Simmons Consulting, the Website of Toby Simmons

New version of Zempt! Zempt 0.5 is released

10
Sep

I finally found some time (I don’t know where) and fixed a few of the bugs that had been bothering me most about Zempt. The biggest one was how Zempt would mess up the internal posting date of existing blog entries when you edited them and re-published them.

It turns out that if you return the timestamp using XMLRPC in UTC time without specifying it with a “Z” at the end, WordPress assumes you are using local time … for me, that meant that when I edited a post originally published at 7 p.m., the edited version would be published with the UTC time of +0600 hours. WordPress assumed the posting date was 1 a.m. the next day … so now, Zempt correctly appends the “Z” timezone specification on posts with explicit dates. Wahoo! Plus the upload file tools seems to work pretty solidly for me.

If you want the latest version, download the installer.

Comments (4) »

  1. Please don’t take this as a complaint; it’s only intended to provide feedback that should be helpful to refining Zempt and maybe warning others about a couple of potential problems.

    I installed Zempt 0.5 last night. When I went to set up an account, I entered the URL of my weblog but Zempt couldn’t find it. So, I entered the URL to xml-rpc.php. That generated three error popups.

    I tried again. Same thing. Shortly thereafter, I discovered I couldn’t access my blog. I have the Bad Behavior anti-spam plugin installed and turned on. Zempt stomped all over Bad Behavior’s big nerve, and BB got even with me.

    My Webhost’s tech support answered my plea for help, deactivating the plugin. I then did a bunch of detective work to learn the source of the problem and how to resolve it, so I could go on using BB.

    Other, lesser problems I encountered in my brief attempt to use Zempt 0.5 was that on loading it declared it couldn’t find Aspell, so there wouldn’t be any spell checking (well, OK); and when I went to work with Zempt, it protested it couldn’t find a Draft file or directory in a subdirectory of \Documents and Settings.

    Others contemplating using Zempt, this version anyway, who also use Bad Behavior should be warned to make a choice, and if it’s Zempt, they should uninstall Bad Behavior.

    I hope this is of some help.

  2. Toby Simmons says:

    No problem! I appreciate your feedback. I’m using Bad Behavior as well. Funny that Zempt is so ill behaved for you. I’ll look into what kinds of things the Curl library (the library that Zempt uses to make web requests) is doing to irritate BB.

    I bet the protest that it couldn’t find Draft dir in \Documents and Settings was due to an error in the installer. I’ll post a new comment here if I find anything out.

    Thanks again.

    Cheers,

    Toby

  3. Toby,

    I should also have specified that I am using version 1.2.4 of BB on WordPress 1.5.1. I run Spam Karma 2 concurrently, but I don’t think that had a problem. Then again . . .?

    Also, during the Zempt install, I directed it to c:\Program Files\Internet, if that makes any difference.

    Regards,

    S.W. Anderson

  4. Toby,

    Hope I’m not becoming a pest, but I thought it might help if you could see the error message in the BB port of my blog’s MySQL database. I believe it to be the error generated on the first attempt to create an account within Zempt.

    POST /wpblog/xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.1
    Accept: */*
    Content-Length: 217
    Content-Type: text/xml
    Host: ohpinion.com
    Pragma: no-cache
    User-Agent: Zempt/0.5.101.0 (Windows XP, Service Pack 2)

    Reason:
    Header ‘Pragma’ without ‘Cache-Control’ prohibited for HTTP/1.1 requests

    I hope this means something to you, because it might as well have been a riddle written in Sanskrit to me.

    Cheers,

    S.W. Anderson

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