The source code to BloGTK 2.0 is now available at Launchpad. That means that if you’ve been waiting to hack away, you now can do so.

Launchpad has some impressive collaborative features, and while I’m still getting my “sea legs” in terms of how it all works, it seems to be a good way of managing this project in the future.

You will need to install Bazaar to get access to the code. Under Ubuntu, that’s as simple as

sudo apt-get install bzr

in a terminal window. Other distributions can get in on the fun too, but you’re on your own.

Right now, BloGTK needs only two additional packages from a stock Ubuntu install. Those packages are python-gnome2-extras and python-feedparser. Once those are installed, BloGTK should run.

Create a new working directory and run the command

bzr branch lp:blogtk

and the code will download to a blogtk directory.

Right now, BloGTK 2.0 has no installer, and must be run right from the testing directory. It will create a new folder in your home directory called .BloGTK where the config data and cache are stored.

BloGTK is not beta software, this is at best an early alpha. Many features are missing. Some things may not work as intended. Some things may not work at all. BloGTK needs a lot of love, and most importantly it needs a lot of eyeballs and testing.

Feel free to use Launchpad to hack away at the code and especially feel free to contribute patches and suggestions. The more help I can get, the faster BloGTK development will go.

Enjoy your BloGTK hacking, and hopefully as time goes by, BloGTK 2.0 will become one of the best weblog editors out there.

Here is a preview of the new BloGTK 2.0 interface. This interface is designed to make the process of working with multiple blogs much easier. You can have all your blogs available from the main interface, no matter where they’re hosted or what system they use.

BloGTK 2.0 Main Window

Development on BloGTK 2.0 is still proceeding, although there are some big pieces left to go. Mainly, the first run configuration needs to be built, and the offline editing functions need to be put into place. However, as soon as BloGTK is functional enough to be usable, I do plan on putting the code out on Subversion as a developer release.

I should also mention that this blog will be getting a makeover in the near future as well. As nice as the WordPress default template is, BloGTK deserves its own style…

A quick update on the progress of BloGTK 2.0. Right now the focus is on getting the MetaWeblog API support working correctly. So far, so good on that front, although there’s a lot of testing to make sure it all works correctly.

There’s also an article that every open-source developer should read on why Free Software tends to have bad usability. BloGTK 1 could be the poster child for that—it’s UI design was atrocious—and I’ll be the first to admit it. I do care about usability, but developing a usable interface is a difficult skill to learn. BloGTK 2.0 is going to get a lot of usability work as development continues, especially when it gets loosed on the world.

More as development continues.