This is much more corporate designing, although with a touch of irony and fun, much brighter. I first went to 4templates, a great site for html, flash, logos and business cards, as I did not want to come up with a design all by myself. So I bought this one for a couple of bucks and finished it in TWiki/NatSkin. Infact, I had to rewrite it mostly, leaving only the basic idea and colorset in place. The package I downloaded from 4templates was coded too badly and surely was not fit to cover a CMS. In addition its imagery was targeted at a medical site, not an internet consultancy. However, I really liked the original design and its potential to be quite appropriate.

Well, and then I went out and bought the michaeldaumconsulting.com domain to get away with using the wikiring.de domain for my own business. While the primary brand of this site is MD Consulting, the WikiRing will only be used as a secondary branding, as required by the Terms of Business for WikiRing partners.

I moved over all the content and user accounts from the old JojoWiki blog in here as I didn't want to cut that off and all blogging happening here from now on will be in direct continuation of what was there, a mix of business related and personal news and opinions.

So while the old JojoWiki site was a blog foremost, the MD Consulting site is much more of an corporate site, which happens to integrate a blog as well.

I am not sure what I will do with the old JojoWiki theme. Maybe I am going to open source it as part of the NatSkin package.

Ok, so this all is quite fresh and the MD theme for this site is not quite finished with some rough edges here and there. For those of you that use the NatSkinStyleBrowser to explore available designs you will experience that the markup of the current site does not fit 100% the standard css of NatSkin. That's mostly due to the reworked header art and logos for the MD theme. I will find a way around this soon.

Last not least a message to all you rss feed readers: come along and visit this site ... and drop me a line of what you think.

Before, you where told to create a new web using TWiki's ManageWebs tool and create a blog web derived from the _BlogPlugin template web. Are you new to TWiki and does this sound like gibberish? And then you got some half configured web where you had to figure out how go on from that point. Over. Well nearly. I don't say that we solved the hassles coming with all those add-ons that have to be installed one after the other to get things up and running. Point is that you can create a new blog more easily and in an obvious way.

Technically, this is done by creating a REST handler that is an extension of TWiki's ``createWeb'' feature. Sadly, this part of TWiki is not pluggable or extendable in any way so that more actions can be carried out after a we has been created. So our version basically does the same but sets yet more preference values in WebPreferences that you had to fix by hand in a separate step afterwards. Infact after creating a blog web, it was not 100% functional and you had to finalize it according to the welcome message. And I am pretty sure most didn't read that longish text anyway. Heh, nice welcome.

But I am not all satisfied with the result. The BlogFactory could even do better. So this is just the first release that has this kind of installation wizard. There are at least two things that I still want to add to the BlogFactory wizard:

1. offer an option to link instead of copying the template web, thereby reducing redundancy vastly; so if there is an error in BlogUp and you have -- let's say -- 10 blogs running on your TWiki you just have to fix it once and not 10 times.
2. generate a BlogAuthorGroup and/or a BlogAdminGroup for each new web so that you may separate access rights; this entails altering a couple of topics in the blog afterwards; note, however that this conflicts with (1) in some cases.

Oh, and before I forget it: as you could think of the BlogPlugin as a blog construction set, we could have a couple of template blogs (like the _BlogPlugin template web), partially being linked to each other to reduce redundancy, but with different pre-configured blog layouts.

Yeah, and to round up this undertaking there should be a TopicFunction to render the most recent postings in all known blogs on your TWiki installation. But that's the easiest part.

Basically this means that the BlogPlugin will be ready to host a lot of blogs in a manageable way.

LastFM

Are you a fan of Last.fm social music and want to display the tracks you recently listended to in your BlogUp? Well then do so. Just add your LASTFMNICK to the WebPreferences and they pop up in your sidebar.

Blog Licensing

It's a good idea to display the license restrictions of your content in a prominent place. Do so by modifying the WEBCOPYRIGHT variable in your WebPreferences. You may also take a look at the license wizard at creativecommons.org. This is a really nice way to chose the license that fits best to your needs. BlogUp supports that by providing a RenderLicense TopicFunction that you can easily customize to display the license you want.

Blog Images

Adding photos to your blog postings should be as easy as possible. So this release adds an improved BlogImages feature that combines the image gallery plugin with the attach dialogue normally only part of the skin to give you a one-stop place to manage your stuff.

...

These are the highlights. Sure, there is a set of embarrassing things that got fixed I better don't mention here.

So the last thing I reported was all this new BlogArchive using tag clouds and the like. You are already enjoying that. Here are the major highlights that came in afterwards in chronological order ...

Tagging

(03 March 2006)

Adding tags to postings is much easier now using a bit of JavaScript. During editing there is a tiny tag cloud of all known tags under the main text area. Click on one and see how they get added to the BlogTag form field; click again and see how they go out again. Tags are extracted from all blog entries. You don't need to define them beforehand like the SubjectCategories. Just start using them. Tags can be weighted. Write someminortag somemajortag:2 to make somemajortag twice as important for that posting as someminortag. Use any number you want separated by a colon. Watch the tags in the cloud.

Delayed Publishing

(11 March 2006)

If you are about to write a posting but unable to finish it in one gasp then you simply mark the state of the posting "disabled" and it does not get published on your blog. If someone is able to guess the reserved url then we will only get a red message saying that this posting is unpublished ... something like that. You as the original writer can see it though and finish writing it safely the next day. All your unfinished/unpublished postings will be listed for you in the sidebar of the BlogAuthor page.

Browsing categories

(11 March 2006, 05 May 2006)

If you click on a SubjectCategory you get to see all postings in that category. Clicking on one posting to come to its detailed view will propagate the fact that you came here via that initial SubjectCategory using url parameters. The effect of that is that browsing to the next/previous posting will be limited restricted to that category the same way category frontpage paginate. So compare the following: click on a category, click on the headline of the first posting, click on "next" (note the url parameter being propagated); compare that with the pagination if you remove the url parameter by hand. The double linked list of postings is a different one now.

BlogLinks behave the same way now. I missed that initially. But as I want to start a BlogUp ring (see sidebar below; bad position for that; need to blog that on a different occasion) I need to have a way to browse news feeds of a certain category. If you click on a BlogUp feed and the on next/prev then this should show you the next feed in the BlogUp ring and not the next in the blogroll. BlogUp feeds and the rest of the blogroll has been separated anyway.

Improved Multi-Author blogging

(12 March 2006)

In a multi-authored blog, not ever writer might agree what should go into the blogroll. So they should be able to share a common set of BlogLinks but be able to choose among them and add own. So every BlogLink is assigned to the BlogAuthor it created first. If a co-writer wants to have it too he can edit the BlogLink and add himself to the respective formfield.

Google Adsense

(30 March 2006)

Google Adsense is the most popular way to add advertisings to your website. Yahoo has something similar (maybe I will give that a try). Adding your Adsense account to BlogUp is a natural desire. And so I did what I can to make things easy for you: just edit the WebPreferences of your blog and insert your Adsense id; customize the colors of and here you are. If you don't insert your code then, sure, Google Adsense will not be displayed. There is a special wrapper function, RenderGoogleAdsense, to display all your ads. Basically, you don't have to got through google's Adsense Setup wizard anymore, just put a call to RenderGoogleAdsense to your topics and watch the ads appearing there. Right now, a few calls have been added in default sections of your blog, like at the bottom of the frontpages and postings in order to be non-obstructive by default.

Model, View, Control

(05 May 2006)

Previously, net data in your blog has been rendered by having specific calls to TopicFunctions in the topic text itself -- DBCALL{"RenderThisAndThat"...} cruft. Whereas the layouting has been refactored into a single TopicFunction the actual call to the layout renderer was not. This too was removed using TopicViews. So every object in the application gets a view which controls its behaviour calling the appropriate TopicFunctions in the end. So that's a kind of model-view-control separation we already know ... in principal.

The nice side-effect of that is, that adding a ?raw=on to a posting's url does not disclose the implementation's details of that item any more as the TopicViews don't have a TEXT tag anymore. So, for example a BlogEntry, only carries the form data and some topic preference variables assigning access, the view template and some minor stuff, but no more.

Blog Images

(24 May 2006)

Adding images to your postings is still a little clumsy. As a first step to ease that all your image material is attached to a central administration tool, BlogImages, which displays all your blog's pictures as an image gallery. The WebPreference variable BLOGIMAGES points to that. If you want to render blog postings in different webs of your TWiki then you have to set this variable in appropriate places. If, for example, you have only one blog you can set the BLOGIMAGES variable site-wide in your TWikiPreferencens.

The actual picture is then added using a bit of html markup like this one:

<img src="%BLOGIMAGES%/pamporn.gif" 
     class="border alignleft" 
     alt="pam porn"/>

Note that there are three img-related classes predefined in the BlogPlugin: (1) ``border'' to ad a little border around the image, (2) ``alignleft'' and (3) ``alignright''. Combine them in the way illustrated above.

I know this is still not as user-friendly as I'd like it but maybe we can integrate Craig Meyer's ImagePlugin as soon as he releases it. This one facilitates a couple of nice things that will come in very handy, e.g. server-side image resizing so that you don't need to pre-calculate an image width matching your posting before you upload.

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Bottom line: we have enhanced BlogUp quite a bit and I think we still have room for more. I may not have covered every new feature since I last reported. In the end you must test out this stuff yourself anyway.

Comming to that point: I am about to collect all sites that run this work in a ring, the BlogUp ring, as I said already. So if you are BlogUp'ed then drop me a line. Even better, if you feel so then make a donation. Send money or hardware. I need a new provider to host this blog. I need a better domain name.

If you want to install a blog using the BlogPlugin and you need help then contact me or even better contact the WikiRing which I am a co-founder of.

For quite some time we had Michael Heilmann's Kubrick for TWiki on JojoWiki with varying header art. Yes, and as the NatSkin is being installed out there, they all use it, mostly with little customizations. So what is it worth to have a site that everybody else has too? Nuttin. All other NatSkin styles are still those from good'ol CopyCatSkin: MovableType remakes in the end. And even MovableType has lots of nicer themes now. Alright, those that come with NatSkin are fine just to see what you can do with it. But I just found out that NatSkin is much more flexible than I thought ... as you can see.

So welcome to the JojoWikiStyle (maybe I rename it to BlackWater or something). But I most probably will not bundle it with NatSkin. Not now. This is mine.

The blonder WikiRing, the darker JojoWiki.