Contents: Downloading the file Creating a database Administering the blog Running a blog in BlogSphere The bottom line Resources About the author Rate this article Related content: Domino blogging: Blogs and blogging Domino blogging: DomBlog Domino blogging: Domino Blog Domino blogging: Basic vocabulary Subscriptions: dW newsletters dW Subscription (CDs and downloads)

David DeJean
Partner, DeJean & Clemens
07 Sep 2004

BlogSphere, a template available from OpenNTF.org, is one of several Notes applications that you can use to develop your own Domino blog. Find out how to create and customize your own blogging database from this full-featured Notes template.

The BlogSphere template was originally authored by Declan Lynch and is now available on the OpenNTF Web site from a development team that includes Lynch, Rocky Oliver, Tom Duff, and Joe Litton. Lynch blogs at dec's dom blog; Oliver is the Lotus Geek; Duff is widely known as the Duffbert of Duffbert's Random Musings; and Litton does both a tech blog (JoeLitton.net) and a personal blog (Little Joe).

The BlogSphere template, like Domino Blog, is a configuration-driven engine. You do the work of configuring and customizing your blog in the Notes client, which provides a workbench for managing the necessary stylesheets, resources, and configuration documents as well as creating blog entries. Readers see the blog and comments in a Web browser.

Downloading the file
You can download BlogSphere from the OpenNTF site. You must be registered with the site to have access to the download, and registration may require a couple of days of processing time, so plan accordingly. The BlogSphere code comes down as an uncompressed template.

Creating a database
After you download the template file, use it to create a new database on a Domino server, then do the following:

1. Edit the ACL. Add the Anonymous user with Author rights and make sure you have Manager rights. (You may want to reset the Default from Designer to No Access, too.)
2. Re-sign all the agents with an ID that can execute server-based agents. If your ID has this privilege, just open the database in Domino Designer, select all the agents, and click the Sign button.
3. In Notes, open your database's Blog Config document from the navigator and edit the first four items to add your name, your blog's title, its domain, and its base URL. (If you are blogging in a language other than English, the Config document includes a pane where you can enter translations of the days, months, and other static text used by the application.) Then save it.

When you open the blog in a browser, it will look similar to the following with the blog content in a central column flanked by two side columns:

Figure 1. BlogSphere

The "post-a-note" icon with the red push-pin beside the entry title is a link that opens the entire item in its own window.

To add a comment to any entry, click Comments and the comment editor opens, complete with a bar of emoticons you can click to add clutter to your message:

Figure 2. Edit mode

Below this comment entry box, there's a place to manually create a trackback entry that points to another blog.

Administering the blog
The BlogSphere NSF file is the interface for administering the blog. The available tools, such as referrer blocker and comment blocker, are in the navigator:

Figure 3. Tools

The tools fall into three groups: tools for creating and managing content, either blog entries or static HTML pages; tools for managing resources, such as image resources, CSS files, JavaScript and so on; and tools for managing referrer information. Referrers and commenters can be blocked by IP address.

The view on the right shows the blocks available for display in the side columns of the blog. The block structure is an easy way to customize the peripheral information displayed by your blog -- the blogroll, contact information, search box, categories list, and RSS links. The HTML block type allows you to create custom blocks that use any HTML you want, so you are not restricted to the predefined block types in the template.

There are 10 positions for blocks in each column, and any position can be configured to display any block:

Figure 4. Block types

Pick the block type from the drop-down, set its position in the column, enable it for display, save it by pressing CTRL + S, and close it. (Curiously, there's no Save and Close button.)

Another common task as you set up your blog is creating an image resource, which you do in another of the Resources tools. Open the Images view and click the New Image button, and you'll see this screen:

Figure 5. Blog images

Resist the temptation to paste your image directly into the only field on the form. The easy way to get a file into the resource is to drag and drop the filename. You can also click in the field to give it focus then choose File - Attach and browse to the name of the image file you want to make a resource. BlogSphere automatically generates a title for the resource based on your user name and computes the URL. Click the Save Image button and close the document.

CSS files are also installed and uninstalled through the Resources interface. BlogSphere includes a number of built-in stylesheets, most of them named for prominent Domino bloggers. The CSS Files view shows the available stylesheets with green checks or red Xs to indicate whether they are active or inactive:

Figure 6. CSS Files view

Open a CSS file document and edit the Enabled field to install or uninstall the stylesheet:

Figure 7. Stylesheet selection

You can edit the stylesheet line-by-line directly in this document as well, create new stylesheets from scratch, or paste in existing stylesheets.

BlogSphere's relatively simple configuration controls can take you a very long way in customizing your blog. Just by creating some image resources, reconfiguring the side-column blocks, and enabling the BlogSphere stylesheet (the template comes with qtzar.css, the stylesheet Declan Lynch uses for his own blog, enabled by default), we were able to get very close to the design of our sample Time's Telescope blog:

Figure 8. Time's Telescope blog

Some work on the stylesheet would take us even closer. We may want to edit the blog entry form to include the eye graphic, just to save ourselves the work of having to copy and paste the link into every new item.

Running a blog in BlogSphere
BlogSphere is the most feature-laden of the three templates. It includes support for Google's Adsense program, RSS for comments, and lots of other things you can dig out of Lynch's blog at www.blogsphere.net. What you can do with the side-column blocks to display information about referrers and Google searches is awesome: Rocky Oliver's Lotus Geek blog takes the side-columns way over the top.

While BlogSphere hasn't been updated in a while and lacks some of the latest features like comment spam blocking, it does do referral blocking. In simple mode, it can automatically block referrers that contain certain words. If you have the ability to run restricted agents, then you can enable advanced mode: The referrer checker that will open the referrer's URL and check for a link back to your blog.

There are a couple of features that ease the labor of creating a blog item. The home page of your blog can display either full items or a lead paragraph with a Read More link. The way it does it is ingenious. The form you use to create a new item displays two text fields separated by Read More:

Figure 9. Read More link

Whatever you enter in the first field is displayed on the home page followed by the Read More. Whatever you put in the second field is concatenated with the contents of the first field, and it's all displayed in the page that unites the full item with any comments posted about it.

You can include an image in a blog entry several ways. You can create an HTML tag using the image resource's URL, which is displayed on the resource page after you save and reopen it:

Figure 10. Blog image resource

The images are also available in the blog entry form. Clicking a drop-down displays a selection box of all the available images. A second control allows you to position the selected graphic -- top, bottom, left, or right:

Figure 11. Blog image selection

Also on this form, you can set the status of the blog entry as Draft or Published, allow or disallow comments for the entry, and set the posting style -- plain text or Rich Text. (If you use Rich Text, you can paste images directly into the content fields of the form.) Also in the Blog Entry form, you can control the publication date: If you set an item's status to Published and the Date field to a future date, then the item won't appear in the blog until that date.

Once you have your blog set up and running, you can create new blog entries and upload image resources from the Web. To create a new blog entry, add the form name story to the blog URL -- for example, http://www.servername/databasename.nsf/story:

Figure 12. Time's Telescope edit mode

The form's built-in editor supports attachments and uploading an image as a resource, then displaying it in the editor. It doesn't support any administration beyond allowing or disallowing comments.

The bottom line
You still have to write some HTML code to format your blog and manage images just as you do with the other two blog databases. Both BlogSphere and DominoBlog let you enter Rich Text, which is turned into HTML when the item is published to the Web. DominoBlog gives you two entry fields, one to use if you're working with plain text and doing all your own formatting, the other for Rich Text. BlogSphere has a little bit of an interface edge here because it lets you choose how you want it to treat the text you enter -- either plain text or Rich Text -- and sets the type of the entry fields accordingly.

And, as with most Domino applications, better documentation would help save a lot of time and effort getting started.

Resources

• Domino blogging: Blogs and blogging
  
  
• Domino blogging: DomBlog
  
  
• Domino blogging: Domino Blog
  
  
• Domino blogging: Basic vocabulary
  
  
• Read the developerWorks blogs.
  

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