today, a new version - get it here. They have added the following (list extracted from the Windows Liver Writer blog post)

The following is a summary of the changes in the Writer 1.0 (Beta) Update:

• Tagging support
• Support for Blogger Beta
• Categories are sorted by name and support scrolling, plus improved support for reading categories from your blog
• Improved startup performance
• Paste is enabled for Title region and TAB/SHIFT+TAB navigation between title and body supported
• Insert hyperlink added to context menu when text is selected
• Title attribute in Insert Link dialog
• Custom date support for Community Server
• Improved keyboard shortcuts for switching views
• Change spell-check shortcut key to F7
• Add ‘png’ to insert image dialog file type filter
• More robust image posting to Live Spaces
• Improved style detection for blogs 
• Fixed issues with pasting URLs and links
• Remember last window size and position when opening a new post
• Open post dialog retrieves more than 25 old posts

From what I have noticed :-

• It still takes an age to open.
• There is still no support for adding a file to a post (and having it uploaded / FTP'd), so my 'Insert File (via FTP) plugin' is still valid.
• There is still no support to add new categories (you can choose from existing categories)
• The insert 'task box' does not provide a scrollbar (so some items get hidden as you create more drafts)

Other things I noticed about the SDK when writing my plugin :

• No way to get a ref to the current blog provider
• No way to get properties for the current blog (this would be great as my plugin would be able to automatically pick up the FTP settings)
• The icon size for displaying on the Insert tab is a crazy 20x18. Why didn't they simply go with a standard size (16x16 for example).

See 'Insert File (via FTP) icon on the embedded image for how it looks when trying to scale a standard image to this custom size - AWFUL.

However, I can't complain, overall I'm pretty happy - it's FREE, it makes my post creating MUCH FASTER and the way it shows me how the post will look on the website (automagically using my website CSS / formatting) is just AMAZING

The excellent RSSPopper (version 0.31) expired on me this morning. After visiting their website I found stable version 0.32 which is valid until 1 Dec 2006.

Downloaded it, installed (over the top of the 0.31 expired version) - it just worked, all my feeds intact etc.

I'm a great fan of the excelllent and free RSS Poppper which aggregates all my chosen feeds into a mailbox folder in Outlook (Outlook is my main daily workspace, I do everything from there).

Yesterday, I found myself considering using Glen Scales' Public folder RSS Feed Event sink v2 to create an RSS feed from one of our company's shared Public Folders (PF) so that I could pull it directly into my mailbox via RSS Popper.

This kinda sounds a bit stupid but it gives me direct access (in a standard place) to all my chosen information - I can read the PF posts along side my other feeds.

The other option is to set my email in the Public Folder properties as a 'forward all to' in addition to having the posts delivered to the PF - either way I'm duplicating data and increasing the size of the exchange store....

Luckily I work for an email archiving company and we use our products inhouse, so I don't have to worry about exchange store size, we're also just about to release SIS (Single Instance Storage) so data will not duplicated either...

Blank entry, simply to list out the categories.