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Troubleshooting BlogML - Introduction

Having a good documentation for software is something mandatory nowadays.  I see some negative feedbacks about various software for documentation.  Unfortunately people (even non-technical people) don't want to spend sometime to get what they need.  In most cases, I see duplicate questions about something that is already answered but if you don't answer then they begin saying "this frustrated software ..." or "I'm giving up with this ..." and same statements!  I hate people who expect others to put the food on the table for them and they just know how to eat!

However, above paragraphs were an introduction to move the thread to BlogML, our open source mark up language for blog content definition.  In the recent months we got many users both from .NET community and from non-technical users.  Some users had problems to get their migrations done with BlogML so sent some feedback about the BlogML project.  Now that we have an official site for BlogML and have planned to provide good documentation about it, I thought it would be helpful if I write a short post as an introduction to BlogML troubleshooting and keep writing more detailed posts on my blog in the future to save myself from answering a question many times and also users to find their answers easier.  So here is the first post as an introduction!

First let me talk about the BlogML issues in general.  During these two years when I've been a member of BlogML project and have worked with many guys to help them migrate between blogging tools, saw some common issues with BlogML.  From one view, these issues can be grouped in four categories:

• Problems with schema
• Problems with BlogML .NET API
• Problems with export tool
• Problems with import tool

As is obvious, the latest two cases aren't something that we directly can take care of them because converters are written with community members not ourselves.

The other annoying point is unfortunately most of the questions and reported issues are something that we have already answered in the default download packages but users do not attend to them at all and again just come up and ask about these issues!

One common question for users is "Do you have an export or import tool for my blogging tool?".  This is something obvious: as long as someone writes a converter then we have that tool available otherwise we just can say that we're sorry!  Fortunately we currently support all famous blogging tools and services like Community Server, Subtext, DasBlog, Windows Live Spaces, Blogger and WordPress and a converter for BlogEngine.NET is coming!  But if you're using a blogging tool that doesn't have a converter written yet and if you're a technical guy then it's possible to create some database mappings to generate your BlogML XML content from database easily.  This is a solution that some guys have used to generate their BlogML content.

The other common question is about the percentage of the content that may be lost during a migration with BlogML.  I'm proud to say that BlogML is able to move the content of all common blogging tools easily.  All common features for blogging tools and services are built for default BlogML structure.  We also have provided some extensibility points like extended properties to let you store data as key/value pairs for BlogML objects and use them easily.  Furthermore, we're going to add new blogging features and extensibility points to BlogML in next version.  I agree that people may have different thoughts about BlogML based on the blogging tool that they use but in my opinion my Community Server converter along Subtext converter are two good examples of converters that could be able to implement BlogML features in good details.  Users of these two converters have been happy with them so far!

In the abovementioned introduction I gave four different categories about BlogML issues.  In the upcoming posts, I discuss more about troubleshooting BlogML issues based on these categories.

10 Comments : 09.10.07

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#1
Jeff Bishop
09.10.2007 @ 9:15 PM

Hi. I installed the CS2007 BlogML tool and attempted to export my blog to BlogML format. After clicking on the Export button I end up on a page can not be displayed page. Any suggestions?

#2
Andrew Tobin
09.10.2007 @ 9:36 PM

Hey Keyvan, I have to disagree with your opening assertion... although I know it's you're opinion and you're definitely entitled to it. By the way this sentence: "Unfortunately people (even non-technical people) don't want to spend sometime to get what they need." I believe you meant to say even technical people - because I can understand non-technical people not hunting for answers, but technical people probably should. Anyway, my issue with what you said is that I believe any good software should be as self-explanitory as possible. If it isn't as easy as a wizard, or as intuitive as something people would do on a regular basis - it should be as self-documenting, or have a good interface, or have something to make it as easily as possible. For example you list the complaint of people knowing what Blogging Systems are supported. Is it made clear on installation, or when they run the app? I haven't used BlogML, to be honest, I should have - I moved from one CS blog to another and did an SQL dump and it was nasty. I think the best thing to do would be to have a Wiki where these things are explained straight-forward, anyone can add to an answer, and link it prominantly on your app. Especially if it is a fast changing app. I don't wish to be overly critical here, because I do love your blog and what you provide to the CS community and I'm very appreciative - I just believe if people are coming to you with the same questions over and over then you haven't made the answer clear enough for them.

#3
Keyvan Nayyeri
09.11.2007 @ 7:21 AM

Jeff, Please send your issue on BlogML forums with more details then we can help you there :-)

#4
Keyvan Nayyeri
09.11.2007 @ 8:50 AM

Andrew, Thank you for taking time to leave your comment. Humm, maybe, I think you're right about non-technical vs technical people but I think my current statement is right as well ;-) I agree that a good software should be self-explanatory but which kind of software? I confirm that an application that deals with users with a UI should have a self-explanatory UI but how about an abstract schema + component thing like BlogML? Sometimes you may try to make things simpler and easier to use but can't improve it very much. A good example is the installation of TFS. You may know that it has a very complicated process while Microsoft has tried to make it simpler very much! In our case, BlogML is a very abstract thing by nature and we can't manage what end users see in different blogging tools but the BlogML, itself, has self-explanatory code conventions, error texts, elements, attributes and ... On the other hand, we've answered many of common issues several times but still get same questions from people and when we don't answer them, they get frustrated. Yes, we're working on the Wiki to let users add content to it and improve the documentation and this is one of our main plans right now. Thank you again :-)

#5
Andrew Tobin
09.11.2007 @ 11:17 PM

Hey Keyvan, I get that, and I suppose in my complete ignorance of BlogML I'll have to take your word for it! :) I'll have to really check it out sometime soon, I've been so busy in my out of work hours preparing for a .NET Group Presentation tonight (and procrastinating as much as humanly possible!) I get where you're coming from, but really when I think what I'd want going from one blog to another is a wizard type interface. Now I know that's mostly not possible... and sometimes I wish there was a convention that people would put in place, like the Weblog Posting APIs and such, so we could just do a dump and transfer. Although, of course that's shooting your blog app in the foot. Anyway, it sounds like you're on the right track and really making an effort so take my comment with a grain of salt :) (If I was really that enthusiastic about making software better I'd try to help out on open source products! So thank you for being the one the kind of guy that is :)

#6
Keyvan Nayyeri
09.15.2007 @ 10:36 AM

In the first post of my series about BlogML troubleshooting I gave an introduction to BlogML troubleshooting

#7
Keyvan Nayyeri
09.21.2007 @ 12:09 PM

So far I've written two posts about troubleshooting BlogML: Introduction Schema In this post I want to

#8
Keyvan Nayyeri
09.28.2007 @ 6:14 PM

After writing an introduction to troubleshooting BlogML as well as two posts about BlogML schema and

#9
Keyvan Nayyeri
10.09.2007 @ 6:39 PM

As the last post of this series, I want to write shortly about BlogML issues related to import tools

#10
News
10.23.2007 @ 7:19 AM

Recently I've begun writing some blog post series about troubleshooting BlogML on my blog and you

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