I made some modifications to my configuration of blojsom, which powers this blog. I had wanted to make the permalink URLs work without query parameters, and also thought it would be kind for the main RSS feeds of this site to include only an excerpt of each blog entry rather than the whole shebang.

I was able to use the PermalinkFilter posted in Chris Nokleberg's fizzy weblog entry on the blojsom Permalink Filter. Chris wrote this filter, and I made one modification to it that I will pass on to him, that I consider a bug fix (though it maybe is only a feature change).

I acutally discovered this when I came across a description of it in David Czarnecki's Blog entry on the Ultimate Weblogging System outline and blojsom. David is the author of blojsom. I found out about David's blog from Erik's Weblog which is a site I try to skim that always has links to interesting things in the world of Java, mobile, and other fun things.

I also wrote my own plugin to blojsom that is a permalink converter plugin--it makes the permalinks on this page appear in the form I want. It just takes permalink query strings that look like blog/?permalink=asdasd.html and cuts out the query part so that it ends up like blog/asdasd.html.

I am going to clean up my code and offer it to the blojsom folks, but I actually want to suggest that they make the permalink URIs more directly configurable. My plug-in is just a hack of blojsom in that it takes a generated URI and chops it up. Then, this combines with Chris' hack which takes the chopped up URI and turns it back into the equivalent of ?permalink=. Might be nicer to just have a feature in blojsom itself for all of this.

I had to do some other little fixes to deal with old URLs on this site, which I accomplished with another servlet filter. Servlet filters are very handy--it is hard to remember how I did stuff like this in Java before I had them.

I also have this excerpter for the RSS feeds (the "show me more" blojsom plugin) and the main feeds will only give you 500 characters of each entry. I also now have separate links on the right to full content entries, in case you (still) would like those.

One thing I notice about the excerpts is that it breaks my XHTML that shows up in the RSS feed. I know there is a lot of debate about HTML in RSS feeds, but I am trying to keep my code on this site at least at transitional XHTML 1.0, and so the full RSS feeds should be valid XML. But, the excerpted entries can cut-off end tags.

So, I am thinking about experimenting with an HTML TIDY plugin for blojsom, as there is a Java version.

I still need to figure out the blog archive in blojsom. The calendar is not displaying the days of my oldest entries in May, and I don't like the calendar interface that much anyway. I also need to clean up the templates for comments and trackback, which I haven't done yet.

Having said all that, I think blojsom is really great! With the iCite prototypes, I will be building it to work closely with blojsom so that my blog entries automatically turn into iCites and/or entries in iCites. Also, although I am a little mystified by Velocity which I am using in blojsom (which can alternatively use JSP, but the Velocity code looked like it was easier to work with), I am enjoying getting a feeling for it.

I am currently evaluating interface-engine options for the iCite prototype, and am thinking about both Velocity and Caucho Resin XTP (eXtensible Template Pages) (since my site is running on resin). Both of these engines have neat template ways of taking XML and rendering it, which could be a big part of making the prototype usable enough for people to get into it.