LiveJournal Charm client's Journal

Feature request: Non-interactive editing of existing posts.
I like using charm's non-interactive mode for quick posts, and with the judicious use of shell aliases, it's pretty simple to have customized parameters while retaining a simplified command line.

One feature I'd like to see is a way to non-interactively edit an existing post. Even the basic minimum — retrieving the most recent post — would be useful. Just to clarify the functionality I'm looking for, here's what I want to do. I have a journal that I use to keep track of certain health stats — number of fluid ounces daily intake. So it would be nice to be able to append to an existing post, so that I can have one post per day, with the entire daily log.

Although I have a specific purpose in mind, I can see many ways where a generalized method of editing an existing post non-interactively could be very useful.

The sha and md5 modules are deprecated
The hashlib module replaces the sha and md5 modules in python >=2.6

I don't code in python but I think this patch works https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2784974&group_id=70637&atid=528507
I tested it out on my own setup though, so that might have been the reason why it works, not sure. Let me know what you think
:)

hlogin for metaweb?
First of all, thanks a lot for Charm - it's absolutely brilliant!

However, the documentation is fairly LiveJournal-centered, so I couldn't figure out how to use MetaWeb (WordPress) without storing my password in plain text.
FWIW, I wouldn't mind being prompted for a password on startup...

Problems running archive
When I try to run an archive of my journal, the following happens:

No previous synchronization. Obtaining data...
Found 1419 new and changed items...
  Fetching item list, 1060 items remaining after 2005-02-20 16:41:34...
  Fetching item list, 698 items remaining after 2007-06-20 17:20:59...
Retrieving 1015 journal entries...
  Retrieving all posts...
    Archived 100 entries...
  Retrieving posts after 2003-10-24 19:57:20...
    Archived 100 entries...
  Retrieving posts after 2004-01-05 20:36:07...
Synchronization download failed: Client error: Invalid text encoding: Cannot
display this post. Please see
http://www.livejournal.com/support/encodings.bml for more information.
  Pausing 5 seconds before trying again...

After that it keeps re-trying with increasing intervals and never gets anywhere. The website referenced in the error message doesn't really provide information (that I understand). What is going on here and how do I get around it?

Charm 1.9.1
I've released Charm 1.9.1. It's available for download via SourceForge.

This is purely a maintenance release, consisting nearly solely of user requests. The changes:

Tags, picture keywords, and journals are now displayed in columns.
If adding a social bookmark fails, you will be prompted for a retry.
If your locale default encoding is UTF8, text is no longer re-encoded.
Hyphens in the man page are now escaped.
GPL boilerplate is now included in the main file.

Thanks to everyone who submitted patches.

One's more about UTF-8
Hello!

I use Charm 1.9.0 on Fedora 8, uk_UA.UTF-8 as system locale - Ukrainian language, cyrillic script with UTF-8 codepage.

Original program recoded my posts in unreadable ones.

Playing with iconv, I have found, that it applies Latin1 -> UTF-8 translation to the text, already encoded in UTF-8.

I have found the following lines in source script:

# -----------------------
# Dealing with Unicode.
# -----------------------

def utf8(s):
    "UTF-8 encode a string, if supported."

    try:
        return unicode(s, "iso-8859-1").encode("UTF-8")
    except:
        return s

It fails to work fine.

Is Charm oriented only on English-speakers?

I propose the next modification. It works.

# -----------------------
# Dealing with Unicode.
# -----------------------
def utf8(s):
    "UTF-8 encode a string, if supported."
    import locale
    loc = locale.getdefaultlocale()
    if loc[1]=='UTF8':
        return s
    else:
        try:
            return unicode(s, loc[1]).encode("UTF-8")
        except:
            return s

Charm 1.9.0
I've released Charm 1.9.0. You can download it from SourceForge, like usual.

In addition to a number of bugfixes and the inclusion of the GPLv2 license directly (per request for something Debian-packageable), crossposting ability for all supported APIs, and support for blog keyword tags (the mt_keyword field supported by Movable Type and Wordpress), the new version has three significant features.

First, you can now run your post through an arbitrary number of filters, so you can use Markdown, Textile, and so on.

Second, you can now have arbitrary post templates. Specify a template on the command line or in your .charmrc file, or load it manually before posting, and your post's meta-info (subject, picture, mood, community, etc., whatever you want) and post body will be pre-populated accordingly. Templates look exactly like archive files, so you can easily turn an archived post into a template. You can always override the contents of a template with command-line options or via the regular posting menu.

Third, if you're using MetaWeb API blog software like Wordpress, you can now automatically add a social bookmark to your posts. Currently, the supported service is AddThis, but I'm willing to add support for other services and general configurability as they're suggested.

Charm 1.8.0
I should probably have released a new version of Charm years ago, since I added MetaWeb API support almost immediately after the release of 1.7.0. I'm finally doing it now.

I've released version 1.8.0 now. It contains MetaWeb API support (for all you folks out there who have WordPress-based blogs), a command-line option for adding tags, and a command-line option to take an existing archived post and cross-post it to another blog.

UTF-8 text and Charm
I'm trying to include some Korean into an LJ post, but Charm doesn't want to process it. Here's the traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/drake/bin/charm", line 14, in 
    ljcharm.main()
  File "/home/drake/bin/ljcharm.py", line 5623, in main
    jobj.quick_mode(resumeold)
  File "/home/drake/bin/ljcharm.py", line 4833, in quick_mode
    ok = self.cli_postevent()
  File "/home/drake/bin/ljcharm.py", line 1463, in cli_postevent
    Basic_MetaData)
  File "/home/drake/bin/ljcharm.py", line 1282, in client_op
    "auth_response" ], blist)
  File "/home/drake/bin/ljcharm.py", line 1195, in web_encode
    s = utf8_urlencode(pdict)
  File "/home/drake/bin/ljcharm.py", line 359, in utf8_urlencode
    for c in w.encode("UTF-8"):
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xec in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

I've gotten similar errors when cut-and-pasing something from the web that happens to be UTF-8 encoded, like fancy quotation marks and so on. I see that it fails in the function utf8_urlencode, which is odd since my post contains no URLs. Is there a way to fix this?

Is there any way to set the tag of a post from the command line? I tried looking at the code, but it has been too long since I've edited python code.

Issue (?) with using an existing tag and a new one
Pardon me if I'm just missing something.

I'm using charm 1.7.0. Having used it for a while, I have a few tags
defined. 8, specifically. When making a post, I want to use an existing
tag and some new ones. For my choice of tags, I type "0, 8" which should
do what I want. Instead, it just chooses tag 8 and goes back to the
posting menu.

Can anyone replicate this?

Archiving of comments?
I've been using Charm for a while now, primarily as a means to archive all my old entries. But is there a way for it to save the comments on those entries too?

can charm post to a Wordpress blog?
I'd like to use Charm to post to a Wordpress blog. Charm claims to be able to post to blogs using the Atom API, and from googling around I think Wordpress supports that. I tried setting up charm for that. The relevant lines in the rc file are:

hatomblog = Dan Rx-stuff-ZGQ http://www.url.com/wordpress
url = http://www.url.com/wordpress/xmlrpc.php

But when I start Charm with that rc file, I get:

Warning: no support for Atom API blogging.

Is this because Charm doesn't have the support, or the Wordpress blog? I don't know much about the various blog API thingys.

If Charm won't do this, is there another text-based client that will post to a Wordpress blog?

Current Mood: confused

Wrapper script for even easier posting

I'm using charm at the moment inside a little wrapper script (in Bash) I have which pipes my files through Markdown and SmartyPants for lovely formatting, etc. I just installed MPD/MPC as my music player and wanted to add that to the mix when I post.

Unfortunately, all my attempts end up with Current music: "Godspeed when it should really say Current music: Godspeed You Black Emperor!: Monheim, or some such. I've done a lot of fiddling with different placements of " and ' and without either, but nothing seems to work.

Currently, the little bit of code which does the business looks like this:

    # Insert current track, if playing
    if [[ $(mpc status | grep playing) ]];
    then
        MUSIC="--music "$(mpc status --format '%artist%: %title%' | head -n 1 )""
    fi
    charm -q -s "$SUBJ" "$MUSIC" $@ <<< "$BODY"

Can anyone suggest why this wouldn't work? If I remove the $MUSIC reference from the charm argument string it all works as planned, but I'd really like it to do music too.

Current Mood: frustrated

Hey,

i really like charm a lot, but (as I have previously posted) it has some problems on my system when trying to post a text which includes an umlaut (ÄäÖöÜüß).

First, some details:
$ python -V
Python 2.4.2

>> print sys.getdefaultencoding()
ascii</mono>

>> print sys.getfilesystemencoding()
ISO-8859-15

When I try and press u for update, It gives me the following error message.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/charm", line 14, in ?
ljcharm.main()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ljcharm.py", line 5631, in main
jobj.main_menu()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ljcharm.py", line 4648, in main_menu
repeat_ok = self.post_menu()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ljcharm.py", line 3663, in post_menu
return self.common_menu("POST MENU", 0)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ljcharm.py", line 3645, in common_menu
ok = self.go_post()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ljcharm.py", line 2406, in go_post
ok = self.cli_postevent()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ljcharm.py", line 1462, in cli_postevent
self.client_op("postevent", [ "lineendings", "event" ] +
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ljcharm.py", line 1282, in client_op
"auth_response" ], blist)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ljcharm.py", line 1195, in web_encode
s = utf8_urlencode(pdict)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ljcharm.py", line 359, in utf8_urlencode
for c in w.encode('utf-8'):
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xf6 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

I will happily provide any further necessary information if it helps to resolve that problem.

Bug (?) in tag handling, charm 1.7.0

I seem to have found a bug in ljcharm 1.7.0 relating to tags support. Can anyone recreate it?

Steps to recreate:

Start charm
Hit p<enter> to post
Hit c<enter> to go to Change tags
Hit 0<enter> for "(use one or more new tags)"
Hit <enter>
Crash

Traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/charm", line 14, in ?
    ljcharm.main()
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/lib/python2.3/site-packages/ljcharm.py", line 5630, in main
    jobj.main_menu()
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/lib/python2.3/site-packages/ljcharm.py", line 4647, in main_menu
    repeat_ok = self.post_menu()
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/lib/python2.3/site-packages/ljcharm.py", line 3662, in post_menu
    return self.common_menu("POST MENU", 0)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/lib/python2.3/site-packages/ljcharm.py", line 3641, in common_menu
    repeat_ok = self.tags_menu()
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/lib/python2.3/site-packages/ljcharm.py", line 3443, in tags_menu
    post_tags.append(t)
UnboundLocalError: local variable 't' referenced before assignment

can't post russian text to blogger.com
i don't know why?! :)

1. did somebody tried blogger feature ?
2. simple config
% cat .charmrc
hatomblog = fff cGVjaGtpbjptaWtlMTIzNDU=

3. charm% charm
--------------[ Charm 1.7.0, a LiveJournal and Atom API Client ]--------------

( Fetching blogs... )
Failed, server error. Try again later.

Charm could not retrieve any blogs for you. This may because of an
authentication error, or because you have not yet created a blog
on your blogging service.

4. if i use password from 2. in the browse i could login.

FreeBSD Port Updated
I've updated the deskutils/ljcharm port for FreeBSD to version 1.7.0, enjoy.

Charm 1.7.0 released
Charm 1.7.0 is now available. You can get it from SourceForge, as usual.

For most users, the only significant new feature is Charm's support for LiveJournal's tag system.

However, Charm now also works as a client for blogging sites that use the Atom API. That means that if you also blog on Movable Type, Blogger, etc., you can also use Charm as a client for those sites. (Charm also supports Movable Type's categories system in a way similar to LJ tags.)

I've got a backlog of some other stuff to do, processing suggestions and patches from other folks, but I thought I'd go ahead and release this now, since it's been a few months and the current code seems stable.

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