GETTING STARTED
BUILDING A INDEXABLE BLOG
BASED ON MESSAGING CONVERSATION 

You can build a blog using the mydigitalstructure MESSAGING endpoint and AJAX techniques to service the user experience, however search engines, like Google, can not easily index AJAX based content.

This getting started document steps you through creating a fully customisable blog that is both search engine indexable and also supports progressive enhancement for the human user experience.

For Google (or alike) to crawl the blog it needs to be able to follow true http links.

The mydigitalstructure service supports a number of dynamic tags that will we render the HTML content (with links) as required.

A key dynamic tag, for the purpose of indexing, is the "Conversation Post Index" tag.   It creates a simple list that can be used by the search engine to link to each post and thus index its content.

EXAMPLE BLOG 

An example blog can be found at http://mydigitalstructure.com/developwith - it uses two simple documents and a css file.


DOCUMENT DYNAMIC TAGS

Set the document to System Template and Object = Messenger Conversation.

  • Conversation ID
  • Title
  • Owner
  • Created Date
  • Posts Per Page
  • Comments Per Page
  • Posts Total
  • Posts Index
  • Posts
  • Posts Summary - summary of posts by year and month
  • Back URL
  • Forward URL

 

URL TAG PARAMETERS

You can also supply some tag parameters via the URL at the time of rendering;

  • id: - conversation ID
  • start: - start position, for pagination
  • posts: - posts per page
  • search: - search the post subject and body
  • post:p: - post ID
  • subject:s: - search post subject only
  • day:d: - day of the month
  • month:m: - month of the year (eg Jan = 1)
  • year:y: - 4 digit year
  • inlasthours:ilh: - posted in the last X hours

You can specify many using a "," delimiter.

Examples:

If your blog is at url /myblog and want search for posts with OAuth then:

/myblog/search:OAuth

Search for posts in December 2011:

/myblog/y:2011,m:12


POSTS INDEX & POSTS DYNAMIC TAGS

Both these tags support parameters.

For the index tag the URL is key eg /myblog

Both have default div based formatting which can be targetted using css (see example above).  You can also set your own format, by creating a document and then setting its ID as the Template Document parameter.

The template supports the following tags:

  • [[CONVERSATION_POST_ID]]
  • [[CONVERSATION_POST_SUBJECT]]
  • [[CONVERSATION_POST_DATE]]
  • [[CONVERSATION_POST_DATE_TIME]]
  • [[CONVERSATION_POST_MESSAGE]]
  • [[CONVERSATION_POST_MESSAGE_FIRST_PARAGRAPH]]
  • [[CONVERSATION_POST_COMMENT_COUNT]]

 

 

METHODS

MESSAGING Endpoint