Work on this blogging tool

It would be really nice if the blog name could be displayed for the posts in the All Blogs view. It is confusing the way it is now; the titles are like "Notes from meeting", but there is no way to tell what blog or project it is referring to.

The new 1.9.3 upgrade zip is waiting on your desktop. A cursory look suggests that there may not be any files in it in which we've made changes, but each one will have to be checked manually for customizations in our install tree, before we overwrite them.

A list of the three most useful bookmarklets would be handy in the sidebar (perhaps below the "Actions" section. The links would provide direct access to each of the handy-dandy reports:
What have I done today
List my outstanding tasks
List my overdue tasks

As of now, the CSS updates to the front- and back- ends are pretty much finished. The few things that I wanted to adjust are too painful to deal with (they'd need PHP hacked to accommodate minuscule aesthetic goals) so I'll leave them to the following task.

The Task:
Respond to CSS bug reports for the two parts of the blog (front end and back end).

I found a post which had no title when working on my rss display on the hcmc site. http://hcmc.uvic.ca/blogs/index.php?blog=28&p=901&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 It looks odd in that context, and I'm sure similar title-less posts will look odd in other contexts within the blog, so should trap for an empty or nothing-but-whitespace value in the title field when the user tried to submit a post.

Follow up information. Thank you for creating the blog. I will post the initial announcement below.

The opening description:

Welcome to our research collective!

In the fall of 2006 we set out to develop a network of people from the Faculty of Humanities who are using or are interested in using CMC (Computer Mediated Communication). At the moment, we are about a dozen people representing six departments and the HCMC sharing experience and research on creating new learning environments and communities.

We use this blog for announcements and discussions. We also like to extend the invitation to new members to join us!

The Netlink IDs: "Claire Carlin" ccarlin@uvic.ca, "Catherine Caws" ccaws@uvic.ca "MC Desforges" desforge@uvic.ca "Scott Gerrity" sgerrity@uvic.ca "Suzanne Gessner" gessner@uvic.ca "Li-Shih Huang" lshuang@uvic.ca "John Lutz" jlutz@uvic.ca "Mathy Ritchiie" mritchie@uvic.ca "Julia Rochtchina" rjulia@uvic.ca "Ulf Schuetze" ulfs@uvic.ca "Ray Siemens"‚ siemens@uvic.ca "Karen Tang" Karent@uvic.ca "Gerlinde Weimer-Stuckmann" gweimer@uvic.ca Helga Thorson: Email: helgathorson@gmail.com

The Announcements:

1. Next meeting: Wednesday, Feb 28th, 2007 at 6:30 p.m. at Martin's Pub/Place (3838 Cadboro Bay: in the little village down the hill) We have booked the upstairs room.

Checking the blogs from the new URL (hcmc.uvic.ca/blogs/) everything seems to be working fine. I did notice that there's a very minor display issue with the titles. When a blog doesn't have a subtitle (such as the All blog), the title bar is narrower, causing the search box to hand down outside the bar. I've rather cheekily assigned this as a task to Greg to fix, since he's the CSS guru for the blogs.

I would like to open a blog for the upcoming Humanities Project Showcase. I am treating the showcase like a project, and think that there will be sufficient posts to warrant its own stream. Announcements will originate from here, and I may welcome faculty to participate in discussion items. Most of the faculty involved are tech savvy already (to one extent or another), and they may actually use it. Also, Ali, Greg and Ehsan will be involved in the Showcase, and having them participate here will introduce them to the blogging tool, too.

Completed Feb 7: Using the report URLs and bookmarklets to manage my work, I notice that although it's handy to see the full list of my outstanding tasks, it's not as useful as it might be because they're not sorted by their deadline date; in other words, it's not easy to see which are most urgent. This ought to be an option in the drop-down on the HCMC Stats page.

Also, "HCMC Stats" should actually be "HCMC Reports"; although you can use that functionality to generate stats, it's primarily a report-generating tool.

Trackbacks and pingbacks are a pain, and we don't need/want/use them. Turn them off.

The place(s) to edit this and other defaults:
/inc/CONTROL/collections/blogs.php (lines 165-178)
/inc/MODEL/collections/_blog.funcs.php (lines 51-73)

NOTE: I'm going to work on this as part of the deployment of 1.9.2 rather than in the current version. If anyone wants to take this task and complete it on 1.8, go right ahead.

NOTE: I believe this is now done.