Blogger.com's updated Atom Protocol support

I'm supposed to be wrapping up Blogs, Wikis, and Feeds In Action, Chapter 14 (Blog Your Build Process) today, but instead I've been experimenting with Blogger.com's updated support for the Atom Protocol (via Robert Sarye). Looks like they have changed at least a couple of things since the last time I tried it:

  • WSSE authentication is gone, replaced by BASIC HTTP authentication over HTTPS
  • Individual entries are now returned as <entry> documents rather than a <feed> wrapping an entry

I haven't updated Roller or BlogClient's Atom support to match. I think I'll wait until the Atom Protocol list arrives at consensus on collection handling.

AIM Terms of Service

AIM Terms of Service: "Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses. "
So, basically, don't say anything on AIM that you would not like to see displayed on the jumbotron or (perhaps, someday) re-enacted on Time Warner's new AIM-dialog based reality TV show.

Netbeans 4: Wow... absolutely smashing

Joseph B. Ottinger: So far... "Wow" and "Well, it's okay."

I found the installation to be a breeze, which isn't too much of a surprise. It found the various JVMs on my machine, including 1.5, which was good, I suppose.

It looks absolutely smashing. (That's good.) The development pane is easy to understand at first glance, also good (although note that I'm not a rank newbie to Netbeans, so my prior experience may factor in here.) It's pretty fast, too, which is good to see. Maybe this will help shut up the SWT hordes.

Lately, I've been working on making the switch to Netbeans 4.X (I'm using both 4.0 and 4.1-beta). My expectations were pretty low due to my past experience with Netbeans 3.X, but Netbeans 4.X is great. It's a whole new IDE, the Ant integration is awesome, and 4.1 adds the refactoring I need to make the switch. Plus, it's fast. I have to agree with Charles Ditzel, the tables have turned and now both Netbeans (and IDEA) seem to be faster and more responsive than Eclipse.

Unfortunately, my Eclipse addiction is still not entirely under control. The one area that needs work in both IDEA and Netbeans is the source-code control integration, I still have to fire up Eclipse when I need to synchronize with the CVS repository. I feel like I'm flying blind without Team Synchronization view.

DataDirect blogs

I just noticed, DataDirect (based here in Raleigh) has blogs -- ok, just one, but it's a start.

re: Why RSS?

Bora Zivkovic: When I went and checked out the latest Blog Reader Survey responses , one thing that caught my eye is how few people use RSS (and presumably other feeds) to check on blogs. And I think that is wonderful. People have their bookmarks and blogrolls and they surf and browse and go from one blog to the next though the link to another and yet another blog "by hand" and who knows where they'll end up. That is how I do it and I love it. If you check the updates on your aggregator of choice, all you get are the same opinions by the same people you liked three years ago.
Bora: that's crazy. I would never have read your blog entry if not for my newsreader and your Atom newsfeed. There is simply no way that I can follow the blogs I want to follow without a newsreader. I still surf around occasionally, but mostly just to find interesting new newsfeeds (like yours).

W2100z

You know what I like about my Sun Java Workstation W2100z?

Full rebuild of Roller: 15 seconds
Tomcat/Roller start-up: 6 seconds

Raleigh/Cary Blogger Meet-up, Tuesday March 15, 2003

Josh has the details on the last meet-up. We're going to do it again next week, same bat time same bat channel.

Time: 6:30PM
Date: Tuesday March 15, 2005
Location: Cafe Cyclo, Cameron Village, Raleigh

Integrated Planet Roller ready for testing

I've been working like mad to wrap up the Planet Roller UI and finally, it's ready for testing. I'm so confident in the code, that I even deployed it (and latest CVS Roller 1.1-dev) to this site. You can see the new aggregated main page in action here:

Main page - http://rollerweblogger.org/planet.do

RSS 2.0 feed - http://rollerweblogger.org/planetrss

As you can see, there is now a Technorati rankings bar that complements the Hot Blogs list, since Hot Blogs only works for the on-site blogs. I included a bunch of Roller-related blogs in the aggregator. If you blog about Roller and you'd like to be included in (or excluded from) the aggregator, let me know.

Update: some Planet Roller usage/testing notes are on the wiki (with screenshots).


Right on Chapel Hill!

My hometown makes me proud and activist bloggers played a part From the News and Observer:

CHAPEL HILL -- They swooped in by the busload to the town they said was filled with "dead churches" that "disregard the Bible," hoping to win over some sinners.

"I came here because I love Chapel Hill," said the Rev. Ron Wood, pastor of Celebration Assembly of God on Weaver Dairy Road and a member of the anti-gay-rights group Called 2 Action.

"I'm an ordained minister, too," he added, referring to several speakers at the Town Council meeting Monday who identified themselves as clergy members. "But I'm not one who believes I have the right to disregard the word of God."

Their message was rejected by the majority of Chapel Hillians who met them at Town Hall with signs, T-shirts and buttons proclaiming their support for gay rights.


IBM blogging with Roller

I'm not sure how many of the reported 2,800 internal blogs at IBM are running Roller, but it's pretty clear that the blog in the screenshot is a Roller based blog. I've heard from multiple sources that they're running a forked version of Roller (looks to me like circa 0.9.7). It's time to upgrade to 1.0 guys and join the fun on the Roller dev-list. We'd love to see your mods.

Raleigh/Cary Blogger Meet-up

Josh has the details. I'll be there. I hope Josh, Grace, David and others will be there too. Come join us at 6:30PM at Cafe Cyclo, Cameron Village in Raleigh, NC.


RSS and Atom books due out in 2005

Danny Ayers lists some of the RSS and Atom related books coming out this year. Don't forget Blogs, Wikis, and Feeds In Action, which is due out in July.

Return of The Art of .war

Patrick Peak's been off writing Hibernate Quickly for Manning, but now he's back with a slick new Roller theme. He's written a nice couple of posts attempting to debunk some of the Ruby hysteria that's been infecting Java bloggers of late.


XSL transform for OPML to Planet Roller config

Here is an XSL transform for converting a flat OPML file (like those produced by PlanetPlanet sites), to a Roller Planet config file (with all subscriptions in one group): opml2planet.xsl

First Planet Roller win

Planet SST has converted from PlanetPlanet to Planet Roller. OK, so "Students and former students of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute" is not a big planet, but it is a start.

Try planet-tool, it's easy!

Planet Roller is a community aggregator, a tool for creating a website that combines related but separately hosted blogs together into one blog with it's own newsfeed. Planet Roller will eventually be part of Roller, but for the upcoming Roller 1.1 release it's in the Roller "sandbox" and will only be available in custom builds. There's also a standalone verion of Planet Roller, which I'll describe below.

Here's some status. I spent most of the week creating the infrastructure needed for configuring and running Planet Roller inside of Roller. That means storing the subscription and group configuration in a database, rather than an XML file. And, it means doing aggregation via a database query rather than spinning through a bunch of hashtables. Once I'm done, we'll have a custom-build of Roller that puts every Roller blog on the system into the aggregator and allows us to add separately blogs into the mix.

Want to try Planet Roller? I've been testing a standalone command-line version of Planet Roller, which I call Planet Tool, by running a site called Triangle Bloggers, which combines a bunch of local blogs in the Raleigh-Durham area. So, one way to try Planet Roller is to visit that site and subscribe to the feed. Triangle Bloggers has been a good testing experience because I've been forced to deal with a wide variety of Atom and RSS feeds. Planet Tool can handle Atom and just about any form of RSS, as long as it has item level publication dates (i.e. must be RSS 0.93 or later).

If you want to try running Planet Tool and creating your own aggregated blog, you can get the tool here: planet-roller-1.1-dev.tar (source is included). If you have Java installed, all you need to do is download it, un-tar it (with tar or Winzip), open a command window, and either run planet-tool.sh or plannet-tool.bat. It reads an XML config file and then generates the HTML and XML files needed for an aggregated blog. To keep your aggregated blog up to date, you'll need to run Planet Tool on a schedule, so run it as a cron job or as a Window Scheduled Task.

For more information on the config file and on page templates see this blog entry:
Rome + Texen = Planet Roller

For more information on how Planet Tool works:
Planet Roller Internals


Syracuseblog.com

Though they don't admit it anywhere on their site, Syracuseblog.com is power by Roller.

Leo's leave taking behavior

You can't say goodbye to Leo without going through this routine:

Hug
Kiss
Bunny nose
High five
Low five
Tickle five

It's a little inconvenient at pre-school drop off, but I love it.


Roller@Apache?

We the committers and friends of the open source Roller Weblogger project propose that the project become part of the Apache Software Foundation. The rest of this document explains the rationale behind this proposal, how Roller meets the Apache project scope, initial source, resources required, and initial committer criteria. [Read More]

Big IDEA: multi-author blogs soon, please?

PubSub scoops Technorati and Feedster again, this time with a short review and another request for multi-author blog support in Roller. In part:

Big IDEA: from Zane State College’s IDEA Center: Wow, I’m impressed with Roller. A brief rundown of some of the plusses:
  • configurable editor interfaces–plain, WYSIWYG (java, IE-only and Mozilla-only)
  • timed availability of comments (enable for n days)
  • enable/disable comments (per-post or blog-wide)
  • nice blogroll import from OPML
  • bookmark import
  • create static pages–the link is created for you and added to the main navigation for you blog
  • per-user themes
  • spell check
  • new user registration
  • rss: site-wide, per-blog, and per-category
Maybe WordPress MultiUser is really the way to go. I used the regular WP for a class blog previously and liked having the multi-author blog. But I also really like Roller now; maybe the developers will add multi-author blogs soon.

« Previous page | Main | Next page »