Anyone implemented Blog on TWiki?

Blogs are all over the news at the moment:

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4086337.stm - Blog Mania
• http://weblogs.about.com/od/weblogsoftwareandhosts/
• http://webdesign.about.com/cs/weblogs/a/aa101402a.htm - Content Management for the Masses
• http://www.waxy.org/random/html/wsj_findablog.html

Further, blogs for feedback are increasingly made available for news articles:

• http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/06/svn_homedir.html (Note RHS: blog this/trackbacks)

It would be good to implement a fully-functional blog on TWiki:

• http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2003/08/integrating_blo.html
• http://www.everythingsysadmin.com/archives/000053.html
• http://www.codewitch.org/twiki/bin/view/Blog/332
• http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/WeblogWithWiki
  • Can anyone work out whether this is fit for general usage?
• http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2003/06/18.html#a275
• http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001001_comments.html
• http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001001.html

TWiki People with blogs:

• LynnwoodBrown: http://skyloom.com/bin/view/Lynnwood/WebHome
  • You can download the package to add this to your own TWiki at TopicClassificationAddOnDev. -- LynnwoodBrown - 13 Jan 2005
• SvenDowideit: http://www.home.org.au/cgi-bin/view/Blog/WebHome
• UMM: http://csci.mrs.umn.edu/twiki/view/CSci2901f04/CourseBlogs
• LesOrchard: http://www.decafbad.com/blog/
• University Minnesota http://csci.mrs.umn.edu/twiki/view/IS3221h/BloggingGroups , http://csci.mrs.umn.edu/UMMCSciWiki/bin/view/IS3221h/CourseBlogs
• MatthiasWientapper: http://mattzz.dyndns.org/twiki/bin/view/Projects/MattzzLogbuch (german)
• ChristopherOezbek: http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/~oezbek/cgi-bin/view/Blog/WebHome
• MichaelDaum: http://micha.wikiring.de
• AndrewZinck (University of Prince Edward Island): http://adelie.cs.upei.ca/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Lounge/WebLog

Yet, I'd like to see more functionality:

• http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/05/10.html
• http://ginseng.csv.warwick.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/Dev/BlogRequirements
• http://www.phoneboy.com/bin/view.pl/Personal/PhoneBoyBlog (abandoned TWiki in favour of a blog)

Are there more blog implementations for TWiki out there?

Standard Features

Pingback spec	This allows for links or continuation of discussions and alerts between sites or web logs.	The pingback system is a way for a blog to be automatically notified when other Web sites link to it. It is entirely transparent to the linking author, requiring no user intervention to work, and operates on principles of automatic discovery of everything that it needs to know. A sample blog post involving pingback might go like this: Alice posts to her blog. The post she's made includes a link to a post on Bob's blog. Alice's blogging system contacts Bob's blogging system and says "look, Alice made a post which linked to one of your posts". Bob's blogging system then includes a link back to Alice's post on his original post. Reader's of Bob's article can follow this link to Alice's post to read her opinion. It enables reverse linking — a way of going back up a chain of links rather than merely drilling down.
Offline content additions	http://weblogs.about.com/cs/bloghost/gr/wbloggar.htm

-- MartinCleaver - 13 Jan 2005

AtomEnabled might be a good thing

-- MartinCleaver - 16 Jan 2005

In thinking about redesign of my weblog app, I've been reflecting on what makes a blog. Some of it is technical features, but a lot is just look and feel. Things like whether they use date as the deading for each entry, how they organize archives, etc. For inspiration, I've been browsing Web-Designed Weblogs.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 21 Jan 2005

A couple features that are nice include:

• Ability to blog web sites quickly, similar to the "BlogIt" script that was with Moveable Type. (BTW, I'll have this in my next release.)
• A "permalink". Trivial in TWiki.
• Organizing archives by month. Don't know how important this really is.
• Showing number of comments.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 21 Jan 2005

On blogging external websites, which could also be known as annotated bookmarks, a very useful little enhancement which dmoz uses is to grab the text from Description meta tag in the header, if it exists. I've long wondered why the browsers don't do the same. It would make bookmarks/favourites so much more useful. (I even logged the request with mozilla a few years ago).

-- MattWilkie - 22 Jan 2005

http://stumbleupon.com (see the publically-licenced code mentioned at FireFoxExtension) adds a toolbar to IE/Firefox which includes the equivalent of blog-this-page. The code is interesting and looks like could be used towards our ends.

-- MartinCleaver - 22 Jan 2005

The blog-this-page FireFoxExtension I am using is JustBlogIt. It's nice because you can configure it easily. I was able to integrate it into my BlogForTWiki in about an hour (mostly fiddling with the url parameters to get them to work right).

-- LynnwoodBrown - 23 Jan 2005

quote: Are there more blog implementations for TWiki out there?

I did the movable type complete integration with twiki and it has no interest whatsoever, so why bother? movabletwiki

I deleted the new domain I had for it, and may delete this as well. Between twiki and six apart (MT), I am amazed at a total lack of interest in a complete integration of the two. unreal

so why bother?

-- BruceRProchnau - 05 Apr 2005

Sorry Bruce, its not that I am uninterested in your work, it is solely that I don't want to use anything that involves a licence cost: I know many people feel the same way. (Else I would be using something like GrooveNetworks). Had your integration been with WordPress I would have been all over it.

-- MartinCleaver - 05 Apr 2005

Bruce, what steps did you take to promote movabletwiki?

-- ArthurClemens - 05 Apr 2005

I use http://thetabase.net as a "blog" I thought TWiki was the very definition of a "blog" or did the meaning of that term some how evolve into something more specific? grab the CommentPlugin and start "blogging" isnt that what we are doing here now? /me is confused.

-- TravisBarker - 29 Apr 2005

go look at what we have done with CoffeeBreak is that not a "blog" too?

-- TravisBarker - 29 Apr 2005

Are wiki's and blogs converging then, or am I lost somewhere? lol

-- BruceRProchnau - 15 Jun 2005

Blogs are time oriented, with mostly one author. Wikis are topic oriented, with numerous authors.

For the rest we are seeing convergence of tools: easy adding of (time oriented, blog-like) comments, link words in a blog to a knowledge base (wiki).

-- ArthurClemens - 16 Jun 2005

Added another (aka my) blog implementation to the list. Working features:

• Comment counting.
• RSS feed only will show new posts.

-- ChristopherOezbek - 15 Sep 2005

Alright, here's a close WordPress / MovableType emulation on a dakar engine running the NatSkin: http://micha.wikiring.de . This is not open for anonymouse comments yet, only for registered users. The blog is not using the CommentPlugin but purely TWikiForms. Everything is classified and rendered using parametrized INCLUDEs the DBCachePlugin.

-- MichaelDaum - 17 Sep 2005

Released a TWiki version of the WordPress Timesince plugin today: TimeSincePlugin

-- MichaelDaum - 11 Nov 2005

Last year, inspired by LynnwoodBrown's fine blogging application, I developed my own WebLog with the following features:

• multiple bloggers are handled easily--each Wiki user can have his/her own blog in a shared Web
• a central index of all blogs with multiple filters that can be applied
• each user's blog has its own user-selected title and an index with links to recent comments by others
• most metadata is kept in attached forms

You can see it in action in the Lounge of The Musical Mind Wiki at the University of Prince Edward Island. I haven't packaged it for distribution, but Lynnwood encouraged me to share what I've done with the TWiki community, so here it is! I don't know whether it's ready for prime time, but it's survived a couple semesters of use and abuse by a bunch of university students--over 350 WebLog entries and counting.

(For those who care, it's running on Cairo. I'm waiting until the university semester is over before I mess with something that's already working and do an upgrade to Dakar.)

-- AndrewZinck - 31 Jan 2006