Enterprise RSS

2010-February-9 at 1:12 pm · Filed under Applications ·Tagged , , ,

Yesterday evening I googled a bit after a Domino based RSS aggregator, in simplier words: a Lotus Notes application that can read multiple RSS feeds and store items as individual documents.

The application has to be installed on a server and the collection has to take place there, cause I am not looking for a ‘personal RSS reader’. I want to avoid that I have to distribute the feeds with every update.

I think it will also be nice to be able to show latest contributions from a central spot (think Planet Lotus or portal page).

So the feeds I will have, now an application who collects the items and can display the collected results in one interface.

Well what did I find?

The View had 2 articles building such an application (only part 1 was of interest):

https://www.collaborationseminar.com/eview/VOLR6.nsf/0/D7D2D0B463D1B2B185257043006FD87A (part 1)

http://nd8seminar.com/eview/volr6.nsf/8fa81fda2203b051852573d0005631ff/28ea51b11f116ac885257091005a8335?OpenDocument (part 2)

But the example application provided just causes a ‘variable not set’ message.

OpenNTF has some offerings:

Dennis:

http://www.openntf.org/projects/pmt.nsf/1af5f59bae92986c85256bae000f898c/6ac6e1a19cee2cdf862576a3000ab9b6!OpenDocument

(Not working, signed the design, I could not even add a new feed due to a javascript error)

Domigator:

http://www.openntf.org/Projects/pmt.nsf/ProjectLookup/Domigator

Web based, have not tried it since it is pretty out of date with updates.

Pavone offers an RSS reader but I do not understand the text:

It is FREE for personal use in the Lotus Notes Client environment.

Well please mention what it does cost if I put it on a server?

http://www.pavone.com/pages.nsf/goto/newsreader_en

Ian Irving offers a news aggregator on his site, but I am not able to get it running:

http://www.falsepositives.com/bs/2003/07/lotus-notes-news-reader-v03.html

Steve Castledine had a project (ProjectDX RSS) for a Feed Reader for IBM Lotus Notes Domino. The database does it job. I am not sure what it supports (RSS 2.0, Atom?)…

http://www.projectdx.org/feedreader.nsf/dx/downloadb4.htm

Jakob Majkilde offers freely a full blown application called Notes RSS Reader 1.0 (supports only RSS 1.0?) which does it’s job pretty well:

http://www.majkilde.com/hosting/majkilde/home.nsf/staticpages/rss!OpenDocument

Good job done here!

Ashok Hariharan offers on his website a Domino News Aggregator but also here it fails, so this demands some further investigation:

http://unganisha.org/home/pages/News_Aggregator_Using_Domino/index.html

Finally Manfred Dillmann offers a good working RSS aggregator but you have to buy directly 10 licences and I am not sure if you can run it on a server?

http://www.madicon.de/rss-reader/

Conclusion:

There is some more investigation to be done. Have I missed a product or (free) offering?

Well at least it gave me some ideas about what kind of system I am after (not project vulcan). Probably it will become a ’steal with pride and improve’ initiative and share it on OpenNTF…

Update:

Others did some investigation already before:

http://martinhumpolec.cz/A55BE2/Blog.nsf/dx/1183832529-rss-readers-for-lotus-notes.html

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Anatomy of The Perfect Sidebar

2010-February-8 at 12:44 pm · Filed under Lotus Notes ·Tagged , ,

Antonio Lupetti is a web developer and probably never considers using LN. In his article about the anatomy of the perfect sidebar he lists out:

  • Subscription options
  • Advertisements
  • Recent and popular posts
  • External widgets
  • Other elements: in aver

Errrrr. I hope not to see Advertisements appear in my Notes client. Or wait a second, could this be an opportunity or the Lotus Notes Home Edition?

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Reviews of web based applications

2010-February-8 at 11:41 am · Filed under Applications ·Tagged , , ,

AppAppeal is a website where you can discover web applications by directory, compare them and read reviews. In other words a nice source of inspiration for defining your portfolio of Notes applications.

It makes you also wonder how up to date the categories for projects on OpenNTF are? I have no idea if their are any plans defined to uplift this project space so it gets a bit of mojo?

In case you know other similar sources as AppAppeal just drop them in the comments.

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Anyone using the blog template? What did you modified?

2010-February-3 at 5:47 pm · Filed under Applications ·Tagged , , , ,

We received  an interesting but rather large request from an internal customer for the IBM blog template. Basically the organization wants to have the template available to order for everyone in their organization.

So I have now two tracks to fill in:

  • Which modifications do I have to make in order to optimize the blog template itself?
  • Which preparations do I have to make so people can order a blog and how can we support it?

I have pretty adapted the look & feel of the blog via CSS and added some images so it comes close (read: it looks better to my opinion) to our Intranet.

I did not go away from a table layout, as used in the default setup. I experienced with using 3 column layout via CSS (aka Holy grail) but I experienced some problems and this was basically because of additional HTML pollution Domino spits out.

Next steps was to spit through the Lotus Notes Domino Blog Template DX Tag Dictionary to see what was available more under the hood. This resulted in some modifications in the Block Templates (available under Advanced \HTML Templates) for the LeftSideBar and RightSideBar documents. I added:

  • Hot Topics
  • Blog roll
  • Recent edits

Under the item templates I added the author image in the document Default Item. This image is taken from a user profile document, when registered.

For now the blog looks and works great, but I guess there is always room for improvement therefor the following question:

  • I am just wondering what other available options I might have overlooked and which you think are added value ?

I know there are a lot more options (documented / undocumented) available in the template.

So far for track 1.

For track 2 I was thinking about setting up a Wiki (or another blog?) to give users support how to use the blog. In the blog itself I want to include a link so people become aware that there is a common place to look for information / instructions. I know that there is help available in the normal Help database but users tend not to start looking here.

I also would like to setup an Feed aggregator that collects all the RSS streams from all the blogs. This aggregator could work as the homepage when people enter blog.company.com.

  • Which Domino based solution would you suggest for such an aggregator?

I know on OpenNTF there are some initiatives for Feed aggregators, but I have not tested them myself, maybe you have done already? It would be nice to have something running before Project Vulcan comes available =)

I also have to figure out the easiest way to setup a mechanism for url mapping so each blog installation is mapped to a user name ex. blog.company.com/patrickkwinten and users can check availability of a suffix.

Hmmm… more work to do then I expected…

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Wanted (proper) ToDo application

2010-February-2 at 6:20 pm · Filed under Applications ·Tagged ,

I made a sketch of the information system that I would like to install to run my next project with. Actually it is not a project, it is more a start-up of a service for providing a portfolio of Notes/Domino applications.

Well here is the sketch:


Right now I am looking for a proper ToDo application for managing tasks (multiple simultaneous projects, multiple project members).

  • Do you have any suggestion?

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IBM Collaboration Forum – 23 february Stockholm

2010-February-1 at 10:27 pm · Filed under IBM, Lotus Notes ·Tagged , ,

I have just registered myself for the upcoming collaboration forum, organized by IBM Sweden.

Hopefully I can pick up some vibrations/memories that people have taken with them from Lotusphere. Or see some interesting product cases by vendors.

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XPages Wiki – Great stuff but what about tables?

2010-January-31 at 9:22 pm · Filed under Applications ·Tagged , , ,

I am moving a Handbook which is now 100% in Notes into the XPages Wiki. The application works great (good job guys) but it bothers me 1 major thing:

  • The creation of tables

I have found some help for Wiki markup here:

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/dx/Wiki_Help

But creating tables feels a bit buggy.

I have no idea what the XPages Wiki supports or not compared with the markup for Wikipedia?:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wiki_markup#link-external

But coming back to the topic: How do you define tables in the Wiki? Right now I am using a work-around and I display the content I would normally display in a table via an unordered list:

column 1 column2
column 1 column2
  • column 1
    • column 2
  • column 1
    • column 2

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OpenNTF – Where is the inspiration?

2010-January-31 at 5:46 pm · Filed under Lotus Notes ·Tagged

On OpenNTF’s homepage you can read the Steering Committee Meeting Minutes of January 12, 2010.

Summary:

Strategy Working Group – Nathan Freeman

No update at this time.

IP Working Group – John Head

No update at this time.

Technical Committee Update by Niklas Heidloff & Steve Castledine

Year over year, OpenNTF has experienced a 400% increase in the number of releases.

Marketing Working Group – Scott Johnsen

No update at this time.

Nice all those company logo’s as OpenNTF.org members on the homepage but where is the drive dudes? The only serious contributor right now I consider those 2 IBM guys…

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First experiences with the next generation discussion template

2010-January-29 at 9:42 pm · Filed under Applications ·Tagged , ,

We have got finally most our servers up to 8.5.1 so we are ready for some real XPages development (and deployment).

For an internal customer I would like to setup the next generation discussion template from OpenNTF to review and for now the application runs well except the following problem I experience with referring to the oneuiv2 theme.

In the blue.css for the application bar there are references like:

.xspPanelInner{background-image:url(../oneuiv2/defaultTheme/themeImages/titlebarLeft.png);}

When I examine the css in firefox I see:

.xspPanelInner {
background-image:url(../oneuiv2/defaultTheme/themeImages/titlebarLeft.png);

But when I copy the location of the image I get:

http://server.domain.com/ds01232/discussion.nsf/../oneuiv2/defaultTheme/themeImages/titlebarLeft.png

The correct path would be:

http://server.domain.com/oneuiv2/defaultTheme/themeImages/titlebarLeft.png

which will also display the image.

I did some quicksearch on the internet which resulted to in postings like this:

http://www.markgargan.com/xpages/accessing-resources-in-the-domino-html-directory/

where they say to add some references to the oneuiv2 theme in the active theme:

<resource>
<content-type>text/css</content-type>
<href>/.ibmxspres/domino/oneuiv2/base/core.css</href>
</resource>

If I however add this reference to the blue theme nothing happens. The location to the image stays the same.

  • Do you have any suggestion?

I do not want to hard-code the servername in the image reference in the blue.css :

.xspPanelInner{background-image:url(http://server.domain.com/oneuiv2/defaultTheme/themeImages/titlebarLeft.png);}

I tried several options with / .. and combinations of them ../../ but I never get the result I want.  It seems like the CSS does not understand to cut off the installation path + nsf file name. Does this have something to do with the server installation or not?

Thank you in advance for your help.

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JavaScript support in the Notes client

2010-January-26 at 9:28 am · Filed under IBM ·Tagged , , ,

I was scanning some old Lotus Advisor Magazines when I noticed this bold statement about JavaScript support in an edition of May 1999.

The vision is great, you may wonder how long did we come so far?

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