Dave Czarnecki is the man!

It has been a few years (March 2003) since I switched my old blog at jroller over to my then shiny new self hosted blog using Blojsom. Sorry David, for missing our anniversaries. I recall that at the time Roller Weblogger was giving me headaches in its installation. I saw David's lovely and simple code and in like 5 minutes, I was up and running. I might not have been an exactly model user for the mojo slop, always staying a little bit behind in upgrading and whining at him in blogs and 1-1 emails, but I loved Blojsom then and still love it now (even if the installation of 3.0 needs a bit of work ;-) ). So much that when I decided that JBoss needed a blog (originally here), I installed blojsom yet again.

I was convinced that a "corporate propaganda blog" -- that was my intent and what I called it -- needed to be one blog rolled up together sot that if you wanted to read the tech articles you had to drink the Koolaid with them. So we misused Blojsom's categories feature, and made it work. I got repeated flak at JBoss about this setup and the blog in general, but just like with the Wiki, one by one, my then coworkers signed up. I still remember when Marc sent out an email on the corporate mail list with the subject "Blogging mandatory". I remember one of the the skeptics reply. To be honest, the setup wasn't exactly what I wanted. We did need topics "portal", "appserver", etc. so that users could filter by area of interest and not just author (In fact one customer at a conference requested that "we" blog about MORE than just "Portal"). And to this day anyone at JBoss could post as anyone else if they like because its one blog w/o access control separation (well this is a little better now)..

So some years later, a little bit wisercrazier, when we planned the Buni launch I contacted Dave and asked him if it was possible to get him to write an internal aggregator. I offeredbeggged to pay... However he'd only implement it, not take our money (its all that Bedeveled Mojo I guess). Basically the "internal aggregator" which I think comes out officially in Blojsom 3.1 works like this... The "default" blog you see at blog.buni.org is actually an aggregation of all of the Buni bloggers blogs. There are categories in this "default" blog (presently /buni and /opensource). In the individual blogs, they (optionally) also have said categories. If they post in a category that exists BOTH in their blog and in the default blog, it is aggregated. It sounds a little complicated but its basically like subscribing to only certain feed categories. This way you can blog about things that you want to keep "off" the front page.

The setup is quite simple. You just add the plugin definition to WEB-INF/classes/blojsom-plugins.xml (probably not the case when 3.1 comes out). Then add "internal-aggregator" to the beginning of your "mappings" under "Plugins" in blojsom's fancy admin tool. You also have to alter the template (we use our own but you can use the asual or whatever).

5. In asual-entry.vm in the templates for the blog acting as the "aggregator" use the #InternalAggregatorFriendlyPermalink macro in lieu of the #FriendlyPermalink macro. This macro is also used in some of the feeds as well as asual-column.vm. Example:

#InternalAggregatorFriendlyPermalink($entry)

6. You can also replace the category output to use a URL appropriate for the blog for the given entry. Example:

in <a href="$blog.getBlogURL()$entry.getCategory()" title="$entry.getCategory()">

David's email

You can do that to ONLY the "default" blog, but if you do then if anyone switches the theme back and forth in the menu the changes are lost! Doh! If you do it in /WEB-INF/themes/asual but then any child blog will have screwed up permalinks (they suprisingly work...they just have velocity macros in them!). So what worked bet for us was to create a complete copy of "asual" to "asual-aggregator" with the changes and select that for the blog theme for "default" and the normal "asual" for the other blogs. (Actually we have our own themes created by the ever talented Sergey Pozhilov, but I figure someone might want to use these as instructions and if they have the Bunisoft theme we'll probably sue them).

So thanks to Blojsom and David we have the fabulous community propaganda blog that you see today, but can express our crazier (or maybe in our case less crazy) sides "off the front page" as needed. Thanks David!