Blogging Roller

I mentioned that I've got a new job at Sun and it begins Monday, so I guess it's time to explain.

Since I joined Sun two years ago I've been working in the .Sun Engineering organization, the team that runs sun.com and blogs.sun.com. In that time we've taken Roller through three major releases, made massive improvements to the Roller code-base, helped grow the Roller community at Apache and delivered new features and improvements on a monthly basis. It's been a truly wonderful experience and I've learned a lot from Will Snow's amazing team, but now that Roller has matured and stabilized I'm ready to start working in some new directions.

On Monday I'll move to the Java EE organization (under Tony Ng) where Sun's working on some very interesting and very cool technologies from server-side scripting with Phobos and JRuby on Rails, RESTful approaches to web services and client-side UI goodness with JMaki. I'm very excited about the move and getting a chance to get involved with those technologies, but I can't talk yet about the specific product(s) I'll be working on. I can say this: I'll continue to be very closely involved with Roller development and I'll continue my work with RSS/Atom, ROME and the Blogapps project. And, of course, I'll continue blogging Roller so stay tuned.

• rc3.org: Predictions for 2007
  Web applications, spam, web advertising, decentralized communication for weblogs
• Wired News: Legal Predictions for 2007
  "Courts will finally have to deal with the growing use of licenses and terms of service that change default computer access, free speech and copyright rules"
• Enterprise 2.0: Ten Predictions for 2007
  "web applications like blogs and wikis are just the beginning of the Enterprise 2.0 story..."
• Steve Anglin: 2006 Java Technology Winners and Losers
  In the comments: Eclipse is "leaking air and marketshare to increasingly popular NetBeans"
• Southeast VC: Predictions 2007 - 1/2
  "The Year of Apple; Investment Opportunities Emerge Around Search and Filtering Tools"
• Southeast VC: Predictions 2007 - 2/2
  "Tech IPO Market Returns; Web 2.0 Takes on Real Definition and the Internet Emerges as a Replacement for TV"
• Portals and KM: Enterprise 2.0 Predictions for 2007
  "platforms that deliver apps for blogging, wiki creation, and social networking within a single framework"
• Web 2.0 Predictions for 2007 - The RSS Blog
  Randy's list of 2007 predictions and links to some some other interesting lists
• Wired News: Wild Predictions for a Wired 2007
  25 predictions from the Wired News Staff
• 5 Disruptive Technologies To Watch In 2007 - InformationWeek
  "including RFID, advanced graphics, and virtualization"

Placeblogger is a new blog and aggregation site that's all about local blogging from Lisa Williams and friends. It's powered by Bryte, which is based on the Drupal content management system and offers blogs, feed aggregations, photo galleries and polls.

You can help build the database by submitting your favorite place blogs. The database supports a number of different "blog types." You can add aggregations, so Joe's local planets would be suitable, and you can add community sites so Orange Politics would fit right in too. I submitted Raleighing.

Here's some more reading on the topic:

• Wired: Get Your Local Fix
• Jay Rosen: Check out Placeblogger.com

Dear Digg.com,

I'm one of the developers of the Apache Roller (incubating) software used by Sun and IBM and others for employee blogging. Our users want to be able to post via Digg.com, but your MetaWeblog API support is lacking.

Roller is not one of the blog servers listed in the Digg Profile area, so we have to use the "manual setup" option, but in manual setup option, you give users the abilty to set only:
- username
- password
- blog URL
- Metaweblog API URL

That won't work. Each of our users can have multiple blogs, so Digg.com needs to tell Roller which blog to post to. The standard way to do that is to use the blogid argument of the MetaWeblog API, but you don't support that -- you don't give users a way to set the blogid to be posted to.

Please add proper support for the MetaWeblog API blogid field so Roller users can blog via Digg.

I'd be glad to help you get this right and tested.

Sincerely, Dave Johnson

PS. I sent this to feedback@digg.com in September but got no response at all.

PPS. If you want the problem to be fixed, please Digg this post. I'm not sure it'll work, but don't know how else to get through to the folks at Digg.

Rich has put together a interesting blogapp that pulls all entries from a blog and turns them into a book, using either cups2pdf or OpenOffice.org Writer. I had the same idea when I was writing RSS and Atom in Action, but I was going to go the DocBook route and eventually dropped the idea because DocBook seemed a bit too complex.

I don't think Rich's work is Roller-specific. Rich used Grabber to get the entries out of Roller and into simple HTML files, so the approach should work with other blog servers that support the MetaWeblog API.

The North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, Saturday, January 20, 2007. This is a free, open and public event for scientists, educators, students, journalists, bloggers and anyone interested in discussing science communication, education and literacy on the Web.

See Bora's blog for an update on sessions, sponsors and ways you can help.

Paul Murphy: By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community - and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure, the core provisions in the community development license, and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.

That's a nice way to start the new year. No doubt plenty of Sun bloggers will be linking to Paul's predictions.

I've been too busy with year-end projects to blog over the past couple of days and now suddenly, it's time to say farewell to 2006. So I'll do that with a quick summary of the year.

2006 was a pretty good year for me. I published my first book: RSS and Atom in Action. Roller is still growing, reached 3.0 status and is now very close to becoming a top level Apache project. IBM started contributing to and announced a Web 2.0 product suite that will include Roller. I did my first solo JavaOne presentation and spoke at both ApacheCon EU and ApacheCon US. And, I haven't mentioned it yet, but I also landed a new job inside Sun, which starts on January 8th (more about that later).

On the home-front: the boys (now 4, 8 and 10) are all healthy, happy and doing well in school. We celebrated my dad's 70th birthday and Alex's 10th birthday. We took family trips to Ocracoke, Atlanta, Austin, Northern Virginia and made numerous visits to the in-laws beach house near Topsail Island. Plus, Andi and I escaped from the kids for a week in Ireland to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary -- our first kidless vacation in about ten years.

I hope you had a good year too and will have an even better 2007. Happy new years!

Joe Gregorio announces a new Atom Publishing Protocol Spec (draft #12) and he says it might end up being the final. I guess it's time for a new Blogapps release with APP draft #12 and ROME 0.9 support.

Plus, Joe has put together a set of new planet sites for towns in the Charlotte, NC area; all based on feeds from Google Base, Google Blogs, Google News, Craigs List, Flickr and the Weather Service. The sites look useful, but the ads combined with the minimalist design make them look a little spammy on first glance. Perhaps a short "about this site" paragraph is in order.

The Smithsonian Air & Space Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles airport is simply amazing. The center "provides enough space for the Smithsonian to display the thousands of aviation and sapce artifacts  that cannot be exhibited on the National Mall." I could have spent a lot more time there, but not everybody in the family shares my fascination with air, space and military history.

Here's a mosaic I created from some of the photos I uploaded to my Flickr account (I used Mosaic Maker to put this together).

We opened presents in Chapel Hill on Xmas eve, at home in Raleigh on Xmas day and then drove up to Northern Virginia for one last round of paper ripping, twisty-tie unfastening and worship of the one deity that really matters to the kids: the good lord Lego. Lego ruled christmas here again and this year, for our kids the holy trinity is Lego, Star Wars and the Cars movie.

Lego's hegemony over the Johnson playroom has some history. Long time readers may remember the Jack Stone incident. Jack Stone has been replaced by a series of increasingly complex Lego Star Wars vehicles for the older boys and an oddly intense Lego Boba and Jango Fett fetish on the part of our four year old. And Lego is also serving as a gateway-drug -- Alex (10) got Lego Mindstorms earlier this month and has been spending hours building bots and some pretty complex programs.

I had to include the Cars movie in the holy trinity because Leo eats, sleeps and drinks it now. I'm almost too embarrassed to admit that he's got Cars movie plastic cars, die-cast metal cars, carrying case, models, pajamas, a blanket (known as fuzzy), socks, shoes, underwear and pull-ups -- but no Cars movie Legos (yet).

I got a couple of nice gifts too. As usual my brother gave me some user-generated content; his year he put together a wonderful CD full of about 30 Who covers. I also got a couple of books: Innovation Happens Elsewhere and The Innovators Dilemma.

We'll be in the Northern Virginia area for the next couple of days. After a short pilgrimage to the Lego store today we'll head over to the new Air & Space museum at Dulles airport. Tomorrow, we're expecting good weather so we'll head down to DC to check out the National Mall.

Here's a little video gem I found while working on our annual video review DVD; a little spontaneous singing and cuteness from the kids on Christmas eve last year. It's my first YouTube upload:

I'm glad I was able to help Simon get his personal planet back online yesterday. And I'm glad the task was fairly easy. All Simon needed as a new version of Blogapps PlanetTool updated to use ROME 0.9 and I was planning on doing that anyway.

What's PlanetTool you wonder? PlanetTool is a command-line program which reads a set of RSS/Atom newsfeeds and then uses a set of templates to generate a planet site with HTML, RSS, Atom, OPML and other representations. Simon uses it to bring together his personal blog, Sun blog, del.icio.us links and Flickr.com photos into a single webpage and a single feed. If you subscribe to that feed, you'll get just about everything that Simon publishes to the web.

If you're interested in learning more about PlanetTool, here are some of my previous posts on the topic:

• Try PlanetTool, it's easy!
  
• ROME + Texen = PlanetTool 
• PlanetTool internals
• It's also covered in Chapter 11 of RSS and Atom in Action.
  

The above title Try PlanetTool, it's easy! is a little misleading, but it brings me to my point. PlanetTool is only easy if you're a developer or a power-user; somebody who can handle running Java on a server, editing an XML config file and setting up a cron job. Simon could handle it, but I'd like to make planets easier.

In fact, I'd like to make it as easy to create a planet as it is to create a blog. This past week, I've been thinking about how to do that by taking the simple ROME powered Roller-Planet code, which is found in both Roller and PlanetTool, and build it into a multi-user planet server -- kinda like Roller, but for planets instead of blogs. To get my thoughts into digital form I worked up a little FreeMind mind-map on the topic, dumped it to text, added some wiki syntax and some screen-shots. The result is this: a RollerPlanetMindMap that outlines ideas for the future development of Roller-Planet.

Isn't the USPTO supposed to run at least a quick check for prior art before granting a patent? I guess the answer is no hope the answer is yes because Microsoft has filed for and apparently was awarded a patent on something called a "content syndication platform" for which there is (and was at the time of filing) a giant amount of prior art. 

The two key claims on the patent application on the USPTO site seem to be #1:

A system comprising: one or more computer-readable media; computer-readable instructions on the one or more computer-readable media which, when executed, implement: an RSS platform that is configured to receive and process RSS data in one or more formats; and code means configured to enable different types of applications to access RSS data that has been received and processed by the RSS platform.

Sounds like a feed reader, like Net-News-Wire, News-Fire, Feed Bandit , Feed Daemon, PlanetPlanet, Radio Userland, O'Reilly Meercat, etc. etc. All of which existed before Microsoft started prowling around RSS.

And the other is #10:

A system comprising: one or more computer-readable media; a set of APIs embodied on the computer-readable media, the set of APIs comprising one or more methods that enable at least one application to access RSS data that has been processed and stored in a feed store; and wherein said at least one application does not understand an RSS format in which the RSS data was originally embodied.

Now we're talking about a feed parser, which parses all formats of feeds and presents to a programmer in an abstract way. You know, like the Universal Feed Parser, ROME and the Jakarta Feed Parser, which again, all existed well before Microsoft started working with RSS and Atom technologies.

Some of the guys listed on the patent are Microsoft bloggers, so perhaps Sean, Walter and the other Microsoft Team RSS bloggers can explain how Microsoft can claim to have invented the RSS feed reader and RSS feed parser.

Via John Robb's blog. Dave Winer has posted about it too.

Update: Niall Kennedy has posted an excellent In depth analysis of Microsoft's patent claim that explains that the patent has not yet been awarded, digs into each of Microsoft's claims and discusses the prior art.

• Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use - LinuxWorld
  #6 Atom API: "it's rapidly displacing proprietary blogging and posting APIs"
• Atomic Firefox add-on
  "An Atom protocol client for creating and manipulating Atom feeds (e.g. blogs)"
• eXist: Open Source Native XML Database
  "eXist is an Open Source native XML database featuring efficient, index-based XQuery processing"
• eXist DB: Atom Publishing Protocol Support
  Intro to APP and it's use in the eXist native XML database
• Atom API for AOL Journals
  "Journals exposes a very complete API for creating and managing blogs, entries, and comments. "

I was tagged by Sam. Sure, I'll play along. Here's five things you probably don't know about me:

1. Apart from software developer, the only other job I've ever had is free-lance scientific illustrator working with pen and ink on a drafting table.
2. I play bass guitar (for some definition of "play") and once performed in a Grateful Dead cover band.
   
3. I lost my wedding ring in one of the hundreds of little pools in Dunns River Falls and amazingly enough, a couple of reward-seeking snorklers were able to find it about an hour later.
   
4. I was a serious trekkie and once shaved part of my hair to have a more Captain Kirk-like hair-line.
5. I lived in Haslingfield, England for a year when I was 9 and I remember those radio telescopes well. 

I'm tagging Raible, Noniko, Skrocki, Josh and Mike.

There's still time to get those proposals in. I ended up submitting three proposals for technical sessions related to RSS/Atom and one for a Roller birds-of-a-feather (BOF) session.

Here's the link to submit proposals: http://www.cplan.com/sun/javaone07/cfp.

If you dig blogs, wikis, feeds, Java and Solaris then you might be interested in the fact that we're hiring. Linda Skrocki's got the scoop on the job opening in Sun's Community Software Engineering team.

The 2007 JavaOne Conference is May 8th-May 11th and this is the perfect forum to share your technology expertise at Sun's Worldwide Developer Conference.  This year, the conference is being expanded so that while Java is at the core, with a significant emphasis on Java ME, SE and EE, there will be ample opportunity to present your technology or ideas in such areas as open source & community development (which includes Java, OpenSolaris, OpenOffice and others), next generation web or "web 2.0" technologies, web services and platform integration, consumer technologies and how to leverage Java and other technologies for businesses (including start-ups).

So if you have a hot topic, specific tips or tricks that you believe will help developers, then please go to http://www.cplan.com/sun/javaone07/cfp and submit your session abstract.