Russell Beattie

Niel Eyde has updated his struts-based Personal Blog!

PersonalBlog is a light-weight personal blogging application that is suitable for installing on your own host provider. It's written in JAVA and uses a variety of J2EE technologies, including: servlets, jsp, jdbc, struts and tiles.

PersonalBlog is a Struts/Tiles implementation of MiniBlog, which is a pure-jsp blogging application. My motivation for creating PersonalBlog was that MiniBlog was difficult to enhance and customize because all the code and presentation logic was jumbled into a handfull of jsp pages. By using Struts, the application logic is neatly tucked away from the presentation logic. By using Tiles, the various sections of the user interface can be maintained independently.

Noteworthy Features:

1. Completely Web-based Weblog - All functions are accessed using a web-browser. No external tools are required.
2. Entries Maintanance - Weblog entries can be added, deleted and editted
3. Built-in WYSIWYG HTML Editor (for Internet Explorer users) - A browser based html editor makes adding/editting entries easy. If you don't use IE, then an alternate form-based entry editor is included.
4. Weblog-Entry Permalinks - Provides each weblog entry a specific url that others can link to
5. Comments - Visitors to your weblog can leave comments on your entries and read other visitor's comments.
6. Text Search - All entries can be searched using keywords.
7. Security - Access is controlled by a login page
8. PDA Friendly Access- At the same time, a lite version of your weblog is available that is suitable for AvantGo channel and Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE). (example)
9. Weblog Categories/Topics - By configuring the category titles and icons in a properties file, each entry can be associated with one or more categories. Visitors can view your posts by category too.
10. RSS Syndication - All your entries are exposed as an RSS Feed (example). Independent category specific RSS deeds are also exposed.

Nice Job Niel! Honestly, I should think about scrapping MiniBlog and installing this bad boy. Many of these features are things that are on my to do list... I like the Category Icons by way of Erik too. Very neat.

-Russ