John Muller of IBM put together a step-by-step video showing you how you can add a YouTube widget to your My developerWorks Connections Blog... and the 7:43 runtime is well spent.

Great video for those of you looking to extend your Connections-based weblogs and add whatever Google gadget -- not limited to YouTube -- you'd like!

I've been playing around with Jott later - which allows me to dial into a (free to setup and use) account, and either leave myself a simple message or send that message to one of my contacts. The coolest part - it doesn't send an audio clip of my voicemail, but rather transcribes (and pretty damned accurately I might add) your message into text.

It's pretty slick, and something that I've been using to take mental notes over the past few days.

Today - while playing around - I saw that you have the ability to basically create a contact in Jott that is basically a conduit to a Web Service! This means, with the addition of a few Domino Design Elements, I could easily create an alternate publishing source for content on this 'blog.

The Jott Developers Guide gives a pretty simple overview of exactly how this is done, and it looks like it will allow integration with any HTTP POST-enabed solution (and thankfully Domino allows POST!).

I'll play around with this over the next few days - around some major data architecture tweaks to Match Maker to get it juuuuuuuuuuuuust right - and report back my findings, as well as some code, for those interested.

After many conversations with people like Nathan, Declan, and my soon-to-be-mentioned co-author on this project (which will be open source and available to the community - it's all about the show!) - I realized that I was taking the wrong approach with thinking that Web Services could do what I needed it to do. What I need to do, for the content management system that I have in mind, is facilitate the ATOM Publishing Protocol (or APP) via REST - that's full support of the POST, GET, PUT, and DELETE methods.

This of course, we know that the Domino HTTP Server won't allow - and now I know that this includes no matter what you say in the Internet Site Document.

I tested this by creating a simple HTML file, consisting of 4 Form objects - each with the POST, GET, PUT, and DELETE methods respectively - that used an Agent Design Element as their posting agent. The Agent Design Element, called "rest_test" for my examples, would simply run a session and return the submission method and some other information via plain text Printing.

The result - well, POST worked fine. GET worked fine. PUT and DELETE were translated to GET method calls. Now, the translation wouldn't bother me so much... but it's seamless. Too seamless. I don't know that the original request was via PUT/DELETE. If you consider what this means...

PUT and DELETE are methods that are designed to modify their target object - update and removal respectively. Such requests are returned as GET - which is designed to fetch an object. Sure, data can be passed along to that object (to Domino developers, think ?EditDocument, ?OpenAgent, QueryString parameters, et al). But that ain't gonna work for what I'm looking to do.

So, after many discussions with my co-author, I think we've got a plan. It's a solid plan. It's a righteous plan. And it's something that will invariably allow extended functionality far beyond the scope of "yet another Domino Blogging template". We're going to a full-on, true REST-compliant content management engine.

More details to follow...

I'm going to make an assumption here: the majority of Notes Shops have not upgraded to 8.0.1 yet, and when 8.5 rolls out, they won't be upgrading to that immediately either.

I say that, because I know several companies who are planning to upgrade... but that plan has yet to be executed. So I'm going to assume that the 2 or 3 companies that I'm referring to aren't the only ones out there in the same situation.

I bring this up, because it was suggested by someone that I honestly respect (although I would never let him know that) that this new blogging template should utilize XPages for what I'm looking to do for the content management and delivery architecture.

Now, while I'll agree that XPages rock - I really want the majority of the Notes community to be able to adopt this solution. On the other hand, I want to be able to showcase something that's currently available to the majority of us but that might not be utilized.

So I'm thinking about doing this template all Web Services. Is that something that you use today? I know I don't. And I think that this is the perfect place for it.

So I plan on implementing the Blogger API into this template and adhering to it for all CMS-like functionality - all via Web Services. While I'm not ready at this point to get into all of the reasons why, I really plan on utilizing Web Services (which I'm going to make another assumption and say that we're not all using them in our day-to-day development) to do this as it will showcase an excellent built-in facility that can be found in more than the latest releases of the product, as well as outside of Domino Development.

So, that's the tentative plan - thoughts?