A couple of services changed their APIs which caused problems for Blogsy and there is also one bug fix in this update.
1. Tumblr Authentication Problem: If you tap on the Tumblr button to set up your Tumblr blog you get a “Failed Request” message. This is caused because Tumblr changed the API so the “Out-of-band” value of the “oauth_callback” parameter are no longer supported. We have updated Blogsy to reflect this change so when this update comes out users will be able to set up their Tumblr blogs.
2. SquareSpace 5 not working: You can’t set up our publish to a SquareSpace 5 blog with Blogsy. This problem is caused because SquareSpace changed the XML-RPC URL from “http://www.squarespace.com/process/service/PostInterceptor” to “http://five.squarespace.com/process/service/PostInterceptor”. We have updated Blogsy to reflect this change so when this update comes out users will be able to set up their Tumblr blogs.
3. URL Scheme Bug: When you use the URL scheme to send post content to Blogsy Blogsy currently overwrites the content you have open in Blogsy instead of starting a new post. This update fixes that so it will move any post you currently have open to the local draft list and start a new post using the content you sent to Blogsy. Until this update comes out please go into Blogsy and tap on the plus button “+” then “New Post” to start a new post before you send content to Blogsy through the URL scheme.
Partial Image Embed Code – If there is a partial image embed code in the HTML then when you try to publish your post Blogsy will just close. This will no longer happen after this update. Until this update comes out you can resolve this problem by flipping to the HTML Side and deleting any partial image embed codes.
Tistory Blog – If the publish date is set to automatic then the categories do not get posted with the blog post when the post is published. This only effects Tistory blogs. Until this update comes out you can set the date of the post and the categories will get published with the post.
[Changed]
German Language – “Automatisch” changed to “Autom.”
This article is a guest post by Yannik Achternbosch, the editor of AppTestsss.de, a German blog about Apple, iPhone, iPad and Mac.
I saw on our twitter feed that Yannik had written up a very good post about how to use the URL schemes in Blogsy to make blogging even easier. And we love it when we see users write about how they do cool things with Blogsy so I wanted to share it with everyone on this blog. The only problem was that the article was in German. I tweeted to Yannik that I thought the post was very good and wished that it were in English so I could share it on our blog. A few days later I got the following post. Amazingly cool! Thanks Yannik!
Before I got my MacBook a couple of months ago nearly all of my articles for AppTestsss.de were written in Blogsy on the iPad. The app is nice and works well with my WordPress installation but with my MacBook I switched to MarsEdit and wrote only a few posts on my iPad. With version 4.2 Blogsy got many new features like a HTML keyboard and Markdown support but there is one new feature I’d like to highlight: URL schemes. With these schemes it’s possible to create a new article, to add content to the body and to open the website in the built-in browser.
Creating a new article
The Blogsy URL syntax to create a new article with a defined body is the following: blogsy://post?entry=content_you_want. It would obviously be possible to use this scheme to create a new article in Safari by pasting in the content you would like to use into the url, but that is not how it is supposed to be used. So how should we use the scheme instead?
I assume you all have heard of the iOS app Drafts. The app supports some really cool actions that can be performed using URLs. To create such an action go to Settings > URL Actions > + but you don’t even have to create the Blogsy action on your own, you can simply click this link on an iPad with Blogsy and Drafts installed. The action will automatically be added to Drafts and can be used from the sharing menu.
Great, but what does this action do?
The action takes the text from Drafts, without the first line which I always use as a heading, and creates a new article in Blogsy with your text from Drafts as the content; and the best thing about that: You don’t have to write HTML in Drafts, you can use Markdown and Blogsy will parse it to HTML for you if you click the Markdown button after opening Blogsy.
That’s it. That’s the easiest way to create a blogpost in Blogsy from a text you wrote in Drafts. At the moment it is not possible to set the title or anything else using the URL schemes, you have to do that manually but I really hope this feature will be added in a future version.
Opening your current Safari webpage in Blogsy
The second thing the Blogsy URL is able to handle are websites you want to open in the built-in browser. The URL syntax to do so is blogsy:URL. To open your current page in Blogsy you could simply type blogsy: in front of your URL in Safari but why should you do it the difficult way if you could do it much easier? Right, you shouldn’t. But what is the easier way? You just create a bookmark in Safari (the best place might be in your bookmark bar) with the following url: javascript:location.href='blogsy:'+location.href;. By clicking this bookmark blogsy: will be added in front of your current url which will open the page in the Blogsy browser.
To come to a conclusion: URL schemes in Blogsy are really great and have a huge potential together with other iOS apps but there’s also one thing I’m missing: The ability to add a title to an article using the scheme. I hope that this feature will be added in one of the next releases with even more improvements and maybe even some other things like the ability to choose the blog with a keyword in the URL (something like blogsy://post?blog=yourblog&content=something would be possible).
Other apps now have another option for sending content to Blogsy. For quite sometime Blogsy has been using the following URL scheme – blogsy:”URL” – which allows other apps to send a website to Blogsy and Blogsy will open that website in its built-in browser. This is what is used if you set up the Blogsy Bookmarklet (find this in the Settings menu in Blogsy). Also, the Mr. Reader app uses this URL scheme so you can send blog posts to Blogsy.
Now we have added a new URL scheme – blogsy://post?entry=”post body” – which if other apps use it will allow you to send information from the other app directly into Blogsy and it will start a new post and put that information into the new post.
Here is an example of this.
Notice that there is content with no HTML tags along with some content with HTML tags. You can send content to Blogsy that has HTML tags or not. (We made this dummy program to test the URL scheme.)
When you send it to Blogsy you will get a message asking how you want to bring it into Blogsy.
Rich Side – This is what we are sure most people will choose in most cases. When you choose this option the content will be pulled in and parsed and if there is HTML in it then Blogsy will use that HTML. If there is no HTML then Blogsy will add the appropriate HTML.
HTML Side – We added this option because if the content you are importing has HTML in it that is not correct this can cause problems in Blogsy. If this is the case then you can choose the HTML Side option to open it on the HTML Side then fix the HTML before flipping to the Rich Side.
Markdown – If the content you are sending to Blogsy has Markdown in it then you need to choose the Markdown option. When you choose the Markdown option Blogsy will parse the Markdown and convert it to normal HTML so the dragging in of images and videos works. If you choose Rich Side or HTML Side then the Markdown will be wrapped in HTML tags and therefore will not work.
We got quite a few requests from high-end bloggers asking for Markdown support so we have added it to Blogsy.
If you want to use Markdown then you first need to turn it on in the Settings menu. Settings -> General Settings -> Markdown.
When Markdown support is turned on there will be a Markdown icon on the dock.
Tap on the Markdown icon in the dock to open the Markdown editor.
When you first open the Markdown editor you will see a full white screen. Tap on the screen to open the keyboard. As you can see in the image above we have added an extended keyboard for Markdown.
Write your post using Markdown or paste your Markdown in. When you are done typing tap on the “Done” button in the extended keyboard.
Blogsy will convert your Markdown to standard HTML so you can then drag images and videos into your post if you would like and publish your post to your blog.
*** In the version of Blogsy currently found in the App Store you can write Markdown on the HTML Side and publish from the HTML Side without flipping to the Rich Side and the Markdown will be sent to your blog.
Satyr (Blogsy 4.2) can now be found on the App Store.
This is the full list of the things we have added, changed and fixed in this update. But I will be doing blog posts each day explaining and showing with screenshots the features we have added and the changes we made.
[Added]
Markdown Support – Add support for writing and converting Markdown.
HTML Keyboard – Added option to turn on an extended keyboard for typing HTML.
History – Keeps versions of your post so you can revert back to a previous version.
Save Button – We added a save button so you can save a version.
Add URL scheme – If other apps add support for this URL scheme then you can send content from another app into Blogsy to create a blog post.
Resize to thumbnail – When you drag in an image to your blog post from the iPad photo library iOS provides Blogsy with an address to where that image can be found on the iPad. If the image can no longer be found at that address Blogsy will display a message and resize the images to 100 by 100 which can’t be found to make it easier to find which images have the problem and need to be deleted and dragged in again.
Added Draft setting for TypePad blogs.
Added parsing when fetching Joomla posts to check for special HTML entities and converting them to plain text.
Triple “+” tap – If you tap three times quickly on the plus button “+” it will move the current open post to the local draft list and start a new post.
[Changed]
User Interface (UI) changes.
Moved button for the (direct/envelope) upload option to the top of the iPad Photo Library panel.
Moved Local drafts from the Post Info. menu to the Plus button menu.
Moved Online post list from Post Info. menu to the Online menu next to the Plus button menu.
Moved the Default Photo Upload Location setting option for the General Settings menu to the Post Info. menu.
Search bars – Changed the style of all the search bars at the top of the panels.
Vimeo – Blogsy now detects and uses original video dimensions of dragged in video.
Posterous – The Posterous API no longer functions and Posterous will be shutting down soon so we removed Posterous from Blogsy.
Changed from Crittercism to Crashlytics to track crashes.
Switching Button – For UI reasons the option to enable/disable the switching button in the General Settings button was removed.
Tumblr – Tumblr changed their OAuth so Tumblr users could not set up their blogs in Blogsy. We have updated our code to work with that new Tumblr OAuth.
Instagram – Instagram changed their OAuth so OAuth users could not set up their Instagram accounts in Blogsy. Instagram reverted back to the OAuth for a few weeks then will change to this new OAuth again. We changed the code so you will be able to set up your account with the old or new OAuth.
iPad Photo Library Refresh – If you drag an image from the web browser and save it to your iPad photo library then Blogsy will refresh that view so you will see the new image right away instead of you first having to tap on another dock item to force a refresh.
[Bug Fixes]
Link crash fixed – If you tried to create a link and you pasted in a URL with a blank space at the beginning of the URL Blogsy would crash.
Freezing problem fixed – If Blogy could not find the photo on the iPad/Photostream at the address that iOS provided then Blogsy would freeze. Now Blogsy will display a message saying that the image(s) cannot be found at the address iOS provided.
WordPress tag refresh fixed – When you created a new tag Blogsy would not refresh the list of tags.
Invalid HTML crash fixed – Blogsy would crash when trying to post or if you tapped on the Post. Info. button and there was mismatched brackets (< and >) in the HTML.
Flickering bug fixed – If your blog sends back an error message you get an option to email that to us. After choosing one of the options in this menu the screen would flicker until you cleared Blogsy from memory and launched it again.
1. Photo Library – Fixed a crashing problem if you’re running pre iOS 5.1 and try to access the iPad photo library.
2. WordPress – If your blog did not have the title set then Blogsy would not set up the media library.
3. Link Setting – If your link URL had a space in front of the URL Blogsy would crash.
4. Naver Blogs – Blogsy would show an error report popup when Naver blog users tried to publish a post which had unicode data in it.
[Added]
1. Show “Can’t Use Emoji” message when you’re trying to use the Emoji keyboard. Blogs don’t recognize the iOS Emoji code so they delete post content after the Emoji in a post.
2. MovableType – support multiple category setting and fetching.
3. Blogger – Blogger chooses to us a tag instead of the standard
tag. For Blogsy to conform with this the post is parsed and
tags are converted to two tags and
tags are converted to a single tag when publishing. Now there is an option in the Settings menu to turn off this parsing and converting.
[Improved]
1. Memory usage improvement for using photos in the iPad photo library.
[Changes]
1. WordPress – Blogsy no longer publishes a post as “Standard” if the post format is not set. Instead Blogsy sends empty post format information and WordPress will set it to “Standard” itself. This means there will no longer be a second “Standard” post format created and a listing of your posts in the WP-Admin will no longer show “Standard”.
Blogsy 4.1.3 can now be found in the App Store. We have already started working on Blogsy 4.1.4 and have an Instagram fix in it if your Instagram account is set to private. If you are having any problem with Blogsy which is not fixed in this update (Blogsy 4.1.3) please email me so we can get it fixed and make it part of Blogsy 4.1.4. You can email us at info@fomola.com.
Blogsy 4.1.3 update
New Features/Changes -
Set Date – now MetaWeblog, Drupal and Joomla users can set the date of a post.
Clear Browser Cache – added a new option in the Settings menu to clear the Browser cache. The reason behind this is that Apple changed the way YouTube is integrated in iOS6. That caused Blogsy’s how-to videos to not play correctly. We fixed this problem but if users had already played a how-to video prior to our fix they would continue to have the problem. The only way to overcome that problem would be to clear the browser cache but there was no way to do that in Blogsy.
UTC Time – for MetaWeblog posting Blogsy will now use the UTC time. This should overcome the issue some users have with a time difference when posting.
Bug Fixes -
Tumblr – Fixed “Not Authorized” error message. You would get a “Not Authorized” error message if you tried to publish a Tumblr post with multiple photos and multiple tags.
Joomla – Fixed “Featured” article setting bug. You would need to set “Featured” on or on and off once after first updating or Blogsy would crash when trying to publish to Joomla.
Link option in popup bubble didn’t always appear – fixed the “Link” option disappearing from the option bubble when selecting text. This was an issue for iOS6 users.
Link Menu off screen – If a word was chosen toward the right boarder of the post and the “Link” option was chosen in the popup bubble the menu would open off screen. This was an issue for iOS6 users.
Link Menu issues – Problem with doubling text and the placeholder text not disappearing when user typed in their own URL.
Translation – Version name and number were not correct for Russian and Chinese users.
Blogsy 4.1.2 update
WordPress, TypePad, SquareSpace and MetaWeblog - Now you can turn off category fetching in the Settings menu. If you turn off category fetching then Blogsy will remember and display the categories you have fetched in the past and will only fetch again if you tap on the fetch button. This is the same as the tag setting which has been in Blogsy for some time now. This means you no longer have to wait for Blogsy to fetch your categories every time you go to set them for a blog post.
Picasa – When Blogsy creates a Picasa folder to upload to it will be set to private. If you want to change it to public on Picasa you can do this without it effecting the photos in your blog posts.
TypePad and Movable Type – Blogsy will remember the comment setting you used for your last post when you start a new post.
Joomla – Now you can schedule Joomla posts. (for Joomla version 1.6 or later)
Joomla – Now you can set if a post is featured or not. (for Joomla version 1.6 or later)
WordPress – Improved uploading code so you are less likely to get a “Failed” message when trying to upload images.
SquareSpace and Joomla – These platforms send back a relative URLs for images so Blogsy would show that the images can’t be displayed when dragging them in after uploading images to their media libraries. Blogsy will now parse and construct the full URL to the root to override this so the images will be displayed on the Rich Side.
SquareSpace – If you used a more tag in a SquareSpace post all paragraphs after the more tag would get stripped out by SquareSpace. Now Blogsy will strip out the more tag before publishing so SquareSpace does not strip out the paragraphs.
Flickr - Improved uploading code.
Bug Fixes -
WordPress -
If you had set an image caption in the wp-admin when writing a post then fetched the post into Blogsy the paragraphs after that image would get stripped out unless there was a tag besides <p> or <div> after it.
If you didn’t have any photos in your WordPress media library yet but tried to set the featured image for a post Blogsy would crash.
If your image embed code had a opening tag without the appropriate closing tag Blogsy would crash.
If you had set a WordPress post to “sticky” then Blogsy had been cleared from memory the “sticky” setting would be turned off.
At the time of setup Blogsy will determine if the blog is running WordPress 3.4 or later so the featured image of a post will appear in the Post Info. menu if the first thing you do in Blogsy is fetch an online post.
iPad Photo Library – If you had imported a RAW only photo to your iPad using the Apple Camera Kit. Then used the photo editing features of the Photos app to enhance that image. When you tried to drag that image into an envelope or post Blogsy would crash.
Joomla – If the Joomla blog sent back an error code at the time of publishing the “publishing…” message would still appear.
Blogsy 4.1.1 Update
Feature changes -
1) Wrap raw text with paragraph tags(p or div) when swipe to Rich Side. – Now, even if you don’t type the p or div tags when writing on the HTML Side Blogsy will automatically add them when you swipe to the Rich Side.
2) Added hidden HTML formatting – This will make the HTML easier to read if you go to your WordPress admin and look in the HTML view.
3) Remember last Tumblr Markdown setting – Now if a user sets Markdown to “on” or “off” it will be set the same way the next time they start a new post.
4) Remember last Comments setting – Now if a user sets comments to “on” or “off” it will be set the same way the next time they start a new post.
5) iPad won’t go to sleep when uploading – The iPad will not go to sleep while images are being uploaded.
6) Showing Picasa username as title on uploading location – In the post confirmation popup it will show the username if you have chosen Picasa as the photo upload location.
7) Add Instagram, Facebook and Vimeo to the default services on the dock – New users will see all services Blogsy supports in the dock when they first install Blogsy. They can remove ones they don’t want to use through the Settings menu.
8) MovableType multiple users – Now multiple users on the same blog can be set up.
Bug fixes -
1) WordPress – SelfHosted : Invalid Attachment ID problem fixed.
2) Tumblr – Blogsy would crash on the first attempt to publish a Tumblr photo post.
3) Tumblr – Would get an error if trying to post a Tumblr photo post with more than one image attached.
4) SquareSpace – Couldn’t fetch uploaded images to display in the Rich Side if the blog was using a custom domain
5) Method Type (null) and incorrect platform information in error code reports.
6) Added br tags in lists – Blogsy would add br tags when fetching posts with ordered or unordered lists. If users published from the HTML side these br tags would be added to their published posts.
7) Formatting iframe bug – Formatting buttons didn’t work if a post had an iframe object in it.
8) White background problem in toolbar icon – At the far right of the formatting toolbar white corners can be seen on iPad 1 and iPad 2.
9) Browser not opening problem fixed.
10) Empty rich side issue fixed.
11) Prevent Javascript parsing crash.
12) Direct embed paper/envelope toggle button disappearing fixed.
13) Browser home button URL not saving if it has http fixed.
14) Photo library full image preview crash fixed.
15) Direct image drag in portrait image dimension problem fixed.
Blogsy 4.1 (Cerberus)
Cerberus (Blogsy 4.1) brings three big new features.
[Features]
1) Offline/Direct adding of photos from the iPad photo library – Yep, we finally figured out how to make it possible to add photos from the iPad Photo library to a post without having to upload the images first. This also means that you will be able to add photos to a post when you are offline. We will have a how-to video up later today showing how this new feature works.
2) Facebook integration – That’s right, now you can drag in photos from your Facebook account to your blog posts. This means you can easily blog about photos on your Facebook account and also photos you have been tagged in. Also, Blogsy now give you the ability to upload photos to your Facebook account with. This way you wont have to have the same photo on Facebook and also in your blog media library. Photos that you upload with Blogsy to your Facebook account will not be added to your timeline. If you want them to be added to your timeline then you can go to your Facebook account in a desktop browser and add them to your timeline.
If you are a current Blogsy user and want to add Facebook go to the Settings menu -> Service Settings -> Manage Dock Items -> Add A New Item -> Then tap on Facebook. This will add it to the dock in Blogsy and you can set up your Facebook account.
3) Featured Image – Yes, Blogsy already had Featured Image support. But that required you to make some changes to the PHP files on your server. Now, if you are running WordPress 3.4 or later then Blogsy will detect that and you won’t have to make those PHP file changes. This also means that WordPress.com users will now be able to set the Featured Image with Blogsy.
[Bugs Fixed]
1) If users tried to post with custom fields that included location data the user manually put in, Blogsy would crash.
2) Metaweblog conflict – If a user had a TypePad, Joomla or SquareSpace blog set up then would try to set up a metaweblog blog Blogsy would crash.
3) In certain circumstances Blogsy would crash when uploading images to a Drupal media library.
4) Metaweblog blogs – incorrect date type problem when trying to post or update.
5) Joomla blogs – some servers required a specific URL to the xmlrpc file.
5) XMLRPC blogs – Blogsy won’t clear a post if an error occurs while posting or updating a post.
6) NAVER blogs – Blogsy would always publish the post as private.
7) Browser button – Infrequently, Blogsy would crash when tappong the browser button in the dock.
What does this mean? Well, if you are a Mr. Reader user now you can choose an article and choose to open it in Blogsy. This action will open the article in Blogsy's built-in browser (like the Blogsy bookmarklet) so you can do a blog post about that article or use images from it.
Posted with Blogsy
