Setting Up Zoundry Raven's Development Environment

When Push Comes To Shove

The offline blog editor Zoundry Raven self-terminates my Amazon Affiliate iframe tags. It converts my <iframe><iframe/> tags to <iframe/> upon publishing my blog posts. And my Amazon Ads do not get displayed correctly when viewed from the Opera web browser. I reported this issue at Zoundry Raven's Open Source website, but I received no reply. I tried accessing the Raven's support forum but it seems to have gone offline. So the only thing that I could do is to install the Raven's development environment, peek at its source code and try to fix this problem myself, if possible.

The instructions to set up the development environment can be found in the page WikiGettingStarted and the compiler and dependent tools that Raven requires are all at the Downloads page. Instructions to download the source code is at Source.

( Update 24th April 2015 : Some of the links above are pointing to Google Code. Unfortunately, Google Code is shutting down and I am not sure what will happen to these links after the year 2016.)

How Did It Go?

On the whole, setting up the development environment went pretty smooth, except for when it came to installing pytz-2008i.zip. The message displayed was a little misleading when executing the command as shown below (honestly it should not be displayed if it has installed successfully):

D:\WinUtils\RavenDependencies\uTidy\code>c:\python24\python.exe setup.py install
*** This library requires that you have two libraries ***
*** installed: ctypes and libtidy. ***
*** Please make sure they are installed correctly ***
*** before reporting a bug. ***
*** See: ***
*** http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/ctypes/ ***
*** and http://tidy.sourceforge.net ***
*** (or consult your vendor documentation for binary ***
*** packages.) ***

libtidy actually got installed successfully, but I spent something like 30 minutes trying to fix an 'error' that never was. I only realized this after when I ran the following commands, thanks to the file README.txt in the uTidy.zip file that did not complain of any problems:

$ python
>>> import tidy
>>> help(tidy)

Also, I place the file cygtidy-0-99-0.dll in the default Python directory "C:\Python24".

And Raven compiled without any problems after that. Now I have Raven version 1.0.500 on my computer. The next thing for me to do is to learn the Python programming language. I hope it is not too difficult, with my background in 'C', Pascal and Delphi 5. The last computer program that I wrote was something like 10 years ago.

Update 23 December 2013:
I have successfully installed the Raven development environment running under Windows 7 Professional yesterday - all within the Oracle VM Virtualbox. Raven compiled and ran successfully after the installation. The only thing to keep in mind is to install the Raven dependent tools with Administrator priviledges - in Windows Explorer, right-click on the file and select "Run as Administrator". Otherwise, the error messages "Could not create key" and "Could not set key value" will be displayed.

By the way, Internet Explorer (IE) under Windows 7 is at version 8.