Box.net

218779 Resource 76096 24 1 1227490263898 1232487951655 Controlled Blogsite and Box: A Great Authoring and Document Publishing Combination

Box.net provides a unique set of tools for authoring and sharing documents. Integrating and using these tools with Blogsite is very easy.

I've been playing with <a title="Box.net" href="http://box.net/" target="_blank">Box.net</a>, a similar idea to <a title="Google Docs" href="http://google.com/docs" target="_blank">Google Docs</a>, with the hope that their online authoring tools provide relatively clean HTML. I recently provided a similar set of <a title="Google Docs as your Blogsite Authoring Platform" href="item/210785">guideposts</a> for Google Docs and there's a complete overview in this support knowledge base article (<a href="http://support.blogsite.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=84">Google Docs as Your Authoring Platform</a>).The post was authored in Box with its integrated <a title="Box WebDoc" href="http://www.box.net/services/web_documents" target="_blank">WebDoc</a> service using Internet Explorer 7, and it was easily copied into the Blogsite editor without any formatting issues. This makes it a good alternative for online authoring in a system that can also preserve each post as a backup document. With an upgraded Box account, you can also track versions of your document changes.Tips for Using Box<ul><li>Enable the WebDoc service in your Box account. This is done by logging in and selecting the <a href="http://www.box.net/services" target="_blank">OpenBox</a> option in the Settings area. </li><li>Organize your posts in your Box account with folders; this will make it easier to backup, share, and find stuff later on. </li><li>Avoid lots of special text formatting - keep your posts simple and clean. </li><li>When copying your content to the Blogsite editor, be sure to select the Preview tab in the WebDoc application before selecting the text to copy. The preview tab presents your document with complete formatting tags such as paragraph elements. </li><li>Use Internet Explorer 7 for maximum benefit. IE7 automatically includes paragraph tags and this will make your content format itself more consistently. </li></ul>Box.net Issues<ul><li>WebDoc embedded links do not support alt tags to describe the links. This is not ideal for best SEO performance. As such, consider adding links after you've copied the content to the Blogsite editor, then copy the final version back to the Box WebDoc before finally saving. </li><li>Formatting text in WebDoc is a little less intuitive compared to Google Docs [and of course Microsoft Word]. This is not likely to be a significant issue since your posts should be web-safe - i.e., focus on the content, and avoid heavy-handed formatting. </li></ul>Other Features...In addition to some nice collaboration features which are far simpler to understand than the Google Docs user interface, Box provides pervasive access to document and folder updates via RSS. As such, it's possible to easily integrate document access via inbound syndicated feeds. The share and collaboration features are also very useful and easy to understand. Another very useful capability is to utilize embedded iFrame code to insert the Box UI into any web page, blog post, or web application. This makes it possible to selectively share certain document collections (based on folders) and publish access to documents with very little effort. Documents presented in this way are always up to date and include new additions to the folder.Using the integration code provided for each folder (see the Share This Folder in the upper right of the folder display in Box) is achieved with an HTML Captyc Component which I used to demonstrate with a folder collection of MyST whitepapers shown below. 9 application/xml false blogsite authoring box.net document sharing Box.net Store Here, Access Anywhere http://box.net Consider Google Docs as an Authoring Platform | MyST Blogsite® This is an approach that allows you to manage your authored content in the cloud with Google Docs. item/210785 <embed src="http://www.box.net/static/flash/box_explorer.swf?widgetHash=7z4p7sotbe&v=1" width="500" height="300" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed> Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.43 Safari/525.19 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 $Admin 76.120.52.24 false true false false true 174050 false false true false false false true 76096 blog blogsite/Blogsite/web