It has been approximately a year since I started using Zoundry Raven. In my opinion, it is definitely the best offline blog editor that I have ever used. More recently, I have been customising Raven (which I now call RavenPlus) and tailoring it to meet my own needs. Hurray for making Raven open-source.
Something Peculiar
I still remember the quirkiness the first time I added a new "Category/Tag" (also called "Labels" on Google's Blogger) in Raven. Adding the "Category" is quite straight forward in the Raven editor - no problems there. After successfully publishing my post with the newly added "Category", everything looked to be in order when I viewed the blog post via a web browser.
I did not suspect anything amiss until a few days later when I tried to reuse the "Category" that I have added in Raven in another blog post. To my surprise, I could not find it in the list of "Categories" in the "Categories" tab, under the "Configure..." pull-down menu in the Raven's editor. But curiously, when I clicked on the "Tags" node on the "Account Navigator" sidebar, all "Categories" are listed, including the missing one.
Poking around, I later realised that for any "Category" that I have added via Raven, they are only available for use in the original blog post in which it was created. I was dumbfounded. Not surprisingly, this happens in RavenPlus too, since it shares almost 99.8% of the code with Raven.
An Undocumented Step?
But luckily I found something within Raven that can overcome the above mentioned shortcomings. I stumbled upon this discovery quite by accident actually, while going through Raven's log ("Tools -> Background Tasks" in the main window).
To make the missing "Category" appear in the editor window in Raven, just click on the "Download" button on the main window and select "Most Recent Post" (any option will do too actually, but the less post to download the faster the task will complete) from the drop-down menu. After the download task has completed, a quick peek at Raven's log ("Tools -> Background Tasks...") will tell us the names of the categories that were downloaded, if there is any. "Categories" was misspelled in the log as "categores", by the way. If you fire-up the editor window and check on the list of "Categories", you will realise that all the "Categories" will be there, as it should.
From what I understand, the "Download" button on the toolbar in the main window in Raven actually performs 2 functions:
- it downloads the most recent blog posts - the number of posts will depend on which option was chosen; and
- it also downloads any new "Categories" on the blog server that is currently not available in Raven.
Perhaps these 2 distinct functions were suppose to be separated into two separate buttons in some future release, but somehow Raven got abandoned before this could be done. That's my theory anyway since I could not think of a reason why.
A button that performs 2 different tasks - now that's odd for any computer program. Isn't this called a "side-effect" in computer programming?
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