Lotus Nut

Looks like Connections 3.0.1.1 is finally hitting FixCentral! I'm hoping some oddities we've seen will be corrected.

Timely enough, I'm just finishing up a 3.0.1 installation and am loading this fixpack now!

The fixpack file (3.0.1.0-LC-Multi-IFLC3011_FP) is a 0.97 GB download. In order to actually install it, when you add it as a repository to the Installation Manager you have to add ".zip" to the end of the filename. Then it appears to know what to do and update properly. I have a snapshot just in case.

Recently, we've had some internal people receiving the following issue when downloading from Connections Files:

Duplicate headers received from server
The response from the server contained duplicate headers. This problem is generally the result of a misconfigured website or proxy.

As I started to dig into it further, I have found that with Google Chrome 16.0.912.75 (the latest stable release as of today), others are receiving the same error when using other non-IBM products. Of course, Chrome is not supported by IBM for IBM Connections, but up until this latest release there were no problems like we are seeing currently.

Workarounds? Wait for Google to patch Chrome or use Firefox or IE (as supported by IBM).

This made me laugh. To some people I'm known as a member of the grammar police, so this error message definitely caught my eye. Yes, I see your bad grammar and I raise you a spell-check...

Is the new Notification Center one of the coolest enhancements for iOS5? No doubt! But is it some stellar Apple innovation? No. But not because many will say it's very similar to Droid Notifications. Rather, it's actually an innovation that comes out of the jailbreak community. You know, those people that Apple doesn't like.  For around 5 months, I've been running Mobile Notifier beta 5 on my 3GS. Check out some of the screenshots there and you will see that it is the same as Notification Center (actually, it matches more closely with the preview of the Notification Center that Apple showed back in June - it would appear that a lot of great work has gone into where MobileNotifier was left off). In fact, beta 5 was the last release of MobileNotifier back in May. That's when Peter Hajas, the developer of MobileNotifier was hired by Apple. One of my only gripes with MobileNotifier is that it cut off a good bit of the notification text, so sometimes the full score of the game wouldn't display or the text in a reply to a tweet, etc... But other than that, it's been really great and I can't wait for the update on iOS5! (oh yeah, and sometimes Springboard would crash when multiple notifications would come in, but I'm sure that's sorted out now)

So, I think I will be waiting for an untethered jailbreak (there is already a tethered jailbreak available!) to be released for iOS5 before updating my 3GS since the Notification Center would be the biggest enhancement that I would likely see with the 3GS. And from some preliminary reading, it appears that iOS5 may also make the 3GS a little peppier.

I have blogged about Ted Hardenburgh's 2 minute drill session before.

Well, now you can catch this live by attending this GROUP Talk session that will be held tomorrow at 11 AM EDT! So, if you haven't already, go signup for this session!

Late last week, IBM submitted apps to the app stores for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. The Android app was approved extremely fast by Google ("within minutes" I have been told!), but we are still waiting to see approval for iOS and BlackBerry apparently.

Part of the requirements for this was that administrators had to install the "July 2011 Mobile Hotfix" for the mobile component (did you know that you could already go to http://www.bleedyellow.com/mobile and have a good interaction before this release?) I've been checking daily for this hotfix and it was released today and I have already loaded it on the server - now we just need the apps to use (hurry up Apple!).

In addition to providing additional services for the native apps, this fix also adds the capability to use the Media Gallery and Ideation Blogs from within Communities via the mobile interface.

Thanks IBM for getting some more native apps out there! (P.S. we still can't wait for Sametime!! )

When you go to the "home page" for Connections Blogs (i.e. http://www.bleedyellow.com/blogs), there is a lot going on in the interface. We have tags on the left, recent Blogs postings in the center, and several items on the right side (featured, most recommended/voted/commented/visited). With Blogs, an admin account can use a web interface to modify certain settings, but none of these. With many of the other services, such as Activities, there are specific configuration files in the LotusConnections-config directory for the WAS cell. But there is not a config file here available for Blogs.

So, what if you want to change some of the homepage settings - where do you do this? With a hat-tip to Luis Benitez for the filename to look for, I'll tell you.

On your filesystem, go to <WAS_HOME>\profiles\AppSrv01\installedApps\<CELL_NAME>\Blogs.ear\blogs.war\WEB-INF\classes and you'll find the file there - roller.properties. This is the file you will want to modify. If you scroll down around 75% of the way, you will see a section titled "Settings for homepage display". Let's say you have a small implementation that doesn't get more than a few Blogs postings every 30 days (which is the default number of days to display), and you would like more content to show up on Blogs home. You would change the value for homepage.entriesSince = 30 to be a value you would rather have. We don't have this concern with BleedYellow, but I have noticed that if I don't post for a while that my blog drops off of the Most Visited - there's a homepage.mostVisitedSince parameter here too (though I'm not going to change it haha).

After making the change, you will need to restart the Blogs service and then ctrl-f5 your browser to reload and clear the page cache.

Update: There were some issues with the initial implementation, please remove the original div from the Weblog template and the scripts from the _header template (I've left the information at the bottom of this post) and only use the following information for the implementation. Thanks again to Luis Benitez for code he's used in other implementations.

Thanks to the information that Luis Benitez posted about how to add these buttons to the main header, I thought that I would make this just an opt-in task for Bloggers to implement if they cared to do so.

In order to do this, you have to customize your blog theme. Under your blogs settings, go to Theme and if your theme isn't already listed as "Custom" then click the Customize button. Then you'll want to go into Templates.

Implentation:

In your _day template, locate the line that reads <div class="entryContentContainer"> and modify that line to be the following:

<div class="entryContentContainer; overflow:hidden">

Immediately after that line, add the following section. You will see that I have bolded lotusnut in two spots below. You will want to change that and make it your blog handle so that the code works properly for your blog posts. If you have any suggestions, let me know!

<!-- BEGIN added by Luis Benitez and Chris Whisonant-->

<div style="width: 75px; float: right;"> <div style="clear: both; margin: 0; padding: 5px;">
    #if($model.permalink)

<script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_url = 'http://www.bleedyellow.com/blogs/lotusnut/entry/$entry.anchor?lang=en_us';
tweetmeme_source = 'bleedyellow';
</script>

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="http://www.bleedyellow.com/blogs/entry/$entry-anchor" data-count="vertical" data-via="bleedyellow">Tweet</a>
     
   #else

<script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_url = '$model.getUrlWithLang($entrylink)';
tweetmeme_source = 'bleedyellow';
</script>
<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="$entrylink" data-count="vertical" data-via="bleedyellow">Tweet</a>

    #end

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>

 </div>
 <div style="clear: both; margin: 0; padding: 5px;">
 <g:plusone></g:plusone>
 </div>
 <div style="clear: both; margin: 0; padding: 5px;">

#if($model.permalink)
<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bleedyellow.com%2Fblogs%2Flotusnut%2Fentry%2F$entry.anchor&amp;layout=box_count&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=65&amp;action=like&amp;font=arial&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=65" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:65px; height:65px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

    #else

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=$utils.encode($entrylink)&amp;layout=box_count&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=65&amp;action=like&amp;font=arial&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=65" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:65px; height:65px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

   #end

 </div>
</div>

<!-- END added by Luis Benitez and Chris Whisonant -->

Old Information: This is for those who have added this previously. You will want to back out these changes:

In your Weblog template, right before the line that reads: #showWeblogEntriesPager($pager) you will want to add the following:

<div>
 <div style="float: left; clear: none; padding: 5px; padding-left: 5.5px; padding-right: 5.5px;">
  <a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-via="bleedyellow">Tweet</a>
 </div>
 <div style="float: left; clear: none; padding: 5px; padding-left: 5.5px; padding-right: 5.5px;">
  <g:plusone></g:plusone>
 </div>
 <div style="clear: none; padding: 5px; padding-left: 5.5px; padding-right: 5.5px;">
  <iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?app_id=166725596724792&amp;href=
<%=request.getRequestURL()%>&amp;send=false&amp;layout=button_count&amp;width=75
&amp;show_faces=false&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;font&amp;height=21"
 scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:75px; height:21px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>
 </div>
</div>

In the above code, the bold via="bleedyellow" would be something in the Tweet that is included (something like some Twitter clients that did a "via" instead of "RT" for a while), so you can leave it as =bleedyellow or you can make it your own Twitter name.

And in the _header template, just before the </head> you will want to add the following:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

This will put the buttons in the location you'll see above on my blog post. Also, this will add the buttons at the top of your main blog page so someone can promote your blog and not just a specific post.

It looks like my colleague Ted Hardenburgh gave an extremely helpful session at PACLUG this week. He presented "Two Minute Drills for Administrators" described as "A task or tool that can be used quickly to help an administrator get the job done." There are some very valuable tips in this session - both for the new and seasoned Lotus Administrators! Good stuff Ted!

Last week, Ed Brill blogged about new features coming with Notes Traveler with 8.5.3 and hinted at "Password caching on iOS Traveler Companion?" In checking for updates today, I find that Version 2.0.3 is now available and it "Adds the ability to suppress repeated prompts for the Notes ID password when reading or sending multiple encrypted messages in succession. This feature can be controlled by administrator policy and requires Lotus Notes Traveler server 8.5.2 or greater. (8.5.2.3 or greater is recommended.)" This will be very handy!

With the "upgrade" yesterday from Lotus Connections 2.5 to IBM Connections 3.0.1, there are many new features in the product. I will give you some highlights below, but here are full listings for versions 3.0 and 3.0.1.

Lotus Connections 3.0

• Standalone Forums feature that does not have to be in a Community
• New Settings options so that you can better customize notifications
• Mobile support added for more features (Bookmarks, Communities, Files, Forums, and Wikis) in addition to the previously available Blogs, Activities, and Profiles
• Navigation bar now has drop-downs to save space and give you faster accessibility to the different services (oh, and the documentation on how to modify the nav bar is confusing at best)
• Added security to Activities membership in a Community
• Improved blog post editor, comment moderation, autosave
• There is the ability to Follow Blogs and Communities
• A subcommunity can be added to a Community
• Multiple forums can be added to a Community
• Improved theming for all Community components and more Community Actions available for owners
• Improvements to the My Profile page
• Many improvements to the Home page, Files, and Wikis as well

IBM Connections 3.0.1

• Thankfully you can upgrade direct to 3.0.1 from 2.5!
• A new Ideation Blog is available from within a community. This allows for you to have participants voting for blog posts that are ideas.
• A new Media Gallery for Communities (which may not actually be working here...yet)

Again, thanks for using the site, and we hope that the new features and enhancements will be of benefit to you!

I will post some more info later, but come on over and try it out!

Also, a side note for all of the bloggers, please update your Template/Theme to one of the new stock templates and then apply your changes. It's caused some rendering issues for me.

Also, bloggers here should check out the new options available for your blog where you can see referrers, comments, etc from a more central navigation menu on the left.