Blogging Roller

I've been digging into Part II of the book and making great progress. So far, I've written three of the "blog app" chapters. Recall that these are short chapters, each centered on an interesting blog application written in Java or C#. I did a blog app chapter about the Planet Tool aggregator, one about searching and monitoring blogs with newsfeed search engines, and one about a Cross Poster in C#. The Cross Poster is like Ben Hammersley's one, except mine handles both RSS and Atom feeds and can post to any MetaWeblog API based blog server (Ben's only does Movable Type).

Now I'm working on a pair of blog apps called MailBlogger (blogging via email) and BlogMailer (which sends you a daily digest of your favorite blogs via email). This stuff is really easy on the Java-side thanks to JavaMail and ROME. On the C#/.NET side: it's .NOT so easy.

Where is the .NET analog to JavaMail? As far as I can tell, the .NET class libraries support only SMTP and the free alternatives are pretty weak, especially when you compare them to JavaMail. I ended up using Pawel Lesnikowski's open source Mail Namespace for C#, which is what .NET blogging package Das Blog uses for POP3 support.

And where is the .NET equivalent to ROME? ROME is an active and growing open source product that can parse all newsfeed formats. On the .NET side there are two separate free parser projects, one for RSS and one for Atom, and both appear to be dead. I hope that is not the case because I need those libraries. For the Java blog apps, I can rely on ROME. For the .NET blog apps, I may have to use my own System.XML based parser.

By the way, I had to make some patches to RSS.Net (adding in W3CDateTime) to get it to parse dates properly.

I recently got the news that the book, or some portion thereof, will be released in the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP). That means we're gearing up for production right now. Getting the promotional stuff ready (for example), deciding which funky Manning dude goes on a cover, and putting the early chapters through production even though the book is not quite done. So, when will the book be done? I'm not sure. We have to wait for Atom Protocol to wrap up, but you'll be able to get the early chapters via MEAP in the next month or two.

I thought Technorati just stopped charging for search. Wasn't that just the other day?

Tim Bray says Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub should be charging for the invaluable service they offer to those interesting in searching and monitoring the blogosphere. Sounds reasonable, but I think a for-fee business model is going to work about as well as a no-fee business model. That is, it ain't gonna fly. Newsfeed reader software will support it, but users won't go for it. So, whats going to happen to these guys? I think the newsfeed search services are going to be bought out or pushed out of the way when the big boys (Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo) start indexing feeds and offering subscription results in feed format (this year?).

I mentioned some time before that the Italian newspaper la Repubblica.it is using Roller for it's comments-enabled reporter and columnists blogs (for example Estremo Occidente, and see the blogroll for more). They also seem to be running, or at least in affiliation with, a site called Kataweb.it which hosts a bunch of Roller-based blogs including one devoted to reality-TV called Reality Blog.

To keep up with what's being said about Roller, I'm subscribed to search newsfeeds from Technorati, PubSub, and Feedster. My search expression looks something like this:

   roller AND ("blog server" OR "blog software")

I'm trying to compare the quality of results from the three services, but so far I can't see too much difference. Ok, on to the topic of the post.

Yesterday, PubSub scooped both Technorati and Feedster with a couple of mentions of Roller. First, in a post from D'Arcy Norman about "Massively Multi User Weblogging." Then in a follow up from James Farmer, who gives his point-of-view on each of the options. Farmer's follow-up is filled with lots of good info, until he gets to Roller where he says:

It looks to me like Roller is going to become part of Sun’s enterprise software offerings (here and here) so there’s not a heap of point following that up at the moment

Whatever do you mean by "It looks to me like Roller is going to become part of Sun’s enterprise software offerings (here and here) so there’s not a heap of point following that up at the moment"? If anything, that is a reason to follow up, not a reason against. Anyhow…

Roller is a great choice, Sun has over a thousand blogs running on it. JRoller.com has > 7000. There are numerous other large scale sites. Roller is open source software licensed under and Apache license and that ain’t gonna change.

Plus, Roller is Java/J2EE -- so it will run anywhere from standalone to Apache/Tomcat to big honkin' app servers like Weblogic, Websphere, and the Sun Java App Server (minor tweaks necessary for some of those app severs, but it will run).

If you're considering setting up a site for hundreds or thousands of blogs, make sure Roller is on the evaluation list.

We took Jetbrains up on their offer of free IDEA IntelliJ IDE licenses to open source projects. Today the licenses arrived and I mailed them out to the Roller committers. I'm happy to have another IDE to work with because neither Eclipse nor Netbeans completely satisfies me on Solaris x86. Swing-based Netbeans and IntelliJ run perfectly on Solaris x86, but unfortuantely Eclipse does not.

Pat Chanezon: The details are in my post to the ROME dev mailing list: it seems like mod_security, as configured at the TextDrive ISP refuses HTTP get with a user-agent containing the string 'java'! How how should java people interpret that? I guess as a compliment: if mod_security forbids Java in the user-agent, it means that even spammers and rogue spiders ended up dumping Perl for their nasty HTTP business to use Java instead: Java everywhere ;-)"

I burned several hours trying to figure out why Roller Planet (and specifically the Triangle Blogs Aggregator) wouldn't work against Textdrive hosted blogs, only to learn that the reason is an anti-Java filter. So my interpretation is %@#(*&!!! Textdrive is not our friend. They don't support Java and they appear to be actively filtering out Java clients. Perhaps I'm wrong and mod_security is the culpret?

PS. By changing my user-agent string to "Roller Planet 1.1-dev" (I considered the user-agent string "Textdrive s****" but that's just rude), I was able to get beyond the filter.

Cool! Don Brown picked up my late night experiments with continuations and JSP last year, ported from plain-old-JSP to Struts and now Struts Flow is an official Struts subproject. (via Dion).

I can't seem to find documentation for Technorati's keyword search syntax anywhere. The help page and FAQ don't say a thing about complex queries and the text field says "Keyword or URL" which indicates to me that, perhaps, only single keywords are supported. I've had some success with NOT, but any more complex queries fail.

Hey lazyweb, where can I find documentation for the Technorati search language?

Update: since posting, I found a post from Dave Sifry with some example queries and some comparison of Technorati, PubSub, and Feedster.

Tim Bray: the blogosphere, Long Tail and all, is not about the millions of voices, it’s about the millions of ears; it is, more than any other single thing, an improvement in our ability to listen, to find out what’s going on.

I like that.

I put together an experimental Triangle blogs aggregator using the new Planet Tool aggregator. Let me know if you'd like to be added or subtracted from the aggregation. I stole Anton's Blog Together theme. Maybe I can convince him to steal my aggregator.

There is an RSS feed and OPML subscription list for the whole site, and one for each of the groups (Chapel Hill bloggers, RTP bloggers, and TriJUG bloggers).

Doing some research on Technorati and other newsfeed search engines, I happened on Bill's blog and this memory of a midnight walk through the Triangle:

Bill Clinton: So that’s the reason I know these places so well. I remember one night and this is many years ago, I went to see him, but he wasn’t home. There were no buses and I didn’t bring my wallet so I tried to walk from Chapel Hill to Raleigh. Big mistake. After a few miles, I couldn’t go on anymore. I tried to hitchhike, but I found no buyers. I gave up. It was extremely dark. People living in New York don’t know how dark rural areas are. The crickets were chirping, I remember them very well. My old friends the crickets. Since I was in the middle of nowhere I decided to go into the shrub and sleep. I did. It's surprising how easy I fell asleep. I mean. In the middle of nowhere. I had no fear whatsoever. Youth.

Paul Humphreys: Jonathan wants Sun employees to blog. The title on the blogs.sun.com page says 'Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.' It really is true. I do not get reminder or requests from anyone that I must write wonderful things about Sun, increase my technical content and not to write about random things that no one has any interest in.

Anton posted some notes about the first Chapel Hill Blog Together meet-up. It was held Wednesday at the tiny Caffe Driade, a bunker in the woods off of Franklin Street that has been converted in to a cute little coffee bar.

It was really cool to meet a bunch of very enthusiastic bloggers from my hometown. These folks are revved up about using blogs for important things like community activism, social change, and health care. Yes, health care. I met a new Roller user: Bernard Glassman of the National Cancer Research Institute is using Roller as part of a project to help patients share experiences and educate each about treatment options.

As Justin said, "what an excellent cross-section of the community." Inspirational, even. Chapel Hill is a 35 mile drive for me, but I'll be back.

First google result for: standard wiki syntax

Is "no standard syntax" really a good thing? When the wiki itself is the user interface, perhaps it is, but if you want the user interface to be a slick WYSIWYG desktop client that edits any wiki via Atom, then having a different syntax for each wiki really sucks.

Bruce has a great list of links about the Triangle Blogger conference. The first weekly Triangle blogger meet-up is tonight at Caffe Driade in Chapel Hill (Anton Zuiker has the details).

"Interesting analysis of the market share of the popular blogging tools by Elise Bauer." She used Google to gather the statistics. From Threadwatch.org via Scoble.

I promised some details on PlanetTool (the command-line tool that generates Triangle Bloggers) internals, so here goes. This is what happens when PlanetTool runs:

Startup

(1) We start by reading the XML configuration file (via JDOM and XPath)

(2) From the config, we create a config object, subscriptions and groups

(3) A group has subscriptions

(4) And a subscription can belong to more than one group

(5) For each subscription, call the Rome Fetcher

(6) Fetcher uses Conditional Get and Etags and caches feeds on disk

(7) Feeds parsed into entries objects and added to subscription objects

(8) Call Velocity Texen with name of a control template

(9) Texen calls our control template

(10) Control template calls file generation templates

(11) Templates calls planet object to get config, group, subscription, and entry objects needed to generates files needed for aggregated site (HTML, RSS, OPML, etc.)

Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.: The News & Record: "As noted here before, the News & Record, the newspaper of record in Greensboro, North Carolina, is embarking on one of mainstream journalism's most important experiments: turning the paper into a community forum, 'to build a Web presence that invites readers in to share the news they know and engage in the civic discussion,' as John Robinson, the paper's editor wrote on his blog. (See online editor Lex Alexander's memo, chock-full of ideas, for more.)"

I attended the Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005 on Saturday morning in Chapel Hill. The meeting was held in a classroom large enough to accommodate the approximately 150 people in attendance, power in every seat, and wireless internet. The agenda was divided into three portions, but the conference was really one long, seamless, and very interesting conversation between audience members and the speakers. The theme was using blogs to build community, how to build a larger readership for your blog, how to use blogs in grassroots journalism. Here are a couple of the things I wrote down (these are not 100% accurate quotes):

• David Hoggard: You've heard of 'dancing like nobody is watching' -- you've got blog like nobody is reading if you want to get your authentic voice out there.
• Dave Winer: Why do you care about being popular? Bloggers don't need readers. Bloggers are documenting the human knowledge base and making expertise available that was previously only available to the press and big institutions.
• Ruby Sinreich: blogs will never replace the mainstream media, their role is to watchdog the media and that is a good place to be. Few people will get their news from blogs, but those that do are journalists, politicians, activists -- people who can make a difference.
• Matt Gross: On the Blog for America site, approximately 5% of visitors would click on the comments link and 1% would leave a comment.

I also got a chance to talk to folks about corporate blogs at SAS and IBM (both have some internal Roller sites) and student blogs at UNC. I also spent some time talking to Roch Smith, the man behind the Greensboro 101 community aggregator. All and all it was a great experience. I learned a lot about blogging and I feel a little more connected to my hometown and the Triangle in general. Thanks to Anton Zuiker, Paul Jones, and everybody else who helped put it together. More information, check here and here.