Blogging Roller

Jim Gisanzio: Check out what is probably Sun's first BSC Podcast -- Simon Phipps interviewing Ed Peterlin at Linux Desktop Summit on NeoOffice/J

I'm looking forward to Triangle Blogger Con 2005 in Chapel Hill tomorrow. Big time bloggers Dave Winer, Dan Gillmore, and Ruby Sinreich will be in attendance and, I assume, helping to lead the discussions. It's a very short conference with thee sessions in the morning focusing on using blogs to help build communities. That's a very appropriate topic for me since I'm spending today writing a community aggregator front end for Roller, which I'm calling Planet Roller (I'm not sure if the name will stick).

Update: via Mister Suger, the Durham Morning Herald on the conference: Bloggers Gathering Outside Cyberspace

These are the best places I've found in Raleigh to get work done, drink good coffee, and enjoy free wireless access to the net.

• Helios Coffee - in trendy Glenwood South (413 Glenwood Ave). Bonus features: very cool music, outside seating, good smoothies, beer and  wine.
• Percolator Lounge - in North Raleigh at Quail Corners (5039 Falls of Neuse Rd, used to be a Cupajoe)
• Cafe Cyclo - in Cameron Village (2020 Cameron St.). Bonus features: excellent food, full bar, ice cream store next door.

Know any others? I need to find similar places in Chapel Hill. I'll leave comments open on this one.

Rama and the rest of the crew at Sun.com have been working long and hard to bring you the coolest of the cool. Podcasting, or MediaCasting as the cool kids call it, has gone live at Sun (actually it's beta).  Stay tuned to Rama's blog because the best is yet to come.

I'm proud to say that I'm part of the Sun.com crew. My little part in this endeavor was to add MediaCast support to the Roller instance we have running on blogs.sun.com. I did it by implementing part of the Weblog Entry Plugin architecture, which is on the table for Roller 1.1 release.

I find it somewhat ironic that, because I'm working on a book about blog technologies and working full time on developing blog software, I have almost no time to blog. That's why you've seen so few personal blog entries recently. Matt's right, the mix of personal entries are what really make a blog for me. I hope that will change soon. Now that Roller 1.0 is really, truly out of the way (fingers crossed) and the really fun part of the book is starting up, I hope that will change (but I'm not making any promises).

Roller Weblogger: Roller 1.0.1 is a bug fix release that also adds support for Google's new rel="nofollow" flag. You can get the release on Roller's Java.Net download space. You can read the change list on Roller's JIRA issue tracking system. And, you can find install instructions and instructions for upgrading your existing Roller 1.0 install to 1.0.1 on the Roller wiki. Happy rolling!

I made a proposal for a Roller 1.1 release today. If you have comments, questions, or suggestions please join us on the Roller-development mailing-list to discuss.

I just wrote up some instructions for configuring Secure Logins for Roller 1.0.

I had to make one minor change in Roller 1.0's Secure Login feature. I found that, when Roller is running behind a web switch, I can't rely on request.isSecure() to tell me if I have an HTTPS connection. I had to add an (optional) request header test. In my case, I have to test for a header named X-SSL to determine if HTTPS is active.

Alan Williamson: I have attempted to use online editors (fckeditor/htmlArea) but they do not enforce valid XHTML and the results they produce can sometimes be a right old mess of tags  (try editing the source of a post-fckeditor saved text).  Ironically one of the common suggestions that have come from my users is their desire to use a WIKI type of input.  They are comfortable with this and it does solve a lot of UI problems. However I am finding it difficult to find tools that will actually take WIKI Markup and transform it to XHTML.

Rick High: For such an indispensable technology, Java Server Faces (JSF) has generated an undue amount of FUD.

A first for me: I submitted a couple of proposals for JavaOne 2005. The first one is a joint session with four speakers (that may pose a problem) titled Beyond Blogging: Feed Syndication and Publishing with Java. If the proposal is accepted Kevin Burton, Patrick Chanezon, Alejanro Abdelnur, and I will discuss the Java tools available for feed syndication, FeedParser, Rome, Roller, and BlogClient. We'll also discuss plans for moving towards a standard Java API for feed parsing, generation, and publishing.  The second paper is titled Enterprise Blogging With Java and it is basically an updated and improved version of the talk I gave at the Triangle and Orlando/Gainesville JUGs last year.

Some status on Blogs, Wikis, and Feeds in Action: I submitted Chapter 8: Publishing with Atom last week, bringing me to the end of part I of the book. Now I'm moving on to Part II, a collection of blog apps, example applications that are designed to be interesting an immediately useful. One of the first blog apps is a simple community aggregator, like a simple more limited version of Planet. That is quite convenient, because I'm also supposed to be working on a more full featured aggregator for the blogs.sun.com front page.

Anil has put together a couple of Roller plugins for Google links and Technorati tags. He has also set up his very own wiki.

CorporateBloggingBlog.info: The blog of European Commissioner Margot Wallström is now a fully enabled blog. We find a feed, (moderated) comments and trackback. There's a calendar, categories and a blog search. Exactly as she promised when it started.

It's nice to see that when the first commissioner decides to try blogging out, she goes the whole way. That in itself, I believe, is a statement of seriousness and authenticity.I also note that the blog has moved. When it started it was found at http://europa.eu.int/comm/commission_barroso/wallstrom/weblog/index.htm. Now we find it at http://weblog.jrc.cec.eu.int/page/wallstrom. Could be an insignificant technical detail. Could also be a sign telling us that the Commission has prepared its infrastructure for more blogs.

Uploaded via Photon, an export plugin for iPhoto (thanks to Dave for pointing it out).

Ross Mayfield: Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales and others are working on Wikia, a wiki search engine, and Wikipedia produces a nice diff feed.  Adapting to MediaWiki covers 1/4 of public wikis.  There are well over 100 open source wikis, a wonderful diversity to respect, and search engines would do well to adapt to them over time just as they have with less standard blog implementations.

I was using Eclipse (both 3.0.1 and 3.1M3) on Solaris x86 and it used to be on the download list, but now it is gone. WTF! I was hoping that, maybe, they'd switch the Solaris x86 build of Eclipse from Motif to GTK. I mean, how hard can that be? Instead they've taken it right off the list. I guess Eclipse.org is not as independent of an organization as I had previously thought. They must take orders directly from Palmisano. I want my Eclipse!

Some friends and I took a couple days of vacation in the North Carolina mountains. We were trapped in the house (pictured in the previous post) for most of the weekend, due to the extreme cold and a very icy road, but there's a full-sized pool table in the house, so we had no complaints.

I'm sorry if I have not returned your email. I was off-line for the weekend and since my return, I've been (mostly) ignoring my inbox and my newsreader so that I can finish Chapter 8: Publishing With Atom and some cool blogs.sun.com stuff that I can't talk about yet. I'm going to take a break this afternoon and tend to my mail and blog reading.

James Todd:a handful of my citizen blog peers have added swag 'chat' links to thier sites:

• Chat with Alan
• Clingan Zone
• Jim's Chat
• GonzoLand

i truly appreciate folks kicking these ideas around. great dialog. great ideas. all grounded in very real world activities. just the way it should be. make it real! further, when i have run into a brick wall, for various reasons, i tend to turn more often or not to those that post here at blogs.sun.com.

Keep an eye on that guy. MyJXTA based blog chat is starting to catch on at blogs.sun.com.