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Added by Miguel Gonzalez Losa, last edited by Adrian Fish on May 28, 2008 (view change)

Sakai Blog Tool

Lead(s): Adrian Fish (Lancaster,UK)
Committers: Nuno Fernandes (UVP)

Description:

The Blog is a tool that allows the creation of journals that are available on the web. The way of using the Blog depends of each user, but normally the Blog is used to contain updated daily information that the user wants either to make available to other users in their work group or make accessible anywhere, any time.

The blog can be used for many purposes, from a log of your daily job to general ideas that you want to share. One of the most popular pedagogical uses is as a reflective 'learning log'. However, the Blog is not only a chronological order of information. It is a tool that facilitates the management of knowledge. With the Blog you can store links to other web pages, files and pictures; it also provides a search mechanism which makes it easy to track and find any published information.

The Blog is not just a personal blog. It is a team-oriented blog. This means that all the information you publish to the team blog can be revised, modified and appended to by any member of your team. All your team members can also add comments to any blog entry.

The Blog is currently maintained against versions 2.4.x and 2.5.x of Sakai and there is a brand new version currently nearing completion.

How to install

1. Check out the relevant version from svn and build it as with any other Sakai tool
2. Change your JVM startup configuration adding this option: java.awt.headless=true This is necessary for the JPEG conversor built in the blogger

Features

The best way to see the capabilities of this tool is reading the user manual. It is available in the Attachment section.
Also, you can read it on http://www.e-science.lancs.ac.uk/eCollaborationTools/blogger/blogger.html
Note: the current manual is for the previous version of the blogger. This is valid for the most of the features of the blogger. We are currently working in a new updated version.

About the authors

This tool has been developed by Miguel Gonzalez Losa and Adrian Fish who are members of Centre for e-Science, Lancaster University, United Kingdom

Notes

File and images sizes: the blogger can work with any file and image size. The current thresold is 20 Mb but it can be change on WEB.xml file. In any case, it is possible that the host system has other limits for example, BLOB's size in the database.

We are expecting feedback from users in order to improve and add new features tot this tool. If you have ideas and suggestion, please, contact us.

If you are using apache in front of tomcat is needed to use mod_jk, so you just have to add a map to /sakai-blogger-tool in mod_jk config file.

For the latest news on bugs and feature requests, use Sakai's JIRA:

http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&mode=hide&pid=10010&sorter/order=DESC&sorter/field=priority&resolution=-1&component=10471

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PC-Description (Provisional: Blog)

PC-Sakai 2.2 Plans (Provisional: Blog)

PC-Sakai 2.3 Plans (Provisional: Blog)

PC-Sakai 2.4 Plans (Provisional: Blog)

PC-Sakai 2.5 Plans (Provisional: Blog)

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Comments (Hide)

I am getting this error in catalina.out:
ERROR: Exception sending context initialized event to listener instance of class com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener (2006-02-07 12:02:38,166 main_org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/blogger])
java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: uk/ac/lancs/e_science/jsf/components/blogger/renderer/RichTextEditArea (Unsupported major.minor version 49.0)

Posted by Clay Fenlason at Feb 07, 2006 12:13

OK, Comments are re-formatting in odd ways. Let me try that again with some markup:

ERROR: Exception sending context initialized event to listener instance of 
class com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener 
(2006-02-07 12:02:38,166 main_org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/blogger])
java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: 
uk/ac/lancs/e_science/jsf/components/blogger/renderer/RichTextEditArea 
(Unsupported major.minor version 49.0)

Posted by Clay Fenlason at Feb 07, 2006 12:16

If I were a developer, I would know that meant to double-check my JVM before posting this

Posted by Clay Fenlason at Feb 07, 2006 12:21

Sorry, I forget to put in the documentation that the version 1.5 is needed to run the Blogger

Posted by Miguel Gonzalez Losa at Feb 08, 2006 11:19

I tried the install in 2.1.1, get the following errors upon restarting tomcat:

ERROR: uk.ac.lancs.e_science.jsf.components.blogger.UIEditPost (2006-02-08 13:19:30,051 main_org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].
[/blogger])
javax.faces.FacesException: Can't instantiate class: 'uk.ac.lancs.e_science.jsf.components.blogger.UIEditPost'.

Similar for UIOutputPost and UIPostListing

any ideas?

Posted by Jim Martino at Feb 08, 2006 14:09

actually, it is a pre-2.1.1: 2.1.1_002 to be precise

Posted by Jim Martino at Feb 08, 2006 14:11

Actually we are going to update the blogger to sakai 2.1.1. I hope these problems will be solve soon.

Posted by Miguel Gonzalez Losa at Feb 27, 2006 06:18

A quick install note. The 0703 .zip now uses /tmp rather than C:\TEMP as its default in web.xml, so if you're searching for that string, you'll need to use that instead.

I'm also still having trouble with Java 1.4. The rich text editor, in particular:

ERROR: Exception sending context initialized event to listener instance of class com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener (2006-03-01 11:05:29,879 main_org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/blogger])
java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: uk/ac/lancs/e_science/jsf/components/blogger/renderer/RichTextEditArea (Unsupported major.minor version 49.0)

Posted by Clay Fenlason at Mar 01, 2006 11:12

Why not include the source code in the distribution? No-one expects it to be perfect...

Posted by Stephen Marquard at Mar 07, 2006 12:05

I am agree that not body expects it to be perfect, and it is not perfect, of course. Now we are making some testing and we want to release the source code on 20th of april (aprox).

Posted by Miguel Gonzalez Losa at Apr 06, 2006 05:43

Miguel, Do you have a timeline for placing this tool in "contrib" for Sakai? Perhaps for the Sakai 2.2 release? Thanks.

Posted by Peter A. Knoop at Mar 28, 2006 08:09

We are looking for the requirements to put the tool in "contrib" for Sakai. We expect to do that on 20th of April

Posted by Miguel Gonzalez Losa at Apr 06, 2006 05:44

If you have this error
...
Error setting property 'image' in bean of type uk.ac.lancs.e_science.sakai.tools.blogger.PostCreateController:

java.lang.InternalError: Can't connect to X11 window server using ':0.0'

as the value of the DISPLAY variable.
...

Then you have to change your JVM startup configuration adding this option: java.awt.headless=true This is necessary for the JPEG conversor built in the blogger

Posted by Miguel Gonzalez Losa at May 04, 2006 06:11

I apologize if this has been covered before, but I wonder if this project should be renamed? "Blogger" is a commercial productand even if Google doesn't mind the use of their trademark, I think potential users might be confused about what this tool's relationship to Blogger(tm) is. I, personally, thought it was some kind of Blogger(tm) integration package instead of an entirely separate piece of blogging software until I found this page. Just a thought.

Posted by David Adams at Jul 05, 2006 14:07

The project can be renamed and we are open to suggestions.

Posted by Miguel Gonzalez Losa at Aug 30, 2006 08:48

The blogger has been renamed as "Blog"

Posted by Miguel Gonzalez Losa at Sep 13, 2006 06:00

Are there plans to add an RSS feed to the blog tool?

Posted by Matthew J Barnhart at Nov 28, 2006 14:45

We're interested in a blog, but most of our applications require public access. My ideal design would publish a URL for public read, and require someone to join the site in order to comment (assuming that comments are permitted).

Posted by Charles Hedrick at Dec 10, 2006 21:18

Many users have requested this feature and it will be the next one that we are going to implement once we fix the bugs that some people have reported in JIRA. I expect we can implement this in january

Posted by Miguel Gonzalez Losa at Dec 12, 2006 07:19