Blogging Roller

Last weekend, my 7 year old son Alex, without any prompting from me - I swear, asked for his own weblog. Just about every day since, he has taken a little time after finishing his homework to do some blogging. He is not able to type very quickly, but he hunts down the keys he needs and gives each a solid tap. He can't spell all that well, but he is not afraid to spell things out phonetically. Luckily for him, his entries are so short that there is no need for formatting, but soon I imagine I'll have to set up a WYSIWYG editor for him or teach him some rudimentary HTML.

Andi and I have decided not to edit Alex's posts or correct his spelling and grammar errors. We want to be able to look back on his progress as a writer. We do sometimes add some notes in parentheses when his spelling is too hard to read. If you have read this far without hitting the back-button, then perhaps you are wondering just where Alex's weblog is. I keep it on a somewhat obscure server and to keep that server obscure, I'm not going to give you a link. Instead, I'm going to publish Alex's historic first week of weblog posts right here on my weblog. Enjoy!

Sunday - Locker dockers. Today I and my famliy went to mil brook hiy school. when we got home daddy lock us outside. flinliy we got in our home.I will see you soon today.

Saturday - duster busters. Today I got dust in my eyes in a tree. We watch a move (movie) of scooey-doo (scooby-doo). It is a good move.

Friday - too snowy. Today it is snowing 3 inchis high! We had a snowball fight. We made a fort. today linus has a weblog. Cats have a talie. Cats are diffrent colors. Luna is black and white. Cats have reytrackl clas (retractable claws).

Thursday - snowing. It is snowing outside! linus lovs the snow. I do too. How bowt you. Daddy said tomrrow we will have a snowball fight.

Tuesday - school. At school I had an ansebly (assemby) Linus got a reading t-shrit. Tonight Linus went to school to sing songs to their parints. I did not go.

Monday - school. Today I went to school. I made a clock that was coloerfull. It is filled up. I can not put one more coloer in it. then I got home. I cilmed a tree and made a amrgsc esit (emergency exit) if eneything hopons. last I did my homework. My homework for today was pick a book you have read. Then make a parugraph. I pick a book you have read. then make a pargragh. I picked the seakrits of droon (Secrets of Droon). Eric looks like harry potter in the move. My dad leat us see some of it. He is reading it too.

Sunday - My first weblog post. Today is my first day writing on a weblog. Today I went to my grandmother and grandpa's house. I got ice cream in the country. On the way home we played racer. How we play is if we pass cars we get points. Today we got 50 points.

I love it, but first, let me say that 1) I only locked Alex and Linus outside for a very short time and 2) the fact that we scored 50 points playing "racer" on the drive home from the country does not mean that I exceeded the speed limit at anytime. As you can probably tell, I'm a proud Daddy - a proud Daddy who will be reading his son's weblog very carefully.

Matt has set up a Roller demo server so that you can experiment with and comment on a recent build of Roller 0.9.9-dev. Thanks Matt. Most of the changes for Roller 0.9.9-dev are complete and now we are focusing on fixing bugs and cleaning up the UI.

Bruce Williams Has 'RSS' really become so common that it no longer refers to a particular technical specification, but instead refers to blog syndication generally? Has it really joined the ranks of Kleenex and Xerox?

Yep, that is correct. RSS has now joined the ranks of Kleenex, Xerox, and, I will add, Google. The original definition of RSS has now been overruled by common usage. RSS now means any sort of website or weblog syndication and in this new Atomic age, you'll find more and more people talking about their Atom RSS feeds.

When you have a rapidly approaching deadline, a VPN connection to work, and a house full of sick kiddies, a snow day is not all that much fun.

Via Don Brady on the TriJUG mailing list: according to this post on de.comp.lang.java, IBM is proposing to donate a number of editors from WSAD to Eclipse including ones for JSP, SQL, XSD, and WSDL (here are some screenshots) but not including the more advanced features like the Struts Builder and JSF support.

Suggested by Anthony Eden.

In preparation for the March release of Roller 0.9.9, I'm trying to come up with a better looking theme for the Roller Editor UI. I just committed JSP and CSS changes for my first attempt at a new theme. Here is the mockup that I started with:

By Howard Lewis Ship.

Stable releases.

at the 60th IETF in August

Check the right sidebar. I'm still working on making the Roller RSS feed more linkblog friendly and trying to figure out how to handle comments on linkblog entries. Update: The links-only RSS feed now works, try the subscribe link under the linkblog.

Very cool!

That other Dave at that other JUG.

Class data sharing.

Comparing Rife and ControlFlow.

A new JSF competitor?

Now you can google RSS feeds with Yahoo!

I wish he wouldn't.

Trust me, it's not an academic issue.