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Last month, I gave you lots of reasons why blogging in your workplace can be beneficial to your business. This month, I want to give you the bare minimum you need to get up and running with the open source Blogsphere V3 blogging template in Lotus Notes.

Getting Started

The first step is downloading the template from OpenNTF.org (where Blogsphere V3 is currently the featured project of the month.) If you don't already have a username and password, sign up for their free registration. Once you are registered, you can go to the Blogsphere V3 project page and download the latest version.

Currently, Blogsphere V3 is listed as in beta, but don't let that scare you. All of the main features are there and are solid. Many blogs in the Domino world (including mine) have been running version 3 for a long time without issues.

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Once you have the template, have you or your administrator install a new copy of the database on your server and sign it. You'll also want your admin to set up a web site document to point to this new install. We won't get into that here, but your administrator should know how to configure their server to have www.yoursite.com point to your new database.

Access Control List (ACL) Settings

Since this is a blog whose purpose is to be visited from a web browser, you'll want to make both the -Default- and Anonymous entries in the ACL have Author access with Create Documents, Write Public Documents and Replicate or Copy Documents checked.

The reason you give the default entries Author rights is to allow them the ability to comment. If you are not planning on allowing commenting, you can give both default entries Readers access.

The ACL can be locked down however you wish for defaults. If you want the site to be secure so only a project team can see it, simply give -Default- and Anonymous no access, and give the Project Team the author rights I outlined above.

For the person(s) maintaining the blog, there are several roles that can be given.

UI-Admin - This allows access to the configuration menu. This is the role you want to give to the person administering the database who will make configuration changes.

UI-Advanced - This gives a user access to content creation and the ability to view logs.

UI-Simple - This gives a user access to content creation only.

The Initial Setup Wizard

Once you have the ACL squared away, you can open your blog for the first time. When you do so, you'll be greeted by a Wizard that will walk you through the initial configuration. The first screen gathers the following info:

Blog Name - This is the name of your blog that will appear on your homepage.

Blog Description - This is a simple tagline that you can add to your blog's title. It can be anything you wish, and will show up on your homepage as well.

Home URL - This is pretty much the most important thing to get right. You have to enter what the full URL path is to your blog database file. This allows all the dynamic code to find the pieces of your blog it needs. For example, my server responds on www.stormtheweb.com and I placed the file in the root of the server. So the full URL reads http://www.stormtheweb.com/blogspherearticle.nsf. If you load your blog for the first time and it's not loading, or there's just text with no style, this is the first place to look.

Base Domain - This is the domain name of your blog, for example stormtheweb.com above.

Homepage Entries - This determines how many posts show on the homepage before they are removed.

Enable Comments - Click Yes to allow users to make comments on your posts, or click No to eliminate that functionality.

New Comments At - You can choose if you want the newest comments to show up at the top of the list of comments, or the bottom.

Enable CoComment - CoComment.com is a resource that some bloggers use to track their comments around the internet. If you want to allow bloggers to track their comments on your site using CoComment, click Yes.

Global Send Comment Notifications - This turns on whether or not to have notifications when a new comment is submitted to the blog.

Auto Lock Comments - If you want to lock commenting on posts after a certain time period, click Yes and then choose how many days you want to allow comments before the post is locked. This is a useful tactic against spammers who attempt to add comment spam to old posts.

Process BlackList - You can set up internet domains that you want to block from ever posting comments. If you wish to maintain a blacklist, click Yes.

Process WhiteList - You can also set up domains that you want to always allow to post comments. If you wish to maintain a whitelist, click Yes.

Process IP Blocking - This allows you to determine IP addresses that you want to block from posting comments.

Action on Spam comment - You can either automatically Delete Spam comments, or you can Keep them for review. If you keep them for review, and a comment is determined to be spam, it will be marked as such and can only be seen from the Notes back-end, not the blog website itself.

Once you've made your choices, click Next Step. The next section deals with the defaults used on all new blog entries and whether or not to log activity.

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