BlogPlugin 0.92 released

So the last thing I reported was all this new BlogArchive using tag clouds and the like. You are already enjoying that. Here are the major highlights that came in afterwards in chronological order ...

Tagging

(03 March 2006)

Adding tags to postings is much easier now using a bit of JavaScript. During editing there is a tiny tag cloud of all known tags under the main text area. Click on one and see how they get added to the BlogTag form field; click again and see how they go out again. Tags are extracted from all blog entries. You don't need to define them beforehand like the SubjectCategories. Just start using them. Tags can be weighted. Write someminortag somemajortag:2 to make somemajortag twice as important for that posting as someminortag. Use any number you want separated by a colon. Watch the tags in the cloud.

Delayed Publishing

(11 March 2006)

If you are about to write a posting but unable to finish it in one gasp then you simply mark the state of the posting "disabled" and it does not get published on your blog. If someone is able to guess the reserved url then we will only get a red message saying that this posting is unpublished ... something like that. You as the original writer can see it though and finish writing it safely the next day. All your unfinished/unpublished postings will be listed for you in the sidebar of the BlogAuthor page.

Browsing categories

(11 March 2006, 05 May 2006)

If you click on a SubjectCategory you get to see all postings in that category. Clicking on one posting to come to its detailed view will propagate the fact that you came here via that initial SubjectCategory using url parameters. The effect of that is that browsing to the next/previous posting will be limited restricted to that category the same way category frontpage paginate. So compare the following: click on a category, click on the headline of the first posting, click on "next" (note the url parameter being propagated); compare that with the pagination if you remove the url parameter by hand. The double linked list of postings is a different one now.

BlogLinks behave the same way now. I missed that initially. But as I want to start a BlogUp ring (see sidebar below; bad position for that; need to blog that on a different occasion) I need to have a way to browse news feeds of a certain category. If you click on a BlogUp feed and the on next/prev then this should show you the next feed in the BlogUp ring and not the next in the blogroll. BlogUp feeds and the rest of the blogroll has been separated anyway.

Improved Multi-Author blogging

(12 March 2006)

In a multi-authored blog, not ever writer might agree what should go into the blogroll. So they should be able to share a common set of BlogLinks but be able to choose among them and add own. So every BlogLink is assigned to the BlogAuthor it created first. If a co-writer wants to have it too he can edit the BlogLink and add himself to the respective formfield.

Google Adsense

(30 March 2006)

Google Adsense is the most popular way to add advertisings to your website. Yahoo has something similar (maybe I will give that a try). Adding your Adsense account to BlogUp is a natural desire. And so I did what I can to make things easy for you: just edit the WebPreferences of your blog and insert your Adsense id; customize the colors of and here you are. If you don't insert your code then, sure, Google Adsense will not be displayed. There is a special wrapper function, RenderGoogleAdsense, to display all your ads. Basically, you don't have to got through google's Adsense Setup wizard anymore, just put a call to RenderGoogleAdsense to your topics and watch the ads appearing there. Right now, a few calls have been added in default sections of your blog, like at the bottom of the frontpages and postings in order to be non-obstructive by default.

Model, View, Control

(05 May 2006)

Previously, net data in your blog has been rendered by having specific calls to TopicFunctions in the topic text itself -- DBCALL{"RenderThisAndThat"...} cruft. Whereas the layouting has been refactored into a single TopicFunction the actual call to the layout renderer was not. This too was removed using TopicViews. So every object in the application gets a view which controls its behaviour calling the appropriate TopicFunctions in the end. So that's a kind of model-view-control separation we already know ... in principal.

The nice side-effect of that is, that adding a ?raw=on to a posting's url does not disclose the implementation's details of that item any more as the TopicViews don't have a TEXT tag anymore. So, for example a BlogEntry, only carries the form data and some topic preference variables assigning access, the view template and some minor stuff, but no more.

Blog Images

(24 May 2006)

Adding images to your postings is still a little clumsy. As a first step to ease that all your image material is attached to a central administration tool, BlogImages, which displays all your blog's pictures as an image gallery. The WebPreference variable BLOGIMAGES points to that. If you want to render blog postings in different webs of your TWiki then you have to set this variable in appropriate places. If, for example, you have only one blog you can set the BLOGIMAGES variable site-wide in your TWikiPreferencens.

The actual picture is then added using a bit of html markup like this one:

<img src="%BLOGIMAGES%/pamporn.gif" 
     class="border alignleft" 
     alt="pam porn"/>

Note that there are three img-related classes predefined in the BlogPlugin: (1) ``border'' to ad a little border around the image, (2) ``alignleft'' and (3) ``alignright''. Combine them in the way illustrated above.

I know this is still not as user-friendly as I'd like it but maybe we can integrate Craig Meyer's ImagePlugin as soon as he releases it. This one facilitates a couple of nice things that will come in very handy, e.g. server-side image resizing so that you don't need to pre-calculate an image width matching your posting before you upload.

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Bottom line: we have enhanced BlogUp quite a bit and I think we still have room for more. I may not have covered every new feature since I last reported. In the end you must test out this stuff yourself anyway.

Comming to that point: I am about to collect all sites that run this work in a ring, the BlogUp ring, as I said already. So if you are BlogUp'ed then drop me a line. Even better, if you feel so then make a donation. Send money or hardware. I need a new provider to host this blog. I need a better domain name.

If you want to install a blog using the BlogPlugin and you need help then contact me or even better contact the WikiRing which I am a co-founder of.