The popularity of Weblogs (commonly called blogs) has reached the level of cultural phenomenon. They cover an incredible variety of topics, and take great advantage of the immediacy and accessibility of the Web. And they add a personal touch to providing Web-based information to others and for building collaborative communities on the Internet or on corporate intranets. It's no surprise that Lotus Notes and Domino are the subject of many blogs and a vibrant community of Domino bloggers has emerged. Likewise it shouldn't be a surprise that using Lotus Domino to host blogs is not only possible, but also desirable.
Domino features from subforms to replication can help you create a blogging application with exactly the look and feel and features that you need. There is even a trio of ready-made applications that you can start with. This article discusses these applications in detail and tells you how to get up and running quickly with instructions for downloading, configuring, and customizing each of them.
You don't have to look far to find examples of the value of blogs. There are several excellent blogs that discuss Lotus Notes and Domino and that provide great information, examples, and problem-solving help for the issues Domino developers and administrators deal with every day. Several of these Domino blogs are listed in the Resources section at the end of this article.
Using Lotus Domino for blogging
Most Domino bloggers not only use their blogs to spread knowledge of Lotus Notes and Domino through the community, they use Lotus Domino to create their blogs. There are three readily available blog applications or templates for Lotus Domino:
- Domblog, created by Codestore.net's Jake Howlett. This is the simplest of the three templates.
- Domino Blog, created by Steve Castledine of Leicester, UK. Users of Domino Blog like its ease of customization. You can change the look and feel of a blog extensively using just CSS files.
- BlogSphere, a project from OpenNTF.org ramrodded by Declan Lynch. Its configuration menus handle a significant amount of customization, including colors, wording, and CSS files.
(A fourth entry, s3maphor3, is in beta. According to its developer, Ferdy Christant, it will be generally available in October.)
By clicking the preceding three links, you'll find instructions on downloading each application, installing it, and configuring it on your Domino server. And you'll find examples of how to customize each one to change the appearance of the blog to include your graphics and design elements.
Lotus Domino has some distinct advantages as a platform for blogs, and these Domino applications can make it easy to get a blog up and running. You can download, configure, and customize an application that puts a fully featured blog on the air very quickly.
Domino bloggers generally agree that Lotus Domino is a great platform for blogging. They like the fact that everything on a blog site is all in one replicating NSF file. They like the ease with which they can customize a template and add features. When we asked Domino bloggers about weaknesses, they tended to agree on two: They'd like better control over Domino-generated HTML and look forward hopefully to the ability to generate clean XHTML (and variants thereof) with future versions of Lotus Domino. And they agree that the main weakness in the Domino blogs is the lack of complete documentation as to how things work and how to configure things.
Getting started with each of the three applications is the same: You download the file (an NSF or NTF) from the Web, install it, configure your blog, and then customize its look and feel to suit your needs and taste. That’s easily said, but it can take a lot of trial and error and tearing down the code to figure out what it's doing and how it does it. It's the intent of this article to circumvent some of the time required to get up and running.
Using Domino-driven blogs for business
Blogging is new enough to still be viewed as a primarily personal (rather than business) use of technology. But blogs can have many benefits in business. Lilia Efimova names four (in her blog, Mathemagenic, naturally):
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Publishing
A blog is a great place to make something publicly available and easily accessible -- and to get recognition for the work. -
Personal information management
Many bloggers use their blogs as notebooks to capture data and impressions, to document ideas and experiences, and to organize links and references. -
Dialogue and networking
Blogs are a place to get feedback on ideas, to initiate conversations, and to make contacts based on common interests. -
Learning
A blog helps its blogger learn by staying updated, articulating and organizing ideas, participating in conversations, and being part of a community, as well as sharpening writing, communication, research, and technology skills.
If you're looking for applications for Domino blogging, look at blogging for collaboration, personal blogging for knowledge creation, project blogging for coordination, or informational blogging to communicate information between departments -- HR policy updates, IT system status, marketing product announcements, department news, and meeting minutes.
Blogs take great advantage of the universality of the Web and browsers, and emerging technologies such as syndication and RSS readers make it easy to capture information for browser users who can't replicate Notes applications.
On the other hand, blogs have some disadvantages as well. They take work to keep going. There's a high abandonment rate for blogs. The threads of a discussion are hard to follow in a blog, and for blogs coming in from the Web, the content is definitely use-at-your-own-risk: It's unfiltered and unmanaged and may not be exactly the information you need.
But with the right champions and the right support, blogging will have an impact on the way businesses work comparable to that of email, instant messaging, and collaboration applications. It was Lotus Notes that led the introduction of many of these technologies in the workplace, and there's no reason why Lotus Notes and Domino can't be the enabling technology platform for corporate blogging as well.
There is a sizeable and active community of bloggers who take Lotus Notes and Domino as the theme of their blogs. You can see a list at the Search Domino Web site. Most of them combine some personal information management with reflective looks at other areas of their lives. Some of the best known are:
- EdBrill.com, written by Ed Brill, who works for IBM Lotus managing the positioning of Lotus software solutions. Ed never fails to make forceful marketing points for Lotus Domino.
- Codestore.net provides an entry point into Jake Howlett's collected writing on technical Domino topics as well as some personal insights.
- Duffbert's Random Musings gives Tom Duff a platform, and his blogroll is another good way to get started learning about Domino bloggers. There you'll meet Ben Langhinrichs (Genii Weblog), Ben Poole (benpoole.com), Chris Miller (IdoNotes), Joe Litton (joelitton.net), Kathleen McGivney (KM/Now), Libby Ingrassia (NotesGirl), Rob Novak (Snapps), Rob Wonderlich (dominounplugged.com), Rocky Oliver (LotusGeek), and more. (In addition, many people familiar to the Notes/Domino community maintain blogs that aren't Domino-centric, but are nonetheless interesting: Ray Ozzie and Ned Batchelder, for example.)
And if you'd like to dig deeper into blogs, here are some starting points:
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Tools and Web applications for blogging
There are many, many Web-based applications for creating and managing a blog. Blogger.com (formerly the product of Pyra Labs, now owned by Google) is the granddaddy of the Web blog services. Others include CrimsonBlog.com, EasyJournal.com, UpSaid.com, Blog-city.com, Typepad.com, Radio Userland, and LiveJournal.com. (Some of these are free, others are pay-for-service.) MoveableType is the blogerati's choice of desktop tools. Other desktop tools and APIs: MetaWeblog API, Atom API, Zempt, w.bloggar. -
Syndication
Blogs typically syndicate their content by providing a URL that returns an XML file that can be managed and displayed by a blog reader application. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) was the original format, and Atom is gaining popularity. -
Update monitors
Sites like blo.gs and weblogs.com track blogs for updates and notify you via the Web, email, or instant messaging when a blog on your list changes. -
Blog search engines
Feedster, Bloogz, Technorati, and others work like Google on the more limited universe of blog content. -
RSS feed readers/aggregators
Reader software lets you subscribe to a blog's RSS feed. It checks all your subscriptions and presents a consolidated list of the new or updated items. Some leading readers include Sharpreader, Radio, FeedDemon, and AmphetaDesk. For an authoritative list of readers see the hebig.org/blog Web site. -
RSS readers for Notes
Just as Lotus Domino has advantages as a platform for blogs, some features of the Notes client, such as replication of databases and unread marks, give it advantages as a platform for RSS readers. Aggregators available for Lotus Domino are Bloggregator by Richard Schwartz, Madicon, and Studio Blog Reader. -
Top 100 blogs
Technorati.com and Blogstreet.com maintain lists of the most popular blogs, ranked by their popularity (the number of times they are read) or their influence (the number of other blogs that link to them). Blogstreet also has a visualization tool that displays the links to and from a particular blog or set of blogs as a graphic with interesting results.
This article is particularly indebted to Richard Schwartz, Notes and Domino consultant, occasional LDD Today writer, and blogger extraordinaire (rhs blog). Thanks also to Tom Duff (Duffbert's Random Musings), Chris Miller (IdoNotes), Rob Wunderlich (dominounplugged.com), Ed Brill (EdBrill.com), and Olaf Björklund (Olaf Blog).
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Domino blogging: DomBlog
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Domino blogging: Domino Blog
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Domino blogging: BlogSphere
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Domino blogging: Basic vocabulary
- Read the developerWorks blogs.
David DeJean has been working with and writing about Lotus Notes and Domino for as long as they've existed. He was co-author of the very first book about Notes, "Lotus Notes at Work," and has been an editor and writer for a variety of computer publications. He is a Lotus CLP and a partner in DeJean & Clemens, a firm that does Notes and Internet application development and technical and marketing communications.
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