Well Ed Brill is finally using a Domino based blog system. He has moved to DominoBlog from Steve Castledine and I have to say that the guys in Precision Systems Concepts have done a great job on the look and feel.

Should Ed / PSC have chosen BlogSphere instead of DominoBlog??? Possibly, but they had to make a choice and I’m sure a lot of discussion went into it. DominoBlog probably came out on top for a number of reasons and I’d guess the main ones are that DominoBlog has better ‘Layout’ control and that BlogSphere is still a beta product. What ever the reason I’m sure they made the best one in their circumstances

Have the Domino Blog Wars started??? I hope not. Both tools have their pros and cons, which one gets used is up to the blogger.

One of the things some web designers invariably forget to do when moving or rearranging a website is to make sure that they don’t break any URL’s that may be pointing to the old site. Nearly every blogging system out there has some sort of permanent link that will always bring you to a specific entry. While you can change all the internal links on your own system there is no way of controlling the links that other sites may have pointing to your own. Lets hope the Ed and PSC have thought about this…

BTW : BlogSphere Beta 4 is now available. Check out BlogSphere.net for the download.

On Friday I was teaching a one day course
about how to combat
spam in a domino infrastructure.
 The course was written by one of my colleagues in Blue
Wave Technology and I have
to say that it’s a really interesting course for both the instructor and
the students.

Lotus ND6 has added a lot of new features
to help in the combat against spam, DNS Black Lists, Server mail rules
and others can all help to reduce the amount of spam the end user receives
however when doing security audits of sites we sometimes find that a lot
of administrators don’t know exactly what all the inbound SMTP settings
mean.  The course is designed to teach the students all about these
settings, how and when to use them and also teach them some of the tricks
of the spammer so that they can educate their users.

If your in the UK/Ireland area and your
interested in attending the course the next time we run it then feel free
to send me an email and I’ll put you in contact with our training manager
for dates and prices etc. I’d really recommend it…
 

I’ve just posted Beta 3 of BlogSphere over on http://www.blogSphere.net. One of the new features that this beta contains is RichText to HTML conversion. This allows posters to post using RichText and when saved the Richtext field is converted into HTML. Converting a simple RichText field is fairly easy however when you have to deal with images it gets a little trickier…

Posted below is the code that I used to do the conversion. It’s not 100% perfect and doesn’t yet account for everything but it works good enough to release…

sub PostSave(source as NotesUIDocument)
dim s as NotesSession
Dim doc as NotesDocument
Dim item As NotesItem
Dim mime As NotesMimeEntity
Dim Permalink As String

set s = NEW NotesSession
s.ConvertMime=False
set doc = source.document
Set item = doc.GetFirstItem("RichTextField")

'Extract The HTML Code From the Rich Text Field

Set mime = item.GetMimeEntity
Set child = mime.GetFirstChildEntity
If child Is Nothing Then
'This is a Single Part Mime Entry
	strHTML = mime.ContentAsText
Else
'This is a Multi Part Mime Entry
	While Not(child Is Nothing)
		If child.ContentSubType="html" Then
			strHTML = strHTML + child.ContentAsText
		End If
		Set child = child.GetNextSibling
	Wend
End If

' replace <img src=CID: with ?OpenElement

count =2   ' Element count starts at 2


permalink = doc.PermaLink(0)

'need a loop to catch all IMG tags
startcheck:
  x = Instr(1,strHTML,"<img src=cid:")
  If x = 0 Then Goto savedoc
  y = Instr(x,strHTML,">")
  NewImg = {<img src="./plinks/}+PermaLink+{/StoryRichText/M}+count+_
{?OpenElement">}
  strHTML = Left(strHTML,x-1) + NewImg + Right(strHTML,Len(strHTML)-(y))
  count = count +1
  Goto startcheck
savedoc:
doc.StoryText = strHTML
Call doc.Save(True,True)

End Sub

Thanks to Julian Robichaux for the LotusScript to HTML converter

Earlier on during the week I was teaching the R4 to R6 Admin Upgrade course to a client that had recently upgraded to R6.01. One of the topics that was covered was Password Recovery, so we went through the motions, setup the recovery info in the Certifier ID and then exported it out to the student’s ID files and then I got one of them to forget their password and I showed them how to recover a password.

Today I was in visiting the client and they told me that they had started receiving backup ID files however they had NOT exported the recovery info to all their existing users for the simple reason that they do not use Lotus Notes for email and therefore the users would not have been able to receive the email and accept it into their ID files. So how did the users get the recovery information into their ID files…