Right-click Blogger BlogThis 0.3 for Mozilla and Firefox: the “there’s more than 26 letters?” release
Although someone pointed it out to me back in December, it wasn’t until 4am this morning (when the best, but most painful ideas seem to strike) that I realized why my BlogThis extension wasn’t playing well with anything other than English: I was using the wrong function to escape the title and text before sticking it in the URI. escape() might sound right, and be what almost everyone else doing a similar bookmarklet does, but it’s completely wrong: to stick things in a URI, you want encodeURIComponent(). So, BlogThis 0.3: There’s More Than 26 Letters. You may find some oddness with stuff like curly quotes if the first blog in your list o’ blogs isn’t published in UTF-8: that’s Blogger’s fault for not recoding properly, and your fault for not publishing in the one true encoding.
Hey Phil,
If you can send me a test case of where you’re seeing this reencoding problem, I can track down what’s wrong. Please respond to me in email.
Thanks,
Steve
Want this updated on UMO?
Please, and thank you: I made a mental note to look at whether we’re still doing bug updates, or through the Developers UI now, but then I took a little nap that drove it right out of my head.
Pony request 1: Any chance of you adding an option to specify the default blog?
Pony request 2: Any chance of adding the ability to exclude blogs from appearing in the dropdown list?
You must be talking to Steve, not me, right? I can’t even remove the bad-idea literal quotes around your selected text, so I can put it in a
<blockquote>instead.Hrm. Unless… maybe a little Greasemonkeying?
Hey Bill,
For request #1: what I do is add &blogID=XXX (where XXX is my blogID) to the bookmarklet source. I have several copies of BlogThis, one called LinkBlogThis! and a regular BlogThis!
As for request #2, I will file it into the bug database as a feature request but I bet it will languish since I’ve never heard it requested otherwise. :-(
I guess I misunderstood who wrote this extension although this is also the first time I’m seeing Steve’s name associated with it (Hi Steve!). Have to explore the multi-copy suggestion, would be my first experience with FF extension code.
Heh. Getting even more murky by the minute, too :)
I wrote the Firefox extension, but all it does is get the title, URL, and selected text from your current page, put them together into a URL at blogger.com, and load that in a popup. From there on, what happens is up to Steve. (Well, except for passing in a blogid, which I think I knew about back in the day when I used it, and used a bookmarklet instead of a right click.)
Steve’s probably (though maybe not) talking about having multiple bookmarklets, where you just go to the Blogger Help page and drag the link to your Bookmarks Toolbar. (And then right-click, and in Properties edit the Location field, to replace escape() and add in your blogID.)
I see, that makes a big difference. Might even make this doable for me. Cool.
Would it be possible to have default text (code snippets) already in the text area? There’s a function at Blogger for it, would make my life much easier… :-D