lekhonee-gnome 0.9.1 is released

I am happy to announce the release of lekhonee-gnome 0.9.1 . You can download the source or check for koji builds for F12 or F13. New features are like:

Supports multiple Wordpress accounts
Tabbed UI for different modes
Now supports adding <br> tag using tool button
Preview mode (more details on this below)
Advertisement message is disabled for this release
Stopped segfault(s) in couple of corner cases
Supports <video> and <audio> tags in Visual and preview mode (you may have to write the details in HTML mode)
Can watch youtube videos in Preview mode (not an actual feature :p )

So the main two new features are multiple account handling and Preview mode. In the preview mode you can see how the post will look like in your blog with the theme you are having. To fetch the blog style please click on the small download style/theme button in the toolbar (this button will only come in the toolbar if you don't have cached theme downloaded in your system), though you need internet connection for this mode to work.

New release of lekhonee-gnome

I just released lekhonee-gnome ( desktop client for Wordpress ) v0.9. You can download the source from here or look for the rpm F-12 or F-13.

This is a complete rewrite of lekhonee-gnome in Vala. So, it is not anymore a gtk frondend to the previous python based one.

Around 2 weeks back mether pointed me to Vala and I started porting lekhonee-gnome. The developers from IRC room #vala helped me a lot to learn and understand the basics of this new language and solving issues while I was working on it. Later siddesh , rakesh and paragn helped me to do the autoconf/autotool things fixed.

Changes/Features:

By default it will open WYSIWYG editor mode , people can still edit raw HTML by clicking the "Edit HTML" button in the right hand corner.
Added option for of extra HTML tags (HTML Tags menu) if one is editing HTML
Save/Open blog posts in the local computer in plain xml format , so that you can edit them in any editor
the configuration file is now a keyfile
In the WYSIWYG editor one can do Spell check by right clicking into "Spelling and Grammar" submenu
While editing HTML one can use Spell Check box
There is a progress bar in the statusbar area which will give visual feedback to the user whenever it will connect to server for any task
The "Add Category" button is disabled in this release, will come back in the next release :)

We need more testing and please file bug reports according to that.

The post is brought to you by lekhonee-gnome v0.9

GNUnify2010 and my python workshop

GNUnify2010 was the first for me. Started a bit early to the venue, Rahul was along with me. His talk was in top of schedule. I slowly moved to the lab where my python workshop was scheduled.

The main target of the workshop was to show/teach the basics of the python programming language. I hear mostly students asking "How to start working on a project?" but as the learning curve is not so easy in most of the things, they run away. The only students we have from India who are contributing to any FOSS projects are the people who came in their own interest. I found programming with python can be an easy entry point for the general students and they can become better programmer in life. This is the main reason behind my python workshops in different places.

No need to buy books, great online community, projects working on different dimensions, all of these can generate interest in the students.

Coming back to my workshop, I generally try to follow my own book (which I have to update). Slowly going through simple examples and showing that it is not difficult. I ask the students to solve the lab works they do in any programming lab in python. This will help them to understand the basics of the language. The workshop lab was supposed to have 30 students, but many more came so I had to ask them to seat in groups in the computers (most of them was running Fedora ). The basic feedback I got, states that it was easy, but how the students are going to use this, I have no clue. Btw, most of the students in my workshop were from Pune University Maths department, I told them to attend Ramki's workshop in the second half as his workshop was about explaining how to solve mathematical problems.

At the end of the workshop I showed few applications written in python and talked about job opportunity in market. 2 students contacted me after the event.

Full set of the event photos can be found here.

Coming month, I will be in Durgapur, doing another python workshop , I will also conduct a Django workshop.