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BloGTK – Using in Karmic

A nice GTK application for blogging is BloGTK. It's written in python and it's fast and a decent replacement for MarsEdit when not on my Mac (not that there are many choices for GTK blogging apps). The 2.0 release is available on LaunchPad, but it requires a few extra python packages to run on a fresh Karmic installation. I've outlined what you need to do below.

The BloGTK 2.0 tarball (itself a python package that needs to be installed as root) will install alright, but it won't run, instead you'll may this:


dillera@granite1201:~/Downloads/blogtk-2.0$ blogtk2
Xlib:  extension "RANDR" missing on display ":0.0".
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/blogtk2", line 6, in <module>
    from blogtk2 import main
  File "/usr/bin/../share/blogtk2/lib/blogtk2/__init__.py", line 35, in <module>
    from blogtk2.main import main
  File "/usr/bin/../share/blogtk2/lib/blogtk2/main.py", line 22, in <module>
    from gdata import service
ImportError: No module named gdata


• Grab BloGTK 2.o
• Grab Python GDATA
• Grab Python feedparser

In your shell, expand them, then as root run the installer....
unzip -d feedparser2 feedparser-4.1.zip
tar xvf gdata-2.0.6.tar.gz

then as root:
# python ./setup.py install
in both of the expanded directories

Finally you'll also need to have the python gtk-spell package installed. This is available in the repo.

# apt-get install python-gtkspell

Now you can run BloGTK.


dillera@granite1201:~$ blogtk2
Xlib:  extension "RANDR" missing on display ":0.0".
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/gdata/tlslite/utils/cryptomath.py:9:
DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead
  import sha
/usr/bin/../share/blogtk2/lib/blogtk2/main.py:63: Warning: g_set_prgname() called multiple times
  program = gnome.init('blogtk', '2.0')


Pros:

• It is very fast

Cons:

• There is no way to specify new formatting types, what is available is just Paragraphs, Blockquotes, unordered lists (and this cannot detect multiple lines of list items)
• There is no image uploading

Alternatives:

• ScribeFire - a nice blogging app that is Firefox Plugin (it does image uploading)