IBM Lotus Technical Information and Education Weblog, Facebook Fan Boxes, and customizing Lotus Connections!

12/17/2009 06:53 PM by Chris Toohey

I've been working again with Joyce Davis on the new Lotus Technical Information and Education Team Blog on IBM Lotus Greenhouse to create a more fun and functional user experience for the community. So far, we've added the Yahoo! Media Player (mentioned here).

Today, I added a Fan Box from the LTIEC Facebook Fan Page... which -- like the Yahoo Media Player -- was easy to do once you know how to modify a Lotus Connections Blog Template...

I simply went to the My Blogs (I am an author of the LTIEC Team Blog; membership has it's privileges!) and went into the Settings and selected the Edit option for the Weblog Template:

From here, it was a matter of finding the particular location where I could insert the JavaScript-based Facebook Fan Box. For the LTIEC Team Blog, we went with the top-right column:

... and entered the following markup:

<div id="facebook_fanbox">
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://connect.facebook.com/js/api_lib/v0.4/FeatureLoader.js.php/en_US ">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">FB.init("38cc8bac1ff12f60195f9fb2574ffd 76");</script>
<fb:fan profile_id="46376367191" stream="" connections="" width="300"></fb:fan>
</div>

Pretty simple really -- and it's something that you can even add to your own Blogs (even Lotus Connections-based blogs, as you can see) -- to help spread the word beyond the yellow bubble!

For those of you curious, we added the Yahoo Media Player markup (which will allow you to click-and-play any linked mp3 file directly from the website or, on the bottom-left, expand a playlist-fed audio dashboard) to the _footer Template. The idea was simple really: call the remote script that didn't require direct placement (such as the Facebook Fan Box) below all of the content. We do this in case the remote JS library is -- for whatever reason -- unable to load. This way, the page content loads successfully while the call to the JavaScript Library times out.

Would you like to see anything else on the Lotus Technical Information and Education Team Blog? If so, feel free to leave a comment on this post or email me your suggestion!