Category: socialware-online

I've been thinking of ways to get the students blogging. One of the easy ways is a desktop client. The list is mainly from searching the web for desktop clients. Will reduce the list as I try them out and look at there actual interopability with blojsom and features.

w.bloggar – Looks quite big and very developed. Too many features to mention.
blogBuddy – Seems very under developed but has th ebasic features and nice and small. No xml-rpc but supports the blogger api.
Slug – not good, seems to work for the moveable type only and requires the .net framework. One to forget for sure.
Kung-Log – oh this looks good, first things the developer is looking at the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines draft and his thinking seems to be going in the right direction. Ah but its totally for mac osx only. No good but looks sweet. Maybe one for the mac heads?
EspressoBlog – another osx only app, whats the deal with macs and blogs?
Azure – J2me based, so any mobile phone in the uk should work fine. Supports xml-rpc and moveable type. Looks promising and could be a extra app for those students without expensive phones or pdas which supports instant messager
My simple Google query

Something's buzzing online about weblog APIs. Someone posted a comparison between the Blogger and the MetaWeblog API on his weblog. Then Dave Winer is getting pretty riled up about Google's plans to develop a new version of Blogger API, which should better be based on the MetaWeblog API instead.

Another interesting service in regards to blogging which I came across.
TypePad is an upcoming hosted service providing powerful tools for creating full-featured weblogs. Built in response to the needs of webloggers, online diarists and writers, TypePad harnesses the power of Six Apart's popular Movable Type personal publishing system into a turnkey service, suitable for beginners and experts alike. Google's blogger beware…

Chronicle Lite – java based works with any platform which supports java but only plays with the blogger API.

I'm a little lost on how to change things around on blojsom?
I've looked at how to customimse blojsom and it seems quite straight forward using css but to actually move things around seems a little more difficult. You seem to need some odd kind of *.vm file. Now I think I understand as default blojsom uses the Jakarta Velocity engine instead of jsp. And I'm unsure if I should change it to jsp which I know and understand a bit or learn what the weird commands in vm mean?
I remember reading on david czarnecki's weblog that the performance of jsp was poor and there were other issues. I cant remember what the other issues were but I need to know before i make the change.

But that aside, if I did want to change the current blojsom theme. How the hell would I do that? seriously because I cant see any *.vm files which I can change except the ones in the themes directory. And thats a different theme from the current one.
I'm either really stupid and missing something really obvious or need to do lots of research. Looking at the log file might help, when i find the time.

I really need to sort out file syncing when it comes to my weblog now, most people are lucky they have one way of writing into there weblog only. Me, well i have about 5 or so. The ipaq and tabletpc are going to be the most used i feel and I need to sort out a way of centralising my syncing so for example this weblog i'm writing on the ipaq while on the bus will not be over written by old data from the tabletpc

Avant-go pisses me off big time. I mean seriously pisses me off!
They give you a crummy 2meg of news subscription and expect you to be happy with that?
Anyway what I was thinking was, if I can query all the rss streams I want from cocoon and then transform them via xslt to a webpage which I can syncronise with my ipaq or even take the piss and add to my custom channels of avant go.

Sounds pretty simple right? Yeah should be in theory, a few problems so far…
Avant go doesnt like ip address even redirected ones it seems. Yet to fully test this due to time but i got a feeling its more to do with cocoon running on port 81 rather than port 80, thats the issue. Anyway I can by pass by syncing the pages in pocket ie. But its gonna be a lot of pages!
Another issue is that feed reader my rss reader has a built in webserver and will server my subscriptions if I need it to. Its just a matter of putting it on the server rather than my tablet or workstation. But it saves its preferences and subscriptions in application data in user profiles! WTF! Damm you to hell. I've also been looking at ampi desk or something which does the same without the gui interface. I would ideally like to beable to control the who style of the web part so I can at least use the current stylesheets i'm using on this website.

full respect to hp for giving this a shot.
The demonstration platform for HP Labs' semantic blogging research programme

Ok I've now turned off the show me more plugin, it was doing my nut in when it cut into a url, because the url wouldnt be right and you couldnt click the read more to get the rest of the blog. Nightmare! Now I could have allowed more or less text but i would have had the same problem at some point in the future
Unless this is solved in the future its going to stay off, its too much trouble for little gain.

talking about blogging generally, I've changed the directorys around once again. Really sorry to people using my premalinks, i honestly wont change it much now.

I've held back on http://blojsim.sf.net for now, because even though its almost working, but a email talk with $marklus$ makes me hold back till http://blojsim.sf.net 1.0. Its going to blow our minds i'm told, and I can believe it.

Things I'm working on, well I just added more urls to my bookmark section, which is good but I want to make a proper xml schema out of it, so I can reference bookmarks and sections from this blog and instant messager chats. Also i'm reading about xml-rpc now and soap, hoping to really understand them sometime very soon. Still want to link exist and blojsom together, as this file system thing is not right for my future plans. Looks like that would be done through xml-rpc mainly?

Ok am having issues, with the blojsom directory system once again. This time its not about the file system its self but the display of the directroys shown on the / page aka home page I guess. Currently I have to enable blojsom to look through a certain level of directorys otherwise you will never find the other stuff I write about. But thats not the problem.
Everytime it finds a directory it will add that to the list of available catergories. Sounds great you say? But what incase for example I have 6 directorys inside another one? Well it will display only up to the prefixed limit. What I'm after really is the ability to set a limit for the directory and a limit for the blogs.
So you can have only a few directorys shown but it will grab the newest from any directory and show them on the main page.

Now there is a thing which can do this Blojsom customazation but i swear it doesnt do it as expected. Hence why cubicgarden.com/blog looks messy as hell at the moment. Every day I try to solve the problem on the bus with my tabletpc but theres no progress as of yet. I mean who knows I could be messing it all up again by putting files in the wrong directory?

I've been reading
the guy who wrote blojsom's engine. And boy his weblog is a pile of ideas waiting to happen. Maybe I might show a few interaction design kiddies where its all at. Also realised where dave was getting his links from

This link is directly about the future of blojsom and its off the page compared to what I was thinking.

the blog about blojsom – bleeding edge stuff, the metadata stuff.

I'm totally convenced now that this is the way forward and I need to think of a way of getting students using this once dave sets it up on a server.

with all the talk about metadata in blogging on blojsom and specially off David Czarnecki's blog about the future blog it worries, maybe less worries me but bothers me that the actual blogs themselves are not written in a richer format. Yes I know at the moment i'm adding my own structure to it using just elements and attributes not supported by browsers. But the damm file isnt xml complient! mainly due to some stupid legacy issue with bloxsom. The first line of the file blojsom uses has to be the title. * pulls a face * why? why? why? why the hell? ok maybe its just me, that i havent read the documentation yet or researched enough. But what sense that make? The rest of the file can be anything you like but not the first line. If its not done now already, i will find someway around it, even if i have to write a damm plugin myself.

on a lighter note, if there was a option at least to have a xml based weblog then you could take advantage of all the key parts of xml, specially if we thinking about the context of metadata. I mean why have some weird crap when you could use dublin core instead? Ok yes i know once its through the blojsom engine its all turned into rss, strict xhtml, blah blah. But wouldnt it be nice to have that from start to finish.
Ok to be fair i havent looked at the xmlrpc stuff yet or anything else, but I will when i finally get time…ummm maybe never this side of August?

Also i have problems with a filesystem as a database. I mean that just sounds so bloody backwards, yes i understand why they do it and it makes sense if you want low trouble storage. But come on lets get real when you have many weblogs and entrys the file systems gonna be a mess. How you gonna archive it? zip it up? so blojsom cant see it anymore?
I know there working on ways of using a real database, but i say toss that lets use a xml database like exist. Once again if no one else is going to do it. I damm well will. Damm you all. getting a bit over excited need to chill out…