Windows RSS platform answerman


Congrats to Niall Kennedy, formerly the Technorati community manager, who has accepted a job with Microsoft to work on RSS/Atom platform technologies. This is great news for all unless it means an end to the Om and Niall PodSessions.

Window RSS platform answers


As I was researching my chapter on the Windows RSS platform for RSS and Atom in Action I came up with a list of questions based on the IE7 previews. Scoble hooked me up with Walter VonKoch, who kindly answered them all. Read on [Read More]

Today's links [April 10, 2006]

JBoss sanitized blogs before aquisition?


Back in 2004 I linked to a blog post authored by JBoss exec Mark Fleury that called Red Hat "open source wannabes" and "girly men." According to my referrers, people are looking for that old post using those keywords. Apparently, they're not finding it because it's been removed (but not from the Google Cache Wayback Machine). I wonder why.

Some news


First, Mark Pilgrim is blogging again. He said he'd return when hell froze over or Rogers switched to Atom. Fortunately for us, hell froze over (i.e. Bootcamp) and Rogers made the switch.

Second, Microsoft has kindly answered my questions about the Feeds API. I was wrong; they were just too busy to answer sooner.

Third, Raleigh's own Red Hat is aquiring JBoss. I always knew they'd start doing some Java stuff someday.

And finally, of course, there was that stuff last week about our president being the source of the leaks he supposedly hates so much, but we already knew that so big woop.

ROME chapter complete


Over the weekend I finished the second of two new chapters I promised for RSS and Atom in Action. The first one covered Windows RSS. The one I finished late last night is the new Chapter 7 on "The ROME newsfeed utilities." Here's the outline:
  • Introducing ROME
    • How ROME works
      • The SyndFeed model
      • Parsers, generators and converters
      • The parsing process
      • The generation process
    • ROME limitations
    • The ROME subprojects
  • Parsing newsfeeds  with ROME
    • Parsing to the SyndFeed model
    • Parsing funky RSS
      • How to handle Dublin Core
      • How to handle <content:encoded>
    • Parsing to the RSS model
    • Parsing to the Atom model
  • Fetching newsfeed with ROME
    • How the ROME Fetcher works
    • Using the ROME fetcher
  • Generating newsfeeds with ROME
  • Extending ROME
    • The ROME plug-in architecture
    • Adding new modules to ROME
    • Overriding ROME
  • Summary
I also updated the book's example code, which you can find on Java.Net here: http://blogapps.dev.java.net.

New layout on Roller project blog


There's a new layout on the Roller project blog, which uses Roller built-in Planet aggregator to display blogs from Roller committers, wiki changes, and recent issues.

Things that need fixing in the MS Feeds API


Here's what I think Microsoft should fix in the Windows RSS Feeds API:
  • Support feed and item ids. The item.id property does not reflect the RSS <guid> or Atom <id> of the item/entry in the original feed. Plus, it's an integer -- not the right type for a URN. If you want to get the actual feed or item/entry id you have to parse the XML. Make it easy to get the real id if there is one
  • Item objects should have description and content fields. Currently, the object model can't completely repesent Atom, Wordpress style RSS or Typepad style RSS -- they have both description and content elements. So, add description and content and get the mappings (and content model) right for Atom, plus regular, funky and 1.0 style RSS.
  • Allow parsing of feeds from file system. Apparently, you can only parse a feed named by URL and you can't parse feeds on your hard disk. That can't be right. Make it possible to subscribe to and parse feeds from the file-system.
  • Cough up a spec for the Common Feed Format extensions. The normalized format used to store all feeds includes some new elements in the same namespace as the Simple List Extensions (SLX), but they're not mentioned in the SLX spec. Fix that.
Tags: topic:[ie7], topic:[rss], topic:[atom], topic:[vista]

Escape from JRoller


Roller doesn't yet provide a blog export facility, but you can do just about anything with Roller templates if you know what you're doing. For example, Debashish Chakrabarty explains how to use Roller templates to generate the RSS required to move a blog from Roller to Wordpress. He was able to get all of his blog entries and all comments out of JRoller.com this way, he imported his entries to his new Wordpress blog, but he couldn't find a way to import the comments.

Raleigh bloggers meetup tonight at Cafe Cyclo


As Josh points out, a US congressman showed up at our last meetup. Which local blognitary could it be this time? John Edwards? Maybe Mark Pilgrim will appear to announce his return to blogging. Or maybe it'll be Dr. Jim Goodnight, who'll ask how to get his employees blogging about SAS Institute products (did you hear the news?) instead of IBM ones.

TS-1756


JavaOne sessions have been scheduled. I'm speaking on Tuesday at 11AM, a much better time slot than last year when Patrick, Kevin and I were stuck with a lunch-time slot on the last day for our Beyond Blogging session.

    Session Id: TS-1756
    Session Title: Java™ Technology and REST: Implementing the Atom Protocol
    Track: XML and Web Services; Web Tier
    Room: Esplanade 301
    Date: 16-MAY-06
    Start Time: 11:00

In related news, I also submitted two proposals for ApacheCon EU 2006 in Dublin.

Roller on Sun Java Web Server 6.1


Seema Alevoor explains in great detail how to install Roller on the Sun Java Web Server.

Roller on OC4J (again)


Tom Stroobants figured out how to get Roller working on OC4J -- something I'd done once before, but I wasn't able to offer much help because that was almost four years ago and painful memories fade fast.

Cone of silence


I mentioned that Scoble had hooked me up with Sean Lyndersay and Walter VonKoch of the Windows RSS team and they had offered to help out with questions about the Windows RSS platform. Unfortunately that's not working out. I sent in a list of questions last week and despite continued prodding of all parties, I can no longer penetrate the cone of silence or even get a response. Oh well. I'm not sure if I blew it with my FeedsManager.Bastardize() post, they're afraid of talking to a "competitor" or they just don't have any good answers for those questions. I'll get over it. I'll post the questions here later and hope for a (highly unlikely) lazy-web response.

Update: The cone of silence was apparently a cone of extreme busy-ness.  Check my newer post Windows RSS answers for Q&A with the RSS team.

Back to the grind

We just returned from a most excellent spring-break trip down to Georgia for some sight-seeing in Atlanta and a family re-union in Callaway Gardens. I had hoped to get some serious work done on my ROME chapter, which is due Wednesday, but that didn't work out so well. I did get some work done, but I'm definitely gonna blow my deadline. That's OK, I had fun instead. The kids did too. We did the new Georgia Aquarium, which was incredibly crowded but well worth the effort. The next day, the kids managed to sit still through the Cyclorama, which you'll find interesting even if you have only a passing interest in Civil War history. We also had a wonderful dinner at Mu Lan with my parents, thanks in part to little Leo, who slept right through dinner.

Callaway Gardens was beautiful and the villa we picked was the perfect spot for a small family reunion and multi-birthday celebration -- we celebrated my dad's 70th, my grandmother's 90th birthday and others. We visited the butterfly house, the vegetable gardens and then I ducked out on the birds of prey show to get some work done. We also pored over a small mountain of unsorted memorabilia and most of the items pictured on this page about my great great great grandfather James Mason.

Now it's back to the grind. The ROME chapter is a little more difficult that I had thought as I'm finding some deficiencies in ROME (some are my fault) and fighting an overwhelming urge to fix them or at least document them in depth.

Roller 2.2 coming soon


We're on the third release candidate now, so expect Apache Roller 2.2 (incubating) real soon now. There's a What's New doc on the Roller wiki in case you're wondering what's coming up.

Today's links [March 27, 2006]

Mutli-domain support in Roller?

Trygve Lie on the roller-dev list: We have spent a lot of time evaluating (almost one year now) different blog software and we also have one installation of your largest competitors running (Drupal, which we are not happy with) as an pilot and we have found Roller to be way ahead of all other blog solutions out there when it comes to technical architecture. But, no blog solution has this multi domain support. I think such a support would be a benefit for a whole new set of Roller users (and possible contributors).
I totally agree. Unfortunately, getting big changes into an open source project is difficult when you have no committers on the project (and the current committers have other pressing priorities), but I think Trygve and the team from LinPro AS are taking the right approach. I want to encourage them to work with the Roller community to make this work. Even if this specific multi-domain implementation doesn't end up in the Roller core, we'll all benefit from this discussion.

Blojsom 3.0


For Blojsom 3.0, David Czarnecki is injecting a Hibernate backend into the codebase via Spring and working to keep the easy-install in place. It should be very interesting to watch his progress.

Grazin' Roller OPML


Your Roller bookmarks are available in OPML format. That means you can graze them at Grazr.com. Your URLs look like this:
    http://<hostname>/roller/flavor/<username>?flavor=opml&path=<path>

So, for example, you can see all of my bookmarks here:
    http://rollerweblogger.org/flavor/roller?flavor=opml
    (or view them in grazr.com)

And my blogroll is here:
    http://rollerweblogger.org/flavor/roller?flavor=opml&path=/Blogroll
    (or view it in grazr.com)

Tags: topic:[opml], topic:[blogging]

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