Wednesday, February 1, 2012

[xpost] Scribefire and Lotus Connections

[This article was originally posted to my IBM internal blog]

A while ago I wrote up a description of how to configure the Scribefire blog publishing tool to work with Lotus Connections. At that time it was necessary to manually specify the service URL and the API type, but in the meantime Lotus Connections has fixed the way that it identifies itself to tools like Scribefire so that now you simply need to provide the URL of your blog (if you are using the IBM internal deployment be sure to use the https:// version of the blog URL) and your username/password - all other parameters will automatically default to the correct values.

However, there is another issue that people will find when using Scribefire with Lotus Connections. It is not really a bug as such, but it is very annoying nevertheless.

When I configure Scribefire to publish to a blog hosted on wordpress.com, the tool automatically configures all of the blogs that I have write access to on this platform. This is actually quite a convenient feature and in any case it only takes me a few moments to delete the small number of blogs that I don't actively contribute to. However, in Lotus Connections, newly created communities get a blog by default and by default all members of the community have write access to the blog. I am a member of a huge number of communities on the IBM internal deployment of Lotus Connections (I am sure this is quite typical for most employees, especially since you can be added to the membership of a community without having to even give your proposal). As a result when I tried to add my personal blog to my scribefire configuration, I ended up with several pages of blogs added to my list of blogs on Scribefire and I had to scroll down 6 times to find the one blog that I was likely to want to publish to.

I have tried removing the blogs that I don't use from my Scribefire configuration, but this is a tedious task since I need to remove them one by one and Scribefire asks me for confirmation each time. I wonder if anyone knows an easy way to remove several blogs from my configuration?

2 comments:

  1. Hi Brian, Thanks for this post. Have you found a fix for this issue yet?

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  2. @Jonathan - sorry I just noticed your comment.
    Unfortunately I didn't find a good solution for this issue, I simply work around it by manually deleting all of the blogs that I never contribute to from my configuration.

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