Case Studies: Weblog Entry Details
July 7, 2003
some Approaches to Blogging in bridge (Posted by Con at 3:39 p.m.)
The kind of blog I want for the SBD/Case Studies site needs to support the time sequencing and archiving of a normal blog site, but it also needs to support the simple, wiki-like abilities of Bridge. In particular links and includes to other parts of the site need to be easy to to. I looked at external blog tools and found themn wanting.
The blog I want for the SBD/Case Studies site needs to be able to:
- Support all the major entrapments of a blog to create a time-sequenced list of entries
- Support for archiving of entries
- Seamlessly include all the wiki-like features of Bridge including linking to or including other objects in the Bridge environment
I tried an external blog editor to see if this would work. There are many obstacles to this apporach, but many of them can be worked (eg, consistent navigation presentation, consistent look and feel, ease of generating new posts, etc.) The major benefit is the ease of managing an creating new posts. The major obstacle is the difficulty in creating a consistent look and feel (this takes a lot of HTML effort) and the impossibility of embedding simple references to other objects in the site. The latter required either excellent knowledge of where the web pages would exist in the bridge site or hard coded references to pages on the site. Overall, the ability to generate a nice web page from simple editing tools was totally lost in a morasse of HTML. With a compatible editor, these issues may be lessened, but there will always be a limitation to how well the blog integrates with the rest of the environment.
After much trial and testing effort, I went back to a manual construct within the Bridge environment. This requires careful copying and editing of web objects, but it is entirely doable. It also points the way to a simple blog paradigm for Bridge. My plan is to work this way for a while and see what other issues come up. The next step is to generate a design for a Bridge blog tool.
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