Embedded Lotus Connections Dogears - Get your BleedYellow.com DogEars on your site!

01/26/2008 08:29 AM by Chris Toohey

Sometimes reading the directions can really helps!

I'm starting to use the DogEar functionality in the Lotus Connections-based BleedYellow.com, when I thought it would be a pretty good idea to have those of us bloggers who don't happen to use the Connections-based blogging engine still display our Dogear'ed content. Thankfully, the Lotus Connections API is both documented and the functionality that I'm looking to achieve was already accounted for in the Dogear Search API!

The following line of JavaScript:

<script src="http://www.bleedyellow.com/dogear/lisnippet?lang=en&email=email"></script>

... returns the following markup (I have only Dogear'ed one item at the time of this publishing):

<ul class="doglinks">
 <li class="doglink last">
  <a class="dogtitle"
href="http://www.bleedyellow.com/dogear/jsclick?link=B60GC0A8A72CFC2661422E86805 B4F00027A"
title="Theo has a brilliant idea for a new feature at next years Lotusphere...">
   Theo's Blog - "Meet the Bloggers" lounge at LS09 ?
  </a>
   <ul class="dogdata">
    <li class="dogearauthor">
     <a href="http://www.bleedyellow.com/dogear/html?email=email">
      Chris Toohey
     </a>
    </li>
    <li class="dogeartags">
     <a href="http://www.bleedyellow.com/dogear/html?email=email&tag=lotusp here">
      lotusphere
     </a>
    </li>
   </ul>
 </li>
</ul>


Apply some whip-snazzy CSS to the generated markup, and you've got a pretty slick usage of out-of-the-box functionality.

Gotta love when it's this simple!

- Updated -

If you like the UI of the above widget, simply add the following two lines to either the header or in-line in your markup:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="http://www.dominoguru.com/dogears.css">
<script src="http://www.bleedyellow.com/dogear/lisnippet?lang=en&email=email"></script>