Domino BlogSphere V3 :: Calendar Sideblock

Category Enhancement
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It's taken a bit of extra time but the final part of 3.0.1 Beta 6 is now ready and is visible here in the sidebar of this blog. It's the all new calendar sideblock.

Blogsphere V1 & V2 also had a calendar sideblock but it worked very differently from the new version. In the old version a calendar document with the pregenerated html code was created everytime a blog entry was saved. This added extra time onto the end of the save routines and it could be noticed when you blog started getting lots of entries that it took longer and longer to process the calendar document.

In BlogSphere V3 I decided to rewrite the calendar sideblock and turn it into a dynamically generated sideblock that would be generated on the fly when a user visits your site. This adds some immediate benefits such as being able to translate the calendar headings into the language of the visiting browser and also being able to generate calendars for previous months.

Using the ProtoType Javascript library that is already used by BlogSphere for the Web Poll function I then decided that it would be better to make the calendar into an AJAX calendar so that the page can load and display to the user while the calendar is being generated by the server. This means I can also have forward and back buttons on the calendar to view other months without having to reload the entire page.

Check it out, I think you'll like it :-)

Comments

1 - Very nice. This just keeps getting better all the time :)

Posted by Joe Litton At 09:45:42 PM On 02/26/2007 | - Website - |

2 - Great job. The first time that I move back a month it took a little longer to load. After I wrote this I tried it again and it took really long. As in, it is still going after I wrote these two sentences. My other suggestion would be to keep the size there so things are not shifting around as much.

Posted by Chad Schelfhout At 10:33:38 PM On 02/26/2007 | - Website - |

3 - Hear I am again trying to recreate the slow performance and now I am unable to recreate it.

So what ever you did or did not do it fixed the problem because I can not recreate it.

Posted by Chad Schelfhout At 10:55:00 PM On 02/26/2007 | - Website - |

4 - I might have adjusted the view that does the lookups to detect if a date has a blog entry or not, it might have been reindexing in the background when you first tried it.

Posted by Declan Lynch At 10:56:57 PM On 02/26/2007 | - Website - |

5 - Great, glad it was simple.

Posted by Chad Schelfhout At 11:00:42 PM On 02/26/2007 | - Website - |

6 - Nice implementation.

Thought you'd want to know, the nav links at the top for "Prev|Main|Next" seem wonky. For example, the next link looks like "<$BSNextEntryTitle$>»" and its url like "...bsphere.nsf/<$BSNextEntryPermalink$>"

Posted by Andrew Barker At 09:04:41 AM On 02/27/2007 | - Website - |

7 - Dec,

Noticing that when clicking on a day with entries (indicated in the calendar), unless it's all the way back to October, I get a 'Nothing to display' result back in the left (main content) area.

For instance, Jan 9th, Nov 2nd, 3rd, 8th...

Seems a little strange that the calendar returns to the current month even if you used it to navigate to a previous month, but this may just be working as you intend it...

All could be a result of you tweaking it as we speak...just noticing stuff...great job so far!

Posted by Phil Randolph At 10:01:14 AM On 02/27/2007 | - Website - |