Hi All,

I've done some searching on the boards about weblogs and blogs but nothing recent or final an any full fledged projects that were spawned...on the boards anyway.

Would anyone be interested in moving forward with integrating a blog type service to their LinksSQL? I hear that using GF may be better, but need functions of LSQL for content mgmt...maybe use Both through community...

This function would have many benefits on different levels. I'm interested in these key points and I know this would actually pull together some other things that I've seen users talk about here.

• Give linkowners and non-website owners an option to open their own blog account.
• Users can search linkowner blogs in addition to links
• ability to easily syndicate content to other blogger sites
• ability to "feed" site content to other Admin owned sites
• could "give" a non-website owner their own blog site (i.e.- blogger.com) when they open their account
• archiving individual user blogs (another blog feature)
• The extra features like homepage, xml feeds, pinging stuff would apply to blogs AND link articles, etc.

We're looking at a kind of Blogger.com, pre-Yahoo geocities, CMS rolled into one. Gee, did I say too much and give away my only business development strategy? NP...I say my prayers at night

I'm looking for co-op involvement and I can fund partially. Haven't contacted GT yet...

Big Thanks just for reading!!! I'm very excited about this, what a great service to our users and site visitors.

Did I post to the wrong category? Or is this an unrealistic project?

Must be the later, if it was the wrong category I think I'd get more response

Hi;

Sounds neat! I would be interested.

Perhaps you got a little less response in a few hours because not *everyone* knows that blogging is a type of CMS (Content Management System).

I bet that if you post something like this: "Hey, I want to get a project going turning Links SQL into a full content management system complete with syndication, xml feeds...", then maybe more people would post back.

HI Slice,

Okay I heed your advice.

M

I DO think it is a fantastic project.
There has been talk of plugins to increase the capability of Links as a CMS.

Heck, if you add a number of fields, some logic and templates, you can have get something decent for publishing articles.

But what you are talking about is a few steps ahead of that, and is needed by more than a few Links owners, so do develop it!

I agree - the article stuff can be done with some grunt work.

As for the XML and related, this is where it's at. I'm doing my homework as we speak. Amazing what we can learn by necessity!

My goal is to be able to syndicate our content all over the place! and offer our visitors one heck of a kick butt service I'm so comfortable with this system, I'd like to keep using it.

I'm not sure what a "blog" is, as I'm not really interested in "new" or "cutting" edge technologies or deployments. Been there, done that, prefer to wait <G>

As far as a CMS goes, you *really* need to do a *LOT* of database layout before you start this.

1) what tables will you need to track data

2) even before that, what data will you be tracking?

3) related and linked tables for data management. You can't just put everything into a Links record, and expect reasonable performance, data integrity, or managability.

4) entry points. Otherwise known as data flow, but entry points are a better concept. Where will people access the system? Will they need a LinkID ? Username? What?

5) How will you tie data together. Even assuming that using Community will tie Gossamer Mail, Gossamer Forum, and LInks together into one "Username" accessible system, you still need to figure out what data you are managing. Using the Links SQL engine is a no brainer, but what are you going to ask it to do?

6) Configuration options and parameters. What will you allow (or need) the user to supply, and how will the program react to it. A large program like this may need a multip paged configuration utility like the links admin setup area.

I'm working on several large projects, that try to tie together several large and unrelated concepts into a whole managed system, and database flow and 'data normalization' is very important. It has to be figured out before you start, _and_ left flexible enough so that as you encounter things you need to add or change, you've allowed for that.


PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc.

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So glad to hear from you PugDog!

The blog isn't really new, it's just made more press lately. Companies have used weblogs a.k.a. blogs to keeping daily journals of their developmental progress, notes, etc. and then later picked up on by kids to post their daily diaries what have you. Some popular ones are the blogs owned by Microsoft employees. I'll PM you with my personal comments on it and what I think it can do for a commercial enterprise.

My interest this is... My visitors can open a Blog account which

• A) can give them an instant website with their first post (I know a homepage plug-in has been discussed in this forum).
• B) Ongoing posts with article archiving per User
• C) Ping posts over the web to other sites like Google, Blogger, Moveable Type etc.
• D) Entries can be syndicated by Admin and/or User to other related sites.

Here are some examples:

http://theredkitchen.net/ (this has multiple authors)

http://matrixessays.blogspot.com/ (notice the URL, envision that page with your preset links and ads at the top - aha!)

A Business Website could gain alot of traffic from this by numerous ways. I think it is worth working on. There are quite a few GPL products out there that can be hacked and integrated into GT products.


=======================

As for the Content Management, I should say mini-CMS. There are way too many other systems out there better suited for that purpose (I like Typo3 and it's free) But again, not really set up for thousands of users in mind, unless you go hi-dollar, even then. So how about this...

Make a new table called Content, so there's links, reviews, users, categories and Content. Then modify the Content properties. or have Content 1, Content 2, Content 3 and have an option like press a button to duplicate the table again for Content 4 or 5 (yeah, LOL at that one) and create your customized columns from there. Then within each Content table you can have the option of a set of templates designed as you want already with the default tags. Then you have the possiblity to have a different look for each type of content or post

I see this site: http://www.pressbox.co.uk/index.html and they use Links as I would for content-not really linking outside the site at all. PugDog, my options now are to - like you say, add all these extra columns to the link record. It does seem like a lot to dump into one place.

Then the Front End ideally would A) user can choose from multiple template styles, B) Choose type of post from the three Content Tables C) Ideally, auto generate a subdomain for their template site D) Allow editing of post (uless locked by admin)

I'm not saying this (execept the Blog plug-in) can't be done by me, but it will be done by adding to the existing links table, that's the extent of my ability.

And Yes FLEXIBLE, I agree completely.

Hi,

A home page plugin is NOT a big deal.

Use a web interface, allow people to use markup language, not HTML, insert images into the image database, not linked to off-site, and you've got a home page system.

I think Fileman has some of that capability if you need to allow users to manage disk space or have access to files on disk, but I would _SERIOUSLY_ argue against that. store their home page in the database, let them add certain information -- limit and check that information.

I'm still not sure what the "blog" is, and what it does, and why it does it.

That all seems outside of Links.

I can conceptually deal with the Links stuff.

What I see you are asking, is for Gforum to be a mini-Usenet, with certain forums picking up incoming posts (which I think it already does) and sending outgoing posts (which it also does). What you want is for that to be in some XML format, so some other automated program on the other end can read it??

Where does Links actually fit into this?


PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc.

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Please leave a PM here.

Agreed - NO Access to any template BE, just their content through the FE. That's all that would be needed. Basically one of the template pages with their information plugged in to appear as their own site. With their own content provided though the form. But needs more options than just a details.html page.



For Links to fit into the blog system, or blogs to fit into Links, you'll keep the content together in one app and the ability to admin all content including blogs through the Links Admin, and have many, many users. I have read in this forum that GF may be a better choice for this - okay with me if the features fit better. Yes to your questions XML.



the Content Table? What a nice feature to have a Content selection in the admin menu and just add away. It could be used for:

• news stories
• Articles
• Image Gallery
• Projects

benefit: you can add fields like demographic data, geographical data etc. You can then offer a more powerful search than just looking for keyowrds. Like a visitor can search for "all posts by guys" or "all users in Miami, Florida, under 40," or "all projects in 33126 Zip Code." Features like that I think are important especially if you were to syndicate and let others pick and choose content by these fields.

Turning LSQL (or GForum, as raised in this thread) into a blogging tool has also been an idea I have played with.

Being a blogger myself, I do see a lot of challenges here, however. It's hard to explain exactly what makes a good blogging tool, but so far, I haven't been able to make LSQL a good blogging tool. I think LSQL in many ways is a bad blogging tool because it's too complex and powerful I prefer to use a state-of-the art dedicated blogging tool (MT) for my blog - it does exactly what it sets out to do, and does it very good. But it has many limitations, one of which is its poor scalability. I use it to run around 20 blogs (only 3 active) with one installation, and don't think I want to it it much further. I know they're working on a hosted blog service, but also that they got a chunck of rare VC going to realise this.

Speaking of blogging, I have used several ideas and innovations that have come out of the blogging movement - such as XML syndication and publishing bookmarklets - with LSQL. Rather than making LSQL into a blogging tool per se, I think it is more interesting to look at what blogging technology can do for LSQL. More concretely, I'd love to be able to have LSQL do trackback pings, autodiscovery, and much more.

Oh, another thing LSQL or rather this community could learn from the blogging world is the use/development of plugins. Here, almost all plugins are commercial, but in the blogging world, most if not all are free.

John

John, If only I could focus my thoughts such as you have above.

Let me stand back and restate my original statements. I would like to incorporate features into LinksSQL that are from the "blogging movement - such as XML syndication and publishing bookmarklets [ trackback pings, autodiscovery] " How's that?

And I would love to hear what incorporations of these features you have accomplished on your end. I shot you an email a couple of days ago, not sure if you received. You can PM me if you like - you have the advantage of knowledge of both worlds.



And yes, love the free plug-ins. It's really a different community, very personal.

And thank you for this reference, it's the only one so far that relates to this.

Thank you all for your input and I hope I've put a 'bug in the ear' so to speak and may have inspired some developmental interest as far as the ability to syndicate and all that yummy stuff.

FYI, for now, we're going to use LSQL for users to post articles and such and MoveableType to offer a limited number of authors their own blog accounts run on a separate domain. Ohh, to have a corporate R&D budget....such is life.

XML, RSS, Rtf, oh my...still looking-

Thanks!!

This old thread is still relevant, isn't it?

To anyone interested in what I wrote above, more specifically about trackback pings, I am happy to inform you that I have it working on a site I run.

I'd be happy to document how-to-do-it upon request. In short, I've trackback enabled Detailed pages ("blog entries"). The install is easy - install the standalone trackback script, and add a few lines to a few templates. Let me know if you want more explanation.

John

This is a cloudy area for me. I'd be interested in more explanation.

I'm still not even clear on what a "blog" is... I've seen it used in many different ways.


PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc.

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Please leave a PM here.

Trackback comes from the blogosphere (blogger community), but could in principle be used for all kinds of regularly updated websites. Having a Trackback-enabled site means that your site can communicate programmatically with other sites using a simple ('ping'), XML-based method.

So, if I have written something in my Trackback-enabled blog, and you want to refer to it in your Trackback-enabled blog - or Trackback-enabled Links SQL for that matter - your blogging tool will give you a checkbox where you can tell your system to send my blog a message, telling me and my readers that you have written something too. That way, Trackback is a distributed dialogue tool, or an advanced referer tool.

Trackback is basically a "single CGI script that accepts TrackBack pings through HTTP requests, stores the pings locally in the filesystem, and can return a list of pings either in RSS or in a browser-viewable format."

Oh, "blog". I keep a rather large list of links about blogging: http://slashdemocracy.org/.../Blogging/index.html which confirms what you've seen, but which also has a lot of good stuff if you want to dig into the concept.

I'd love to see details! Add in trackback and reviews (or in blogspeak, "comments" and you've got the ability to create a really powerful blogging system atop your links database. Movable Type and LSQL have roughly analogous back ends - except LSQL supports infinite subcategories, where MT limits you to one.

OK£¬ gotze£¬

you want blog and lsql to combine and the blog trackback function work!

i had research the MovableType and gforum, the Lsql plugins yet i should make a plugins to do that blog account create and blog content searching into lsql.

about your requirement detail, please send me a mail to tsigson@perlchina.org, so i find out a soluction for this.

my MSN: perlchina_at_hotmail.com

I have made preliminary arrangements with GT to develop a blog+forum product for me (a sample of what I am trying to do is: http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com) . It's a custom job. I have GF up and running and wanted to add blog-like functionality. Because of timing and resources, GT said they need to integrate LSQL & GF instead of just modifing GF. We are hoping to have this up in April. I'll keep you all posted with the progress if anyone is interested.

Dave

bretzke-
I thought it would be a matter of time before we got some good feedback on this project. It's a great community (business) tool. I'll keep watch on this thread if you'll keep us updated.

That would be excellent, thanks.

Awesome!

Hey, did this blog project end up happening?

Actually, it's just about done.....but unfortunately, GT ended up using a GForum backbone instead of LSQL. Sorry.

Dave