bedeviled mojo slop

On the geo-blogging front ... Geo-Blogging with Blojsom and RouteBuddy + Google Earth

I've just written up a little how to on how to Geo-Blog using Blojsom and RouteBuddy + Google Earth on RouteBuddy forum. RouteBuddy is a very slick and well thought out GPS application to the Mac. My little how to should allow you to bridge the gap from reading about a location to getting there in reality in your car or on foot. If you have a RouteBuddy installed on your Mac just click on the little RouteBuddy icon below. To see a little demo movie click here.

Excellent work there Adam!

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Andreas Schaefer wrote up the installation notes on blojsom 3 under JBoss, Linux, and PostgreSQL. Thanks!

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Changelog
Updates
Quickstart (for new installations)
Upgrading instructions
Bugs Fixed

If you think it takes a lot to implement a Widget API, think again. At the very least, have a look at the Widget API. It's quite simple. But, still powerful as widgets have access to items like the request, response, context, etc. The widget plugin in blojsom is responsible for sending out a request to widgets for their "junk". The correct widget responds with, "I'm a get get get get you drunk ... get you love drunk off my humps." Or ... something like that. And the rest is history. The templates just need to display that "junk". I like to think of them as mini-plugins. Widgets in blojsom can also be run per-flavor. So, you can have different widgets run for your main page display as opposed to your various feeds. You can access the rendered widget templates en-masse or per-widget.

Oh, and of course there's the new Bean Scripting Framework dispatcher which would allow you to develop templates in your scripting language of choice. I've already used this plugin to develop blojsom templates in JRuby. As far as I'm concerned, the templates thing is pretty much done as far as blojsom is concerned. You can use the 20 some-odd scripting languages in BSF or JSP, Velocity, FreeMarker, WebMacro or Groovy to write templates. That's really 25 ways in which to write templates for blojsom. Yeah ... we're done here.

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Miles writes in ...

Getting Blojsom working with IMified was a no-brainer:

- Get an IMified account
- Add a "Wordpress" service with your Blojsom blog's XML-RPC endpoint
and login details
- Post to your blog from the comfort of your instant messaging client

In the before time ... in the long, long, ago, there was blojsim which allowed you to post to blojsom from IM. Mark and I also wanted to create a service around information creation, aggregation, and exchange across stuff that we called "something me". It worked the same way as blojsim, but was really more agnostic. I don't run the somethingme service any longer.

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I committed the scripts to run blojsom on the H2 database. Thanks Claudio.

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I figured I could also knock off being able to write templates for blojsom in multiple scripting languages by implementing a BSF dispatcher. This would be similar to what Roller did with a BSFRenderer. blojsom has had the ability to use multiple presentation technologies since blojsom 1.0, so it wasn't a big deal to plunk down a few lines of code to get this working.

Now you can use any of the 20 some-odd scripting languages supported in the Bean Scripting Framework to write templates for blojsom. This in addition to dispatchers for JSP, Velocity, FreeMarker, WebMacro, and Groovy.

I did also play with the JRuby engine behind the BSF dispatcher to use Ruby's ERB for templates. The only minor gotcha was having to include the JRUBY_HOME on the CLASSPATH so that the application server could find the erb.rb file. The JRuby wiki page on require and load behavior was helpful.

After that it was just a matter of configuring the BSF dispatcher for "ruby".

<bean id="ruby" class="org.blojsom.dispatcher.bsf.BSFDispatcher" init-method="init">
<property name="blojsomProperties">
<ref bean="defaultProperties"/>
</property>
<property name="servletConfig">
<ref bean="servletConfigFactoryBean"/>
</property>
</bean>

And writing a template.

require 'erb'

template = ERB.new <<-EOF
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="<%= $BLOJSOM_BLOG.getBlogLanguage %>">
<head>
<title><%= $BLOJSOM_BLOG.getBlogName %></title>
</head>

<body>
<%
$BLOJSOM_ENTRIES.each{|entry|
%>
<p>
<%= entry.getTitle %> <br/> <%= entry.getDescription %>
</p>
<%
}
%>
</body>
</html>
EOF

$out.println template.result(binding)

And that's it!

P.S. You can declare the BSF dispatcher multiple times in the blojsom configuration to support multiple template types. Say, for Beanshell as well.

<bean id="beanshell" class="org.blojsom.dispatcher.bsf.BSFDispatcher" init-method="init">
<property name="blojsomProperties">
<ref bean="defaultProperties"/>
</property>
<property name="servletConfig">
<ref bean="servletConfigFactoryBean"/>
</property>
</bean>

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What is SoundExpert?

SoundExpert (SE) provides audio quality ratings of sound equipment and technologies such as mp3/wma/aac coders, portable players, sound cards, amplifiers ... (only coders at the moment, though).

Check out their blog.

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Changelog
Updates
Quickstart (for new installations)
Upgrading instructions
Bugs Fixed

More issues fixed in this release than in the past. I’m trying to be as diligent as possible in marking new additions, changes, and fixes in JIRA.

There are a few new plugins in this release. If you use Twitter and you want to let people know when you’ve updated your blog on Twitter, well then, the Twitter Notification plugin is for you. It still needs an administration plugin, but you can add the relevant configuration information in the database and you’re all good.

Basically I’m going to be working on documentation over the next week to migrate all the old plugin documentation and other supporting documentation to be relevant for blojsom 3.0.

I don’t anticipate working on any code over the next week and the following two weeks. Mostly because on January 30th I’m off to Seattle to snowboard for 3 days and then I’m off to Whistler, BC, Canada to snowboard for 8 days or so ... Mostly. There’s over 30 ft of snow out there!!!

But, once I get back I'll put in the Widget code and get on the roles (named permission collections) work. There will also be a number of other event hooks that I'll be adding for people to wire in components to respond to various events using the event/listener API.

That’s about it. Stay classy San Diego!

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Uh oh ...

Dec 04 23:07:48 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor24] servlet.BlojsomServlet - blojsom plugin execution: org.blojsom.plugin.widget.WidgetPlugin
Dec 04 23:07:48 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor24] widget.WidgetPlugin - Sending process widget request for widget: ip-widget
Dec 04 23:07:48 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor24] widget.WidgetPlugin - Sending process widget request for widget: search-widget
Dec 04 23:07:48 DEBUG [http-8080-Processor24] widget.WidgetPlugin - Sending process widget request for widget: hello-widget

And with a little widget love in the template ...

#DisplayWidgets()

We get ...

I guess this means blojsom is officially on the widget bandwagon!

Stay tuned for more information.

Technorati Tags: blojsom widget widgets

I needed an excuse to get motivated about flushing out the blojsom 3 wiki pages.

So ... I've put up pages describing the plugin API and the event/listener API.

Plugin API you ask?

Plugins allow developers to add to the capabilities of blojsom in a well-defined way. Plugins can be responsible for changing how an entry is displayed, adding or removing information to an entry, making information or objects available to the templates, etc. You are not limited to what you can do with plugins. In fact, the web-based administration console was developed as a series of plugins.

Event and Listener API you ask?

The blojsom event notification and listener API allows developers to write components that respond to events from other blojsom components in a well-defined way. For example, based on an event indicating that a blog entry was added or updated, a listener or plugin could be written to respond to that event and "ping" a weblog update notification service like weblogs.com or blo.gs. Another example might be a listener or plugin which e-mails a list of individuals when a blog entry has been added to a blog.

There are also some pages with plugin API examples and event/listener API examples. They're simple, but then decidedly so they illustrate key techniques of plugin development and things you might want to do with plugins.

Of course, this complements the "code" documentation that's already available (also here) if you want to see how some of the near 100+ plugins that have been written for blojsom.

Enjoy!

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I wrote a plugin for blojsom that updates Twitter for you when you add or update a blog entry.

You can customize the update text with a message like, "OMG ... I just blogged about {0}". The {0} is like a placeholder for where you want the title inserted.

You can also select whether you want Twitter notifications sent when entries are added or updated or both.

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Claudio Miranda points us to instructions on using blojsom 3 with Jetty and Apache Derby.

This page describes the setup of blojsom 3 using Jetty 6 as the application server and Apache Derby Embedded as the database engine.
The use of Apache Derby Embedded, is of use when there is no need or cannot use a networked SQL server.

Enjoy!

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Blojsom/Google Maps Template Mashup
Originally uploaded by DavidCzarnecki.

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Miles writes in ...

Just in case no one else has thought of it...

Microsummaries for Blojsom!

0. Install the Blojsom addon bundle.

1. Create a velocity template: microsummary.vm, and put this in it:
Latest: $BLOJSOM_PLUGIN_LIST_TOOL.get($BLOJSOM_ENTRIES,
0).getEscapedTitle()

Not actually sure about the syntax, but it returns what's expected,
so, I'm living with it.

2. Create a new flavor: microsummary, text/plain and associate
microsummary.vm with it.

3. Create a plugin chain (perhaps conditional get is not good?) for
the new microsummary flavour. This is the chain I'm using right now:
conditional-get, meta, limiter, nofollow, rss-enclosure, list-tool

4. In the <head> section of your blog's HTML template add something
like this:
<link rel="microsummary" href="$BLOJSOM_BLOG.getBlogURL()?
flavor=microsummary"/>

Et voila. When you bookmark your blog in Firefox, you get a dropdown
box for the name, and you can choose the latest headline as the live
bookmark summary. Another 0-day Blojsom result

Scary! And Firefox 2.0 isn't due until tomorrow. Oh ... wait ...

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Just a few items left to be translated for the Simplified Chinese localization of the blojsom administration console.

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