Crad's .NET Blog

L'UGIblog di Marco De Sanctis
posts - 190, comments - 457, trackbacks - 70

A tool to manage your blog categories and Technorati Tags

When I first decided to have a blog, I didn't have a clear idea of what I was going to talk about. It was supposed to be focused on .Net and programming topics, indeed, but figuring out a list of categories having only this in mind was extremely hard. I think that a lot of bloggers had (and keep having) the same experience and, sudden or later, almost everyone comes to the need to re-arrange post categories.

Things get much more complicated when you decide to start Technorati-tagging your post: doing it post per post is pretty easy, just a matter of adding a couple of links. Some WLW plugins can be helpful to mantain a certain coherence on the keywords you are tagging, but what about the old posts? Can you figure out how boring and time consuming tagging old posts can be? I'm sure you can. I tried to do that job, giving up just some minutes after and deciding that I did need a tool to deal with it.

Though, I made Blog Manager (if you have a better name to suggest, please do it, I know that "Blog Manager" is simply awful smile_teeth) which uses MetaWeblog API to interact with blog engines and let you arrange Categories and Technorati tags with all those fancy features a Windows Explorer-like UI has, like multiple selection.

All you need to do is setting up your connection credentials

fetch some posts from your blog

and change categories and tags using multi-selection on the listview and three-state CheckBoxLists on the left

After your work is done, just press the Save button on the toolbar to update your blog.

An important reminder: Technorati Tags feature use regular expressions to extract keywords from each post body. Although both I and my friend Simone Chiaretta did many tests and it seems to work as expected, be aware that it can potentially mess your post text. So, please, do a backup of your blog data (there's a built in backup/restore feature in Blog Manager too) before using it.

Oh... and please always remember that...

This application is provided as is. The copyright holder cannot be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use, data, or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of this software, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.

Here you can find both source code (in VS2008 beta 2 format) and executables.

EDIT: This project has been moved to Google Code and renamed as Blog Commander

Technorati tags: ,

Print | posted on sabato 29 settembre 2007 21:17 | Filed Under [ .Net 3.5 ]

Powered by:
Powered By Subtext Powered By ASP.NET