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Use ID File for Author - Each blog posting has an author. If you choose Yes, it will automatically fill in the name in the Notes ID of the person posting. If you choose No, then an individual can choose whatever name they like to post as. For group blogs, you definitely want to leave this as Yes in order to determine who officially made each post.

Permalink Formula - Either one of these choices is fine. It just determines how many characters are used in the permalink to each individual blog story.

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Process Hot Text - Blogsphere has a feature called Hot Text that associates certain words with an internet address. For example, Lotus might be associated with www.lotus.com. That means, any time a post contains the word Lotus, it will be converted to a hyperlink pointing to the Lotus website.

Process Emoticons - Emoticons are the smiley faces that people post in internet correspondence. This will take any emoticons in a post and convert them to a graphic representation of the emoticon. If you don't want emoticons to show up as graphics, turn this off.

Global Logging Enable - This allows activity on the database to be logged.

Log Page Reads - If logging is enabled, this will allow the database to log whenever a page is read.

Log RSS Reads - If logging is enabled, this will allow the database to log whenever the blog is visited by an RSS reader.

The steps will then be complete. Click the OK button on the right hand side of the wizard to finish up.

Your Identity and Preferences

Right after you finish the wizard (and any time a new Notes ID accesses the back-end of the database) Blogsphere will ask you for some default information. This is stored and used for every time you make a post. The preferences are as follows:

Short Name - The default name that will show up for you on posts if you aren't using the Notes ID option

Default Location - Each blog post can have a location associated with where the post originated. Many blogs have this separated out by Office, Home, Airplane etc. Some may use cities or divisions within your company. This field just sets your default so you don't have to enter it manually each time.

Preferred Comment Options - Each individual post can use different comment options. Chose the default you wish to use on your new posts.

Email Address - This is the email address used to send you notifications of new comments (if you have enabled that feature)

Comment Notifications - This determines whether you want a notification when comments are made. None means you will never receive a notification, Own Entries means you will receive notifications when someone comments on your posts, and All Entries means you will receive notifications when someone comments on any post in the blog.

Notify on Own comments - If you don't want to receive notification every time you yourself make a comment turn this to No.

Posting to your blog

Now that you have the blog up and ready to go, you'll be at the main menu. If you go into any of the Blogs views, you will see action buttons that allow you to post new content. Make a post and hit Publish. Once you do, revisit your blog's site and you will see your new post at the top of the page.

Configuring your blog

In order to configure your blog, you first need to make sure you have the UI-Admin role as outlined in the ACL Settings section above. If you do, you will see the Blogsphere button above your views, click it and choose Configuration.

The configuration menu will allow you to make changes to the look and feel of your blog, set up translations of how blog items are rendered, set up what content blocks appear on your site, and change any of the initial settings you entered during the initial wizard.

Where to go now

Since going into detail on every available option and piece of content is beyond the scope of this article, you need to know where to find more information. Since this is an open source project, documentation isn't as strong as some commercial options. The best thing to do, is play around with the application in a development environment and see how changes affect your blog.

The Blogpshere V3 wiki at wiki.blogpshere.net is a good starting point for documentation and is expanding all the time. You can also visit the project page for Blogsphere at OpenNTF.org and visit the forum. You can ask questions there that will get answered by other users or the developers themselves.

Now that it's this easy to get a blogging template up and running, you don't have an excuse not to start. Within a half an hour you can have a fully functioning blog ready to go. Now you just have to think about something to write. That's the hard part!

About this Series

This series of articles on intranet solutions with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino is intended to help readers understand the fundamental methodology and capabilities of the product and how to utilize it to deliver a feature-rich, secure, and functional corporate intranet solution. It will include implementation strategies, case studies, industry-tested tips and tricks, and, with your input, true value to the administrator or developer who wants to utilize IBM Lotus Notes/Domino technologies to deliver winning intranet solutions.

If you have any questions on the series, Lotus Notes/Domino, or if there's something you'd like to see addressed, visit the Intranet Journal Discussion Forum.

About the Author

John Roling is the Senior Groupware Administrator for a North American trade-show exhibit company and a certified Lotus Notes Administrator, Developer and all-around geek. You can keep up with him at his blog or drop him an e-mail at jroling@gmail.com.

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