Forum OpenACS Q&A: Does lars-blogger support individual, private blogs?

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1: Does lars-blogger support individual, private blogs?
Posted by Janine Ohmer on 05/09/03 11:22 PM
It looks like the only way to give each user their own blog is to mount a copy of lars-blogger for each user.  Seems a tad inefficient. :)  Am I missing something or is this how it would have to be done?
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2: Re: Does lars-blogger support individual, private blogs? (response to 1)
Posted by Simon Carstensen on 05/09/03 11:33 PM
You are absolutely correct.

We are working on improving lars-blogger in various ways, though. Have a look here:

http://www.collaboraid.biz/developer/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=9229

We'll commit these changes next week along side a few others and the internationalization of lars-blogger by Oscar Bonilla.

Further suggestions of improvement are welcome, of course.

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3: Re: Does lars-blogger support individual, private blogs? (response to 1)
Posted by Caroline Meeks on 05/10/03 12:47 AM
Sloan also has a package written by OF that sets up personal communities for Users in the dotLRN framework.  I only had a chance to play with it briefly, and its never been used in production.  Basically it sets up each user's community similarly to how classes and communities are set up and thus should allow you to mount dotLRN enabled packages for each User.  Each User is then able to control access by adding other users as members or administrators.

Modifying lars-blogger as Lars discusses is probably a better solution for this specific problem. But personal communities may be a useful concept for someone out there so I wanted to mention that the code exists.  However, please be aware that personal communities is in development state, and has never been deployed on a production system nor is it an official part of dotLRN.

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4: Re: Does lars-blogger support individual, private blogs? (response to 1)
Posted by Tom Jackson on 05/10/03 05:54 PM

I'm working on an application specific blogger that is going to have the following features:

  • multi-user: only one blog instance for the site.
  • keyed entries: each entry is keyed to a subject (acs_object).
  • simple publish: check publish field to allow public viewing. Other users can still be added to private views.
  • ratings: users can rate the public blog entry.
  • combined view: public entries on a subject can be viewed togeather.

It would be nice if I could make this into a general package, but that might be too much work. The main focus is on personal blogging. Probably only a small proportion of entries would be published for public use.

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5: Re: Does lars-blogger support individual, private blogs? (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Grumet on 05/12/03 03:51 PM
A couple of other things you might consider implementing:
  • Weblogs.Com pings
  • (if we don't have it already) A mechanism to refresh the appropriate RSS feed each time a post is added or edited. Maybe switch to querying the database every time, instead of periodically refreshing the filesystem.
From what I can tell, ideas and information flow very quickly through the weblog world. Adding these to features would allow OpenACS users to keep up.
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6: Re: Does lars-blogger support individual, private blogs? (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 05/12/03 04:07 PM
Andew,

These features are already present in the 4.6.2 version of lars-blogger.

Janine,

I am wondering why mounting one package instance per "thing" seems inefficient. I guess intuitively it seems that way, but it also makes it much for flexible and easy to generate pretty URLs.

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7: Re: Does lars-blogger support individual, private blogs? (response to 6)
Posted by Janine Ohmer on 05/12/03 10:41 PM
I am wondering why mounting one package instance per "thing" seems inefficient. I guess intuitively it seems that way, but it also makes it much for flexible and easy to generate pretty URLs.

Well, it is mostly intuitive - adding hundreds if not thousands of mounted packages just *feels* wrong, I guess. VUH files can be used to create pretty URLs too; that's the approach I generally take for this sort of thing.

Simon, what is the approach you guys plan to take to implement this?

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8: Re: Does lars-blogger support individual, private blogs? (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 05/13/03 02:53 AM
Janine,

Ah, yes, that makes perfect sense. I guess I am stuck thinking about a much smaller sort of site. A large community site, even one like openacs.org with a lars-blogger instance would be impossible to view in the site-map.

Maybe the best solution is a combination, where mounting a package several times is possible, but support large communities in one package instance is also possible.

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9: Re: Does lars-blogger support individual, private blogs? (response to 1)
Posted by Lars Pind on 05/13/03 10:23 AM
That's exactly what we're doing.

Andrew, we don't update RSS feeds on every post, it's done periodically by rss-support, but we were planning on doing that as part of these rounds of improvements.

/Lars

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10: Re: Does lars-blogger support individual, private blogs? (response to 1)
Posted by Simon Carstensen on 05/13/03 11:03 AM
Simon, what is the approach you guys plan to take to implement this?

We're using VUH files to scope between instance-level and user-level, which basically means that if you've mounted blogger under /blog, visiting /blog will either display all posts of the instance or a list of bloggers and visiting /blog/user/screenname will display entries of individual users.

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11: Re: Does lars-blogger support individual, private blogs? (response to 1)
Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 05/18/03 02:31 AM
I hope we get a cute little RSS reading .LRN portlet out of this.