What is the best way to discover blog posts by label

[Joshua Thompson]

This question relates to Confluence 5.1.3 download version with the documentation theme.

In our organisation we have a number of blog posts targeted primarily at developer users of our Confluence instance. My problem is that older blog posts start to get lost after a few months. I try to label blog posts according to topic (e.g. Java, Hibernate, Database, etc) but it requires me to write a page for that topic and include a "blost posts" macro filtered by that label.

The Browse > Blogs section isn't very useful beyond finding the last few blogs. I want discovery to be automatic so I want to be able to have a central blog post page that allows easy discovery of existing content.

E.g. For blog posts in the given space, give me a list of labels used and the count of blog posts which contain that category. This immediately tells me what topics are regularly blogged about and should hopefully allow me to follow a "content by label" link to find those blog posts for topics I am interested in.

Is there an out-of-the-box solution for this? Alternatively, what is my next best bet? Can this be done with a user macro?

[Renjith Pillai]

How about using feed builder https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Using+the+RSS+Feed+Builder and filtering only for blog posts and required labels? (and may be use a browser extension to load that into your browser)

[Joshua Thompson]

It's a cool feature that I hadn't played with too much before but again doesn't help me.

1. My problem is of content discovery. In my use case people don't know what labels they are interested in. I want to show them popular labels, exclusive to blogs, and then they can seek out the content they are interested based on a summary of the content in the system.
2. My problem is more around historical information. The RSS feed is useful for aggregating or reducing exposure to new content but that is not my problem. I want to help people discover older existing content and there isn't an easy way to find it.

[Guilherme Nedel [Atlassian]]

Hello Joshua

You can use a combination with tools to achieve the desired results, with Label Tools, you may suggest labels according to the predicted categorization to users, that will help to tidy up the content.

Simultaneouly using Confluence Advanced Macros to have a macro view of the current label usage, for example using the following:

• {recently-used-labels}- List the labels that have been used recently.

There are other helpful features such as Popular Labels and Related Labels. Further details can be seen at the Advanced Macros documentation home.

[Joshua Thompson]

Cheers for the tip but I've already tried all of those macro's and they don't really do what I want.

The are a few problems,

1. We blog in a space that also has normal page content. When you click on a label you get a large list of content but there isn't an easy way to see which are pages and which are blog posts. The list page on label/<space>/<label> uses screen real estate quite poorly as it takes up 3 lines but only provides title, date, author and labels. This could easily be placed on two lines and provide more information. I want to be able to filter and only show the blogs with that label.
2. There is no way to discover which labels have been blogged about in a mixed space containing blogs and content. If I create a Popular Labels heatmap (which is pretty good in itself) it shows labels across all content types. I don't want to have to move all my blogs into a separate space to the content so that I can summarize it's content more accurately. It would be hugely useful if many of the label macros could be filtered by content type.