As you are probably aware of, I've been revamping keithstric.com. In that revamp I wanted to add a Google Custom Search (CSE) engine to search only my site. Making the CSE was easy enough with the wizard Google supplies but, I didn't like the way that it either redirected you to a google page or you had to submit the search to another dedicated page on your site. So I set on the quest of getting the results to show up where the content of my website usually shows up. Below I list all the things I tried and then what finally succeeded.

First I tried the default of showing the results on a google hosted page. I just didn't like that at all, I could customize it a little bit but not really.

Next, I tried having the results show up in an article type document, however, the url that gets appended to the search results page starts with "?", seems Domino didn't like this at all and kept dying with an error 500. I tried all sorts of ways to prevent the "?" from being the start of the appended URL to no avail. I did some research on what the subject and it seems when a url contains a "?" Domino expects a domino url extension (i.e. OpenDocument, OpenView or whatever) to come right after the question mark, if it's not what Domino expects, it throws an error 500. To get around it you can create a rewrite rule, but with this blog being hosted by Prominic, I really didn't want to go this route. So, this didn't work...

The last option for displaying the results from a Google Custom Search engine is to display the results as an element. This actually worked with no changes really needing to be made as far as just displaying the results. However, the results just pushed the rest of the blogs content down below the search results. While this worked, I didn't really like it, I think only the search results should show up. But I really liked that the results were "wrapped" within my website. So, how to make it so that when someone performs a search the div which contains the website content is hidden and only the search results are shown? Well, I messed with this for quite a while and never could get it to "really" work. I could hide the div which contained the content but not when the "Search" button was clicked. So I had to post a question over on the Google Custom Search Implementation Forum. The guy that answered didn't leave his actual name, only "omr" is his username and is who really got this to work and who deserves the credit for it.

Now we just need to put this within BlogSphere and we're ready to go. So without further rambling...

• First, setup your CSE to only search your site. When you do this if you go through all the options in the wizard you should find your "CSE ID" which is a long number which basically identifies your CSE.
• Once you get your CSE ID we're ready to put everything in BlogSphere.

Click the "Read More" link...

Continue Reading...

Over the past month or so I've been working on making keithstric.com a better looking BlogSphere blog. During all the tweaks, changes and fixes I've come to learn a lot more about all the tags available within BlogSphere.

Tags are used to put dynamic content within your BlogSphere template which is what allows you to fully customize the way your blog is laid out and also allows you to build links and use common text throughout your site to give it a more consistent look and feel across all areas of the site. Without the tags all of the things listed here would be hard coded or be done via clunky lookups all over. The tagging system of BlogSphere is a very elegant way to accomplish the task of customizing your blog.

The tagging system is basically made up of a LotusScript library called RenderEngine.Tags. Within this LotusScript library are functions for each of these tags which returns the proper value based on the context of the request. Like I said above, it's very elegant. So, I took all of those functions to come up with this list and hopefully make it easier for you to customize your blog. If you come across something I misrepresented or just plain got it wrong, please let me know and I'll fix it.

While writing this I discovered that the appropriate tags can be used within a blog entry, article or download also. When placed in one of these other elements the tag will be rendered as it should, which is a bonus for BlogSphere. But I had to modify the tags below to be formatted as <$ Tagname $> instead of <$TagName$>. So, when using these tags in your blog, just take the spaces out.

• <$ BSAlbumURL $> - The URL of a photo album
• <$ BSAttachments $> - Display the attachments on a download entry
• <$ BSBlogDesc $> - The description that shows up underneath the Blog Name and is defined in the BlogSphere configuration document
• <$ BSBlogName $> - The name of the blog and is defined in the BlogSphere configuration document
• <$ BSCategoriesURL $> - The url for a blog entry's categories. This link opens all the blog entries for whatever category is clicked
• <$ BSCommentAuthorLink $> - The link to a comment author's website and is defined when someone leaves a comment
• <$ BSCommentAuthorName $> - The name of a comment author and is defined when someone leaves a comment
• <$ BSCommentBody $> - The body of a comment and is defined when someone leaves a comment
• <$ BSCommentCount $> - The number of comments for a particular blog entry, download or article. This is incremented when someone leaves a comment
• <$ BSCommentDate $> - The date a comment was left and is defined when someone leaves a comment
• <$ BSCommentID $> - The number for a particular comment and it is defined when someone leaves a comment
• <$ BSCommentNumber $> - I can't figure out what this tag is for
• <$ BSCommentsURL $> - The URL to the comments for a particular blog entry, download or article
• <$ BSCommentTime $> - The time a comment was left and is defined when someone leaves a comment
• <$ BSEmoticons $> - The emoticons that are configured for your blog. Emoticons are configured in the configuration view under Resources\Emoticons
• <$ BSEntryAuthor $> - The author of a blog entry, download or article
• <$ BSEntryCategories $> - The categories of a blog entry which is defined when a blog entry is created
• <$ BSEntryDate $> - The date of a Blog Entry, download or article
• <$ BSEntryHTML $> - The html of a blog entry, download or article
• <$ BSEntryImage $> - The image that is defined for a blog entry, download or article
• <$ BSEntryLocation $> - The location of the author as it is defined in the author's profile
• <$ BSEntryMoreHTML $> - The html of a blog entry's "More" field. This is available when some text is placed in the "More" section of a blog entry
• <$ BSEntrySubCategory $> - The sub category of an article
• <$ BSEntryTechnorati $> - A link to technorati for the category of a blog entry
• <$ BSEntryTime $> - The time a blog entry, download or article was created
• <$ BSEntryTitle $> - The title of a blog entry, download or article
• <$ BSGravatar $> - Displays an image based on an MD5 hash of the commentors email address. Check out www.gravatar.com for details.
• <$ BSHomeURL $> - The URL of your blog
• <$ BSMediaPlayer $> - I'm not entirely sure about this one, but I believe if you attach some kind of media to a blog entry, this will show the appropriate media player
• <$ BSMenu $> - Displays a menu which you define in the Blogsphere menu under Resources\Navigation Menu. It must be enabled in the BlogSphere configuration document
• <$ BSMonthName $> - The month name as listed in the language translation document
• <$ BSNextEntryPermalink $> - The next blog entry's permalink url
• <$ BSNextEntryTitle &> - The next blog entry's title
• <$ BSPhoto $> - The html img tag of a photo
• <$ BSPhotoAuthor $> - The author of a photo in a photo album
• <$ BSPhotoDate $> - This will display the date a photo was added to a photo album
• <$ BSPhotoDesc $> - The description of a photo
• <$ BSPhotoEXIFInformation $> - This will display the EXIF info from an image in a photo album
• <$ BSPhotoLocation $> - This will display whatever is in the Location field of a photo
• <$ BSPhotoTitle $> - The title of a photo
• <$ BSPlinkURL $> - This is the URL for a permalink for blog entries, downloads and articles
• <$ BSPrevEntryPermalink $> - The previous blog entry's permalink url
• <$ BSPrevEntryTitle $> - The previous blog entry's title
• <$ BSRating $> - I haven't been able to get this to work and it may be a future enhancement. But it displays the rating of a blog entry, download or article. This must be enabled in the BlogSphere configuration document
• <$ BSReadMoreLink $> - This is the link that shows up when something is present in the "More" part of a blog entry
• <$ BSSearchScore $> - This is the score of an entry that is returned from a search of your blog
• <$ BSThumbnail $> - A photo's thumbnail
• <$ BSTrackbackCount $> - This is the number of track backs for a particular blog entry
• <$ BSTrackbackURL $> - This is the URL for a track back
• <$ BSUniqueID $> - This is the unique id of a blog entry, download or article
• <$ BSYear $> - The year for an entry
• <$ BSYYMM $> - I'm not sure what this is

I will continue updating this post as I find more tags. For the <$ Trans_xxx $> tags, continue reading.

Continue Reading...

I went ahead and exported the DXL for my BlogSphere template and skin and made it available in the Downloads section for your enjoyment.

OK, I found one last issue. On the Downloads page/view, the comments link pointed to /d6plinks/ instead of /downloads/. So, I modified the "RenderEngine.Tags" script library, "TAG_BSCommentsURL" function to the following...

Function TAG_BSCommentsURL(blogDoc As NotesDocument,cfgdoc As notesdocument,debuglevel As Integer)
	On Error Goto LogError
	If DebugLevel > 3 Then Call LogEvent("Process Tag: BSCommentsURL",0,Nothing)

	If blogDoc.Form(0) = "content_Download" Then
		TAG_BSCommentsURL = cfgDoc.cfg_Basic_HomeURL(0) + "/downloads/" + blogDoc.PermaLink(0) + "#Comments"
	Else
		TAG_BSCommentsURL = cfgDoc.cfg_Basic_HomeURL(0) + "/d6plinks/" + blogDoc.PermaLink(0) +"#Comments"	
	End If

	Exit Function
logerror:
	Call LogError
	TAG_BSCommentsURL = "TAG ERROR : Check Debug Logs"	

End Function

The change here is that I just check if the form being processed is a download form, if so I use /downloads/ instead of /d6plinks/, and that's it

If you visited the downloads link above since the site change, I guess you noticed that the attachments weren't available unless you visited the Permalink URL for the download. Well, this has now been fixed.

I noticed this issue when looking at the search results on Nathan Freeman's website, that his search results showed the attachments in his download documents that were returned by the search. Got to looking on my site and mine was doing the same thing. However, if you visited the /downloads view, the attachments didn't show up, you only saw the BSAttachments tag. So, I got to digging in the code a little bit to compare the differences between the rendering of all downloads and the search results. There is quite a difference here, but it wasn't too difficult to figure out.

In the "RenderEngine.Blog" script library, "RenderEngineAllDownloads" function, there are a few arrays there that contain the tags and values of each download document. The tags array contains all the tags that the script will look for and the values array contains all the values for said tags. Looking at this the BSAttachments tag wasn't listed in the array. However, comparing to the "RenderEngineSearchResults" function these arrays weren't present at all, but a call to the "RenderEngineProcessTags" function was used instead and this wasn't in the "RenderEngineAllDownloads" function. So, I replaced the line of code in the "RenderEngineAllDownloads" function for "RenderedText" to read:

RenderedText = RenderedText + RenderEngineProcessTags("SingleEntryTags", templateDoc.template_Plink_Download(0))

This seemed to have corrected the issue and now the BSAttachments tag gets processed in the /downloads view.

I've been using the Blogsphere template since it first came out and haven't looked back. BlogSphere and the OpenNTF mail template are the templates that really opened the world's eyes to OpenNTF and the benefits of an OpenSource community for the Lotus faithful. However, since version 3.x of blogsphere there have been a couple of bugs that really bugged me. These bugs didn't really hurt the overall feel of Blogsphere but are really just little annoyances. Now what brought these bugs to my attention is that I'm currently redoing the look and layout of keithstric.com. This current look has been here for a couple of years now and I'm tired of images getting cut off because of the layout being too narrow. Also, because of the set width of the layout, on my big iMac screen I've got an awful lot of wasted realestate. What really inspired this was the new look of Chris Toohey's site. I think the layout and overall look of his site is great. Good work Chris! I hope you don't mind if I steal borrow some of your layout ideas?

The first one is the Download permalink on search results. Seems the TAG_BSPlinkURL function in the RenderEngine.Tags script library had a typo on line #13: "TAG_BSPlinkURL = cfgDoc.cfg_Basic_HomeURL(0) + "/download/" + blogDoc.PermaLink(0)" should read "TAG_BSPlinkURL = cfgDoc.cfg_Basic_HomeURL(0) + "/downloads/" + blogDoc.PermaLink(0)". While this really isn't that big of a deal, it was frustrating at times when looking for something.

Another bug, but not really a bug, but just had to do with the page template. In the search results, it didn't show the content of the post, just a Blogsphere tag, which to the average user doesn't really mean that much. But that tag doesn't exist, hence it only showing that tag and not the content of the found entry. The tag that was being used is "<$BSEntryBody$>". I changed that to use the "<$BSEntryHTML$>" tag instead.

Next up, and this one I can't seem to get to work at all, is the display of all the static pages. Just like with downloads, you should be able to display an excerpt of each static page in a blog like layout. This was returning an error for the comments rss which is something I'll get to in a minute. But, I never could get the static pages to display like I want, but that's certainly something on the agenda before the new layout goes live.

Last one, in the RenderEngineCommentsEntries function of the RenderEngine.RSS script library, line #9: "numofentries = configDoc.cfg_rss_RSSFeedEntries(0) * 5". The field cfg_rss_RSSFeedEntries doesn't exist, so this was causing an error to be returned. For some reason this error occured when you tried to navigate to the view containing the Static Pages. I just changed this to read: "numofentries = 50". Now, I know I shouldn't hard code this, I should just add a field to the configuration document for this, but I guess I'm just lazy and don't want to change too much in the template in order to make upgrading to the next version easier.

Please don't take these bugs as me bashing Blogsphere, I think it's a great product and I look forward to continuing to use it in the future. I just thought folks that are using blogsphere may be experiencing some of these same issues and would like to fix them. But while you can't see these fixes at this moment on keithstric.com, they will be implemented when the new layout goes live in a few days (I'm not very fast with tweaking CSS).

The other day I was noticing that when I included a list in my blog posts that the bullet image wasn't showing up. So, I started digging through the code a little bit. The first stop was the "View Source" in FireFox. Looking here, the HTML is correct and should show the bullets. This led me to the CSS in the BlogSphere Site Skin document for my website and find the tag for lists, this is all correct also, at least it appears to be correct and that it should work. So now I'm a little stumped, I try and view the little blue dot image that is supposed to be displayed as the list item bullet via the browser, it didn't display properly or at all really. Now I had to go look at the images tab in the BlogSphere Site Skin document, yup the file is there and I could preview it with the built in image preview software of both Windows and Mac. So, just out of curiosity I detached the file, opened it with The Gimp, saved it and re-attached it in the Site Skin. Voila', the bullets now show up.

Now what caused this is beyond me, but if you're experiencing the same type of issue you may want to go about the same process.

OK, I posted a discussion post over on OpenNTF in the BlogSphere project about the Post title not showing up in Google Analytics. This happened after I upgraded to the 3.0.1 B8a version of BlogSphere and I moved my Google Analytics code over to the Configuration document. Well last night I got to thinking about where in the header the title tag showed up. So I got to looking and the title tag was at the very bottom of the head tag (hope that makes sense). I modified the RenderEngine.Blog lotusscript library, RenderEngineBlogHTMLHeader function. I moved this code up above all the script tags:

If permaLinkDoc Is Nothing Then
    RenderedText = RenderedText + "" + Chr(13)
Else
    RenderedText = RenderedText + "" + Chr(13)
End If

This seems to have corrected the problem and all the visits from today are now showing the post title.

I know I haven't written in a while, it's been hectic here. But I do have some news about Lotus Symphony . I picked up the latest copy of CPU Magazine and in the Bleeding Edge Software review section there was Lotus Symphony. I thought that was pretty cool

On to something else... In my previous post I talked about a bug with BlogSphere v3.0.1 B8a in the downloads section that attachments weren't showing up. Well it turns out that my page template was missing the crucial tag to include the attachments Thanks to Kevin Pettitt who pointed me in the right direction as I had been digging through the code. I also updated the Class-ExcelData.lss file that I attached to my previous post in the downloads section with the newer version.

In other personal news, I finally came up with a UI that I was talking about in this post. I ended up dropping the horizontal navigation as the customer didn't care for the initial mock up of this, which I guess as far as notes applications go is pretty new (I may be wrong). But they did like the ideas of bringing contextual data into a form (layers) so you don't have to navigate away from what you're working on to see a pertinent piece of information (Embedded Frameset). I would like to thank everyone that replied to my plea for help in that post.

So, until next time....

I was looking at this post over on developerWorks and went looking for the URL to my ExcelData class only to find out that in the downloads section, all the download documents didn't contain their attachments So, I submitted another bug over on OpenNTF.

But, I've made some changes to my ExcelData class to include some more features and functionality. I also fixed a few bugs that I've encountered over the last few months. But I'm going to try and post the LSS here in this post, whether or not it'll work I dunno, but we'll see.

Hmmm, ok that didn't work too good, so, I'll just post all the code in the "Read More" link, sorry it isn't formatted all pretty, but that makes it too large

OK, this is getting ridiculus, let's try another way....how about a link to Class-ExcelData.lss

I upgraded keithstric.com to BlogSphere 3.0.1 B8a this afternoon. I made a few tweaks to the template and found a couple of bugs. In the SideBlockLinks function in the RenderEngine.SideBlocks LotusScript Library the line:
If LinksDoc.Link_Windows(0) = "Yes" Then

Should Read:
If LinksDoc.Link_Window(0) = "Yes" Then

So that's fixed here on keithstric.com. I also modified a couple of other things. I modified the SideBlockDBColumn function in the RenderEngine.SideBlocks LotusScript library to put a "< UL >" tag before the rendering of the DBColumn output. Also, in the TAG_BSEntryTechnorati function in the RenderEngine.Tags LotusScript Library I changed that to open the category link at the bottom of a post in a new window. I also modified the Lookups\Hot Text view to change the URL for Hot Text to open in a new window. That's all the changes I had to make to this version of BlogSphere.

Another bug I found though was in the SideBlock for Static Pages. It will show the category that the page is in, but it doesn't show the pages. If you click on the category you get the BlogSphere navigation structure, but no list of Static Pages. Hopefully this will be addressed at some point in time. All in all I think this is a good release so far, but time will tell for sure.

I've made a few enhancements to keithstric.com and the BlogSphere template. Let's start with commentor's web sites. I noticed that if someone didn't put the http:// in front of their URL and just put www.somesite.com that the link actually went back to my site with the www.somesite.com at the end of the url. So, you would click on the website link for that author and it would return a 404 error. So, I updated the TAG_BSCommentAuthorLink function in the RenderEngine.Tags lotusscript library to check if http:// was in the url, if it wasn't then I add it. That seems to work alright and I didn't even have to refresh the already posted comments, bonus!

Also, I added Snap.com snap-shots. This is a tool that enhances external links with visual previews of the target site. Sometimes a snap-shot will bring you the information you're looking for without leaving this site and causing you to loose your place where you were reading, or it allows you to look ahead to determine if you want to visit the link or not. Pretty cool .

The last addition is a "Subscribe to keithstric.com" block over on the left. This provides you a one click method of adding my RSS feed to many different readers along with their pretty icon. I found this information and buttons at RSS Icon Gallery.

I think the next big project for my website will be to start moving all the images that are stored locally in quick images and the one photo gallery I'm using is to move those images to Flickr. I think this would be a good idea as I only get 1GB of space on the Prominic servers and if I don't have to store the images locally then why should I. The problem is I don't know if that will be completely possible, it'll certainly take some research, tests and trials.

So hopefully everyone will like the new additions and they'll add value to keithstric.com.

OK, seems if you paste images into a Rich Text story or static page as of version 1.2 Beta 1a the images no longer appear. So, I’ve changed all my Rich Text static pages into Plain Text and coded them in HTML to prevent errors showing up in the log when it tried to load those images. It’s really more of a pain than a problem, I guess it’s just part of the ongoing maintenance of this web site. Hopefully I’m done re-writing already existing stuff .

OK, It’s late and I’m going to bed. Later.

Keith

Well, if you tried to visit keithstric.com yesterday and was getting strange errors it’s because I blew up blogsphere. It was really bad too. Thought I had lost my whole blog and had to rebuild it. The bad thing is I thought that something was wrong when I updated the design to Blogsphere 1.2 beta 1a. The fact was, what was on my home page was the “Home” category and it seems that the Blog By Category views were changed to not include images or the entire entry. So this made me think it was broken. So, after trying to roll back the design I opted instead to use my backup copy after making a backup in a different directory which promptly replicated and started causing Replication save conflicts (aaarrghh). So, I deleted my main copy of Blogsphere and moved the backup to proper location, fixed the Replication Save conflicts and got the comments count to work properly . So now everything is back the way it should be and I also learned a lesson or two. I guess all in all it could have been worse.

Keith

I’ve moved keithstric.com to BlogSphere on a Domino Server. So far so good. The only issues I’ve had so far are with my photo Gallery. I got php running on Domino and it seems to work but the Domino server don’t recognize index.php as a start page. If anyone knows where this gets set (I know I’ve seen it somewhere) let me know. Then maybe I can get Gallery working on Domino. But until then, I’ve got apache running on a different port than Domino, seems to work for now.

Also, I had to get rid of some of the links to add content to the site. I’ll look into adding that kind of functionality back. Also, check out the bulletin board, get us started, ask some questions, post some rants, whatever. Let’s try to get some traffic over there.