Put your Blog Navigator on a stick!

On how to make Blog Navigator store it’s data on a USB dongle or wherever you want it to be.

I’ve seen some requests recently to make Blog Navigator run from a flash dongle or any mobile drives in our newsgroups lately. I was not quite comfortable with the inability to change the storage path by the user myself for a while, not to say that the data is stored in a wrong place, on the contrary, this default behavior does not change. But to make it confined to a Local Application Data folder was a bit too harsh. for my taste.

So, for Blog Navigator 1.2, I went ahead and made it totally customizable for the user to define where does he/she want to store the files. Currently there are 3 definable folders in Blog Navigator:

<repositoryFolder> is the place that Blog Navigator stores its repository to it’s the file that contains all the knowledge and articles stored in your Blog Navigator
<keepSafeFolder> is the folder that will be the default folder for keepsafed articles, unless the user defines differently globally in the Blog Navigator preferences or locally for a particular folder, and finally
<temporaryFolder> this is pretty much where all the dynamically generated stuff goes, it’s the Blog Navigator working folder.

Blog Navigator supports a number of variables for definition of those paths to cover the most common scenarios it’s going to use, namely:

%LocalAppData%\ – this is the default way – application data is stored in the Local Application Data folder, separately for each user. Mind that if you’re logging into an NT Domain (or Active Directory based domain) this folder will NOT follow you within the domain as you log into other computers. Your blog set will only be available on this computer and will not be a part of the mobile profile. If you’re not logging into an NT domain choosing this variable over the next one has no meaning. The sample storage.manifest can look like this:
```
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<Storage>

	<repositoryFolder>%LocalAppData%\Stardock\Blog Navigator\</repositoryFolder>
	<keepSafeFolder>%LocalAppData%\Stardock\Blog Navigator\KeepSafe\</keepSafeFolder>
	<temporaryFolder>%LocalAppData%\Stardock\Blog Navigator\Temporary Files\</temporaryFolder>

</Storage>
```
%AppData%\ – this specifies that application data is to be stored in the mobile profile Application Data folder, separately for each user. With this setting if you’re logging into an NT Domain (or Active Directory based domain) this folder WILL follow you within the domain as you log into other computers. Your blog set will be available on any computer you log into and will be a part of the mobile profile. Of course this blog set will be used on the other computers as long as Blog Navigator storage.manifest file is configured on them the same way If you’re not logging into an NT domain choosing this variable over the previous one has no meaning. The sample storage.manifest can look like this:
```
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>

<Storage>
	<repositoryFolder>%AppData%\Stardock\Blog Navigator\</repositoryFolder>
	<keepSafeFolder>%AppData%\Stardock\Blog Navigator\KeepSafe\</keepSafeFolder>
	<temporaryFolder>%AppData%\Stardock\Blog Navigator\Temporary Files\</temporaryFolder>

</Storage>
```
%AllUsersAppData%\ – the regular Application Data folder, common for all users. You can use this variable if you want to share your feeds and keepsafes among all users that can log in to this computer, this setting works the same regardless whether you’re login into an NT domain or not. All users logged in to the computer will have the same level of control over the repository. The sample storage.manifest will look like this:
```
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<Storage>
	<repositoryFolder>%LocalAppData%\Stardock\Blog Navigator\</repositoryFolder>
	<keepSafeFolder>%LocalAppData%\Stardock\Blog Navigator\KeepSafe\</keepSafeFolder>
	<temporaryFolder>%LocalAppData%\Stardock\Blog Navigator\Temporary Files\</temporaryFolder>
</Storage>
```
.\ – yes, a dot and a slash, this tells Blog Navigator to store your files in the same folder as the application folder, this is THE way to put Blog Navigator on a USB drive. All files will be stored in a sub folder to the folder in which the Blog Navigator executable files are located. The storage.manifest should probably look along the lines of:
```
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<Storage>
	<repositoryFolder>.\Stardock\Blog Navigator\</repositoryFolder>
	<keepSafeFolder>.\Stardock\Blog Navigator\KeepSafe\</keepSafeFolder>
	<temporaryFolder>.\Stardock\Blog Navigator\Temporary Files\</temporaryFolder>
</Storage>
```

any hard-coded path you may think of…

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<Storage>
	<repositoryFolder>C:\Stardock\Blog Navigator\</repositoryFolder>
	<keepSafeFolder>C:\Stardock\Blog Navigator\KeepSafe\</keepSafeFolder>
	<temporaryFolder>C:\Stardock\Blog Navigator\Temporary Files\</temporaryFolder>
</Storage>

The storage manifest located in the Blog Navigator folder contains all the options with all but the default commented out, you can either copy and paste the code from this article or simply uncomment the section you want to use. Remember about commenting out the section you want to disable. You can only have one storage behavior enabled at this time.

That’s pretty much it, the customization of the storage folder is really pretty simple and quite possible right now.

If you are an administrator or want to brand Blog Navigator for your site (if you’re not, you may want to consider, it’s free and it’s a great oportunity to promote your site) and want to customize that behavior, you can simply install Blog Navigator to your system, modify the storage.manifest and make an installer again out of the files stored in the Blog Navigator folder.

Get your news syndicated, the way you want, anywhere, any time. Put your knowledge repository on a dongle and make your favorites mobile!

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This entry (Permalink) was posted on Monday, May 16th, 2005 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Blog Navigator, Blogging, Web applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.