Adding IBM Connections Feeds to TweetDeck

Posted on 26 June, 2012 by Andrew Frayling

Here’s a guide on how to add feeds from IBM Connections to TweetDeck which was prompted by this tweet from Bruce Elgort:

I wish I could use TweetDeck to pull in my IBM Connections feeds #in

— Bruce Elgort (@belgort) juni 26, 2012

The basic process is:

1. Identify the IBM Connections feed URL that you want to add
2. Submit the IBM Connections fee URL to FreeMyFeed to create an unauthenticated version of it
3. Create a Twitter account to post the feed to
4. Submit the unauthenticated feed generated from FreeMyFeed in step 2 to twitterfeed and configure twitfereed to post the feed content to the Twitter account created in step 3
5. Add the Twitter account to Tweetdeck

DISCLAIMER: The process requires you to publish content from your IBM Connections implementation and make it public on the Internet. I take no responsibility for you publishing restricted information from your IBM Connections implementation publicly on the Internet. You know your content and if it is sensitive or not, if it’s sensitive don’t make it public.

1. Identify the IBM Connections Feed URL

The feed URLs for status updates are documented in the IBM Connections 3.0.1 Documentation and for this blog post I’m using the feed of all public updates from Lotus Greenhouse which is:

https://greenhouse.lotus.com/news/atom/stories/public

This feed will return the same status updates as the “Discover” section of the “Updates” tab.

For your feed follow the documentation to determine the feed URL that you wish to use and obviously replace “https://greenhouse.lotus.com” with the address of your IBM Connections implementation.

2. Submit the IBM Connections Feed to FreeMyFeed

As most IBM Connections implementations will require authentication the feed needs to be submitted to a service such as FreeMyFeed which will create an unauthenticated version of the IBM Connections feed. Just visit https://freemyfeed.com and supply the feed URL from step 1 and the username and password of your IBM Connections implementation.

3. Create a Twitter Account to Post the Feed to

Rather than posting the IBM Connections status updates to your own Twitter account you probably want to create a new Twitter account so that you (and anyone else that may find it useful) can subscribe to it separately.

4. Submit the FreeMyFeed Feed to twitterfeed

In order to automatically post the status updates to the Twitter account created in step 3 I use the twitterfeed service.

a. Create an account on twitterfeed and select “Create New Feed”
b. Provide a name for your feed, e.g. “IBM Greenhouse” and copy and paste the URL generated by FreeMyFeed in step 2, e.g. “https://freemyfeed.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9ncmVlbmhvdXNlLmxvdHVzLmNvbS9uZXdzL2F0b20vc3Rvcmllcy9wdWJsaWM6OmZyYXlsaW5nYWoxQGNhcmRpZmYuYWMudWs6OlBRcU9NT0NPVUZhQ3JYek5ENmhDTWpvNk1nPT0=”
c. Click “test rss feed” and you should see that the feed is “Active” and that the “Feed parsed OK” as shown below

d. Before moving on to Step 2 of the twitterfeed wizard select the “Advanced Settings” option and change the “Post Content” field to “title only”

e. Continue to Step 2 of the twitterfeed wizard and you should see that the feed has been successfully created:

f. Select the option to connect to Twitter and authenticate the twitterfeed service to the Twitter account created in step 3.
g. Leave the UTM Tags as the defaults, select “Create Service” and you should see:

h. Click “All Done” and “Go to Dashboard”

It can take up to an hour for twitterfeed to start processing feeds, but after a while you should see that it is posting to the Twitter account:

5. Add the Twitter Account to Tweetdeck

Add the account to Tweetdeck, add a column, select to display “Tweets” and select the relevant Twitter account.

Confluence Space Meta Data User Macro

Posted on 3 May, 2012 by Andrew Frayling

As an alternative / addition to the bundled Space Details macro for Confluence:

here’s a simple user macro which displays extra details about a Confluence Space such as number of pages, number of blog posts, total size of attachments, etc. which you may find useful for a Community Management Dashboard:

NB: I couldn’t figure out how to round to 2 decimal places for the attachment size in Velocity without Velocity MathTool, if you know how to do that please drop me a line via the comments

To create the user macro:

1. Login to Confluence as a Confluence Administrator
2. Select Browse -> Confluence Admin
3. Select User Macros -> Create a new user macro
4. Enter the information as provided below:

Template:

## Macro title: Space Meta Data
## Macro has a body: Y or N (N)
## Body processing: Selected body processing option
## Output: Selected output option
##
## Developed by: Andrew Frayling
## Date created: 03/05/2012
## Installed by: <your name>

## Macro to display information such as number of pages, number of blog posts, attachment size, etc. about a Space. 

## @noparams

## Get space details
#set ( $spaceName = $space.getName() )
#set ( $spaceKey = $space.getKey() )
#set ( $spaceHome = $space.getHomePage() )
#set ( $spaceCreator = $space.getCreatorName() )
#set ( $spaceCreationDate = $space.getCreationDate() )
#set ( $spaceDescription = $space.getDescription() )
#set ( $pageCount = $spaceManager.findPageTotal($space) )
#set ( $blogCount = $spaceManager.getNumberOfBlogPosts($space) )

## Get all pages in the current Space
#set ( $allPagesInSpace = $pageManager.getPages($space, true) )

## Reset total attachment file size
#set ( $totalAttachmentFileSizeForSpace = 0 )

## Reset total number of attachments
#set ( $totalAttachmentCount = 0 )

## Loop through all pages in the current Space
#foreach ($page in $allPagesInSpace)
  ## reset the attachment count for each page
  #set ( $pageAttachmentCount = 0 )
  ## reset the attachment file size total for each page
  #set ( $totalFileSizePerPage = 0 )
  ## get the attachments for each page
  #set ( $allAttachments = $page.getAttachments() )
  ## Loop through each attachment
  #foreach ($attachment in $allAttachments)
    ## Increment the attachment count for the page
    #set ( $pageAttachmentCount = $pageAttachmentCount + 1 )
    ## Sum the size of the attachments on the page
    #set ( $totalFileSizePerPage = $totalFileSizePerPage + $attachment.getFileSize() )
  #end
  ## End looping through attachments
  ## Increment total attachment count for the current Space
  #set ( $totalAttachmentCount = $totalAttachmentCount + $pageAttachmentCount )
  ## Sum the total size of attachments for the current Space
  #set ( $totalAttachmentFileSizeForSpace = $totalAttachmentFileSizeForSpace + $totalFileSizePerPage )
#end
## End looping through pages

## Convert attachment size to MBs
#set ( $attachmentSizeMb = ($totalAttachmentFileSizeForSpace / 1024.00) / 1024.00 )

## Display Space Details
<table class="confluenceTable">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <th class="confluenceTh">Name</th>
      <td class="confluenceTd">$spaceName</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <th class="confluenceTh">Key</th>
      <td class="confluenceTd">$spaceKey</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <th class="confluenceTh">Description</th>
      <td class="confluenceTd">$spaceDescription.getBodyAsString()</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <th class="confluenceTh">Home Page</th>
      <td class="confluenceTd">#contentLink2($spaceHome true false)</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <th class="confluenceTh">Created By</th>
      <td class="confluenceTd">#usernameLink($spaceCreator) ($action.dateFormatter.formatDateTime($spaceCreationDate))</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <th class="confluenceTh">Number of Pages</th>
      <td class="confluenceTd">$pageCount</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <th class="confluenceTh">Number of Blog Posts</th>
      <td class="confluenceTd">$blogCount</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <th class="confluenceTh">Number of Attachments</th>
      <td class="confluenceTd">$totalAttachmentCount (including all versions)</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <th class="confluenceTh">Total Size of Attachments</th>
      <td class="confluenceTd">$attachmentSizeMb MB</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>

5. Click Save

You can then use the macro on a page by using:

{spacemeta}

Or select the macro from the Macro Browser via Insert -> Other Macros:

I Hope you find this useful. The source code is available on Bitbucket.

Confluence Space Administrators – Remixed

Posted on 28 April, 2012 by Andrew Frayling

A few weeks ago I blogged about how to write a Confluence user macro to list Space Administrators. The macro works, but is not ideal for implementations with a large user base as it loops through every user to find out if that user can administer the Space or not. This is a new version which loops through the permissions on the current Space and then lists the users and groups that can administer the Space – which should be a lot more performant than the previous version.

General instructions for creating the macro are the same as the previous post, but replace the Template with the following code:

## Macro title: Space Administrators
## Macro has a body: Y or N (N)
## Body processing: Selected body processing option
## Output: Selected output option
##
## Developed by: Andrew Frayling
## Date created: 28/04/2012
## Installed by: <your name>

## Macro to list all users and groups with the permission to administer the current space.
## @noparams

<h1>Space Adminstrators</h1>
<p>The following users and groups have permission to administer the <strong>$space.getName()</strong> Space.</p>

<h2>Users</h2>

<table class="confluenceTable">
  <tr>
    <th class="confluenceTh">Space Administrators</th>
  </tr>

  #foreach ($permission in $space.getPermissions())
    #if ($permission.isUserPermission() && $permission.getType() == "SETSPACEPERMISSIONS")
      <tr>
        <td class="confluenceTd">#usernameLink($permission.getUserName())</td>
      </tr>
    #end
  #end
</table>

<h2>Groups</h2>

#foreach ($permission in $space.getPermissions())
  #if ($permission.isGroupPermission() && $permission.getType() == "SETSPACEPERMISSIONS")
    #set ( $groupString = $permission.getGroup() )
    #set ( $groupObject = $userAccessor.getGroup($groupString) )
    #set ( $memberList = $userAccessor.getMemberNamesAsList($groupObject) )

    <h3>$groupString</h3>
    <table class="confluenceTable">
      <tr>
        <th class="confluenceTh">Space Administrators</th>
      </tr>

      #foreach ($member in $memberList)
        <tr>
          <td class="confluenceTd">#usernameLink($member)</td>
        </tr>
      #end
    </table>
  #end
#end

The macro loops through the permissions twice – once to pick up the users that have been given the administration permission directly, and a second time to pick up users that have inherited the permission by being a member of a group with the permission.

Using this macro will then give you the following:

I hope you find it useful and if there are other ways of improving this macro please drop me a line via the comments.

An Experiment with Dropbox and Google AdWords

Posted on 28 April, 2012 by Andrew Frayling

The other weekend I ran an experiment with Google AdWords to see if I could max out my Dropbox referrals to get an extra 16GB of free storage using my free £75 AdWords voucher. This is the same hack that Vladik Rikhter blogged about back in September 2011; and with a ton of people doing the same following Vladik’s post I wanted to see if it still worked. Short answer: yes it does

For those that don’t know what Dropbox is, it’s an online service for backing up, synching and sharing files and has clients for Web, Windows, OSX, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry. The basic service gives you 2GB of storage for free (with paid plans offering more storage) and you can earn up to an extra 16GB of free storage through referrals (500MB per referral). If you want to sync files to have them available on multiple devices, or want to share files with other people it’s incredibly useful.

I just have the basic plan and had zero referrals before I started the AdWords campaign so needed 32 referrals to reach the 16GB maximum. I ran the campaign over the weekend of 14-15 April 2012, switching it off at around 6am on Monday 16 April 2012, and gained 59 referrals – more than enough for the extra 16GB of free storage.

The Figures

Ad Impressions: 21,141
Click Thru’s: 484
Click Thru Rate: 2.29%
Average Cost Per Click: £0.09
Total Ad Spend: £44.73

From the 484 click thru’s this generated the following numbers:

Total Joined Dropbox: 83
Total Installed Dropbox: 59
Total Ineligible: 1
Abandonment Rate: 28.91% (24 not installed / 83 joined)
Conversion Rate: 12.19% (59 installs / 484 click thru’s)
Cost Per Conversion: £0.79 (£44.73 ad spend / 59 installs)

NB: you only get the referral bonus if someone installs Dropbox after joining.

It’s the first time I’d used AdWords and the stats geek in me found the numbers really interesting. From running this short experiment you can see how online advertising costs could soon mount up and why targeted advertising to help increase that magic “conversion rate” is so appealing.

List Blog Posts Confluence User Macro

Posted on 14 April, 2012 by Andrew Frayling

Following on from my previous post on Creating a Blog Summary Page in Confluence here is a simple user macro which will list all of the blog posts in the current Confluence Space which were posted in the current month and the previous month, grouped by month.

To create the user macro:

1. Login to Confluence as a Confluence Administrator
2. Select Browse -> Confluence Admin
3. Select User Macros -> Create a new user macro
4. Enter the information as provided below:

Template:

## Macro title: List Blog Posts
## Macro has a body: Y or N (N)
## Body processing: Selected body processing option (No macro body)
## Output: Selected output option
##
## Developed by: Andrew Frayling
## Date created: 13/04/2012
## Installed by: <your name>

## Macro to display blog posts for the current and previous months
## @noparams

#set ( $allBlogsInSpace = $pageManager.getBlogPosts($space, true) )

## get a calendar object for the current date
#set ( $currentDate = $action.dateFormatter.getCalendar() )

## Define an array of Month names
#set ( $monthArray = ['January', 'February', 'March', 'April', 'May', 'June', 'July', 'August', 'September', 'October', 'November', 'December'] )

## set the current month
#set ( $currentMonthNum = $currentDate.get(2) )
#set ( $currentMonth = $monthArray.get($currentMonthNum) )

## Display posts for the current month
<h5>$currentMonth</h5>
#foreach($blog in $allBlogsInSpace)
  #if ($blog.getPostingMonth() == $currentMonth)
    #contentLink2($blog, true, false) $blog.getPostingDayOfMonth() $blog.getPostingMonth() $blog.getPostingYear()<br />
  #end
#end

## set the previous month
#set ( $previousMonthNum = $currentDate.get(2) - 1 )
#set ($previousMonth = $monthArray.get($previousMonthNum) )

## Display posts for the previous month
<h5>$previousMonth</h5>
#foreach($blog in $allBlogsInSpace)
  #if ($blog.getPostingMonth() == $previousMonth)
    #contentLink2($blog, true, false) $blog.getPostingDayOfMonth() $blog.getPostingMonth() $blog.getPostingYear()<br />
  #end
#end

5. Click Save

You can then use the macro on a page by using:

{listblogposts}

Or select the macro from the Macro Browser via Insert -> Other Macros:

Adding this macro to my Blog Summary Page it now looks like:

Hope you find this useful. The source code is available on Bitbucket.

Adding IBM Connections Feeds to TweetDeck

1. Identify the IBM Connections Feed URL

2. Submit the IBM Connections Feed to FreeMyFeed

3. Create a Twitter Account to Post the Feed to

4. Submit the FreeMyFeed Feed to twitterfeed

5. Add the Twitter Account to Tweetdeck

Related Links

Confluence Space Meta Data User Macro

Related Links

Confluence Space Administrators – Remixed

Related Links

An Experiment with Dropbox and Google AdWords

The Figures

Related Links

List Blog Posts Confluence User Macro

Related Links