The DomBlog Template v1.6

Jake Howlett, 11 July 2003

Category: Miscellaneous; Keywords: blog

If you don't know what a blog is by now you've obviously not been spending enough time on the Internet. Even my mum and dad know what a blog is!

There's something like 500,000 blogs and growing. Some good, some bad. There aren't however that many blogs out there that are based on or talk about Domino. Hopefully I can help change that by making a template available.

So, here it is. The DomBlog version 1.6. Download it and get yourself blogging. All you need to do is get it on to a server with all the document intact and go from there. Add yourself to the ACL with the Admin role. Once logged in you will see a red box section with all the options you need to administer the site - creating new blogs and adding new image resources etc. I've put a few in there for an example of how to do it. It should look pretty much identical to the shot below and like this online version.

Once you're up and running be sure to let me know and I'll start to compile a list of any blog using this as the template.

Terms of usage:

If you do end up actually using the template as a blog of your own I have a few things to ask of you. One that you make a donation to my favourite charitable cause MSF or, if you'd rather, you can make a donation to my second favourite cause, me, via my Amazon wishlist. Another is that you make some reference either in the source or on the site about where you got it from. Don't try and pass it off as your own. It's not clever!

Apart from that, do what you want. Learn from it. There are some nice little tricks included in there that can be stripped out and used to great effect elsewhere.

If you make a significant improvement to any part of the template let us all know. Or if you have an idea for how it could be improved let us all know.

Future Improvements:

Addition of ContentEditable style editor.
Ability to block IP addresses of offensive posters.
Ability to require new posts go for approval before appearing on live site.
Adition of a Category field (e.g: "Internet", "Life", "Love", "Thoughts" etc) to blogs and subsequent views.

Note: Any changes to the template will be added to an update to this "article".

Known Issues:

User responses trying to use the bulletin board style formatting is less than perfect. Hey, it is Notes!
There is no option to preview either the main blog or the posts that users add. Might resolve this in v2.0.

Version History:

Version 1.6.2 (11 Sep 2008)

Added a fix to allow use of blog with SSL.
Fixed content-type issue of global.css which meant it didn't work in Firefox..

Version 1.6.0 (11 Jul 2003)

Added the first release of the Domino Blog API (1.0). Thanks to John Marshall for all his hard work.
There is now the ability to have more than one author on your blog.

Version 1.5.2 (16 Jun 2003)

Fixed a bug that prevented comments from being saved when HTML was allowed in the Blog Preferences. Thanks to Clyde McKenney for pointing this out to me.
Links to images in Resource documents now include the document name to make it easier to copy them as links for your blog entries.

Version 1.5.1 (11 Jun 2003)

Fixed a bug with the way dates were handled that meant only UK format was accepted.
Fixed a bug whereby the Title field was case-sensitive. Thanks to Julian Robichaux.
Tidied up the code to try and cater for standard Java coding guidelines. Thanks to Johan Kanngard.

Version 1.5.0 (09 Jun 2003)

The template is now an R6 database.
Added ability to blog via the Blogger API. Read how...
Added the ability to place blogs in Draft status.
Draft blogs can be given a date on which they will be automatically posted.
Added ability to list sites that you consider worth reading.
Added a RSS feed of all Blogs. Courtesy of Chris King and by request of Justin Freeman.
The mail received when people respond to a blog has been tidied up.
Fixed a bug with the search feature, discovered by Chris King.
Fixed a bug with the $$Return value of reader responses. Thanks to Chris King for pointing this out.

Version 1.1.3 (19 Dec 2002)

Added a feature to the "blogpost" form that allows the Administrator to view all posts by the same IP address.
Added a list of names to the "blogpost" form that posted using the same IP address. Allows the Administrator to quickly identify dubious posts.
Fixed a typo in the Calendar header row HTML.
Added version number to the HEAD element.
Re-ordered Admin links following a prompt by Uncle Phil.
Removed a legacy Subform element.
Fixed a bug in the "blogpost" form that broke the link to the parent blog.

Version 1.1.2 (16 Dec 2002)

Fixed a bug whereby removal of the "unid" view in v1.1.1 had caused the Delete Document admin link to break.
Removed the legacy Approve and Un-Approve buttons from the "post" form.
Fixed a bug that meant that New Post mails were sent every time a post form was saved instead of just the first time.

Version 1.1.1 (15 Dec 2002)

Fixed a bug in the search view HTML that broke the result links.

Version 1.1.0 (15 Dec 2002)

You can now have more than one blog post per day.
You can specify a name to send mails to when an occurs and/or a reader posts a comment. Both controlled via Application Setting documents.
Added an experimental feature allow users to add their own formatting and links when they can't use HTML. Not perfect but it can only get better ;o)

Version 1.0.3 (12 Dec 2002)

Users can no longer add HTML to their Name and Email fields in blog responses. This stops people able to use JavaScript to hijack your site.
Changed the CSS layout styles so that it doesn't tend to scroll horizontally as much on smaller screen sizes.

Version 1.0.2 (10 Dec 2002)

Added the ability to control whether reader's can add HTML to their comments. Controlled using the Application Settings documents. Thanks to Todd Harris for the prompting.

Version 1.0.1 (08 Dec 2002)

Fixed a bug in the date formula of the calendar code that resulted in too few days being displayed. Thanks to Danny Jamieson.

Version 1.0.0 (08 Dec 2002)

Initial release.