Blogging Roller

Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0 Release 1 for Tiger

I want it, but when can we ditch JDK 1.4 support in Roller?

Adrian Sutton: Issues With Ads In RSS: "So now there’s adsense for RSS feeds (or at least an early beta of such). It raises some interesting issues. I hate ads so I’ll quite happily unsubscribe from any feed that has ads in it, but what about the various planets that I subscribe to? What if one person who’s syndicated through those planets adds advertising to their RSS feeds, would I unsubscribe from the whole planet? Possibly. What if a few people did? Probably.

What is a fair policy for planet administrators to take on this? Is it okay for them to remove the ads from the feeds so as not to annoy their readers? Should they drop feeds that contain ads? Should they offer two feeds, one that includes the people with ads and one that doesn’t?"

That's a good point. What is a planet adminstrator to do when the blogs he aggregates start including advertisements in the body of their feeds? The PlanetRoller sites I've set up show only short excerpts of each blog entry and HTML is stripped, so this should not be a problem. When the ads start showing up as separate entries, then I'll be looking for ways to filter them out.

Dare Obasanjo: What I find very interesting is using RSS is the data access format for the Web. RSS gained popularity as a way to syndicate blog posts and news sites but its turned out to be a lot more versatile than that. Sites like Feedster and Amazon's OpenSearch technology show you can use RSS as a mechanism for providing search results and integrating search engines respectively. Podcasting shows you can use RSS to syndicate digital media content instead of just plain old text or HTML. With Amazon's syndicated feeds one can keep abreast of when new CDs, books and more are released.

As Pat likes to say: blogs are just the tip of the syndication iceberg.

Nice overview of business blogging by NC blogger Ed Cone in CIO Insight.

What's the downside of switching to Thunderbird on Mac OS X? Am I going to miss out on some "to die for" feature in Tiger's new Mail.app? I sure would like to be using the same mail client on all four platforms in the house.

Nice photo! And a nice comment from Scoble too

Whoa! and an even better picture from Pat.

Dare Obasanjo: Corporations should not be amoral entities that only exist to generate money. They employ members of a community, they exist as part of community and their actions affect both local and global communities.

Weiqi Gao posted an informative and insightful article about the recent GCC 4.0.0 release, which features a much improved version of the GCJ Java compiler and GNU classpath, a free as in FSF implementation of the Java class libraries. I don't agree with his predictions, but he's done his homework and put together bunch interesting links.

I've used Ecto before with Roller (I bought a license), so I was a little surprised that Tim found a problem with it. He said that it was able to post, but it issues an error message RPC handler object "mt" not found, which indicates that perhaps Tim's Ecto is configured for Movable Type instead of plain old MetaWeblog API access.

Let's see if I can edit a post in place.

I'll post this now and then open it for editing... back in a sec.

Yep, that worked. However, something odd happened. When I opened up the post, my <p> tags were stripped out. I had to add them back in by hand. Hmmm.... an Ecto bug? But the re-post did work, in fact, when I clicked the Publish button Ecto popped up a dialog that asked "Old or New? This entry has been posted before. Should I submit a modification or create a new entry?"

Update: I was able to get Ecto to stop stripping my <p> tags by setting the "Convert line breaks in rich text mode" option.

To make it easier for folks to try Roller 1.1 and the new experimental Planet aggregator, I've created a standalone Roller demo by bundling Roller with JSPWiki, Tomcat, and the tiny pure-Java HSQLDB database. Everything is preconfigured and ready to run. All you need to do to try Roller is the following:

1. Download roller-demo-1.1.tar.gz from Java.Net (a 22MB download)

2. Unzip the file into a directory on your hard-drive 
   (directory name should have no spaces)

3. Ensure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to point to your JDK

4. Ensure that CATALINA_HOME is NOT set in your environment

5. To start Roller, either:
   - on Windows: open the Roller bin directory and double-click on startup.bat 
   - on UNIX: cd to the Roller bin directory, chmod +x on all files, run ./startup.sh

6. Point your browser at http://localhost:8080/roller

7. Login as nina/nina, admin/admin, or register as a new user

8. Get rollin'

Read all about it on the Roller project blog: http://rollerweblogger.org.

I'll have a new build of the standalone demo version of Roller ready today so you can check out the Planet Roller aggregator (which is not included in the standard build).

Dave Hyatt: Safari 1.3 supports HTML editing, both at the Objective-C WebKit API level and using contenteditable and designMode in a Web page.

And you don't even need to upgrade to Tiger to get it. Cool. I hope that means the RTE Editor will now work in Safari. Update: nope, RTE still does not work on Safari.

I just heard from one of the many blog advocates within SAS Institute about an interesting webcast called Overcoming "The Fiefdom Syndrome" scheduled for Tuesday April 19 at 11AM ET. From the looks of it, the presentation focuses on data management, but overcoming corporate fiefdoms sounds to me like a job for blogs and wikis.

VentureBlog: it is best not to clip your fingernails while pitching your company

I knew there was a reason I subscribed to VentureBlog.

I've had a very productive week so far in MPK and I'm heading home early tomorrow. Working with new blogs.sun.com developer Allen Gilliland, I wrapped up first drafts of requirements and design for group blogging in Roller (check the wiki if you want the details). Allen and I also spent a lot of time discussing possible "supportablity" enhancements like configuration consolidation and load balancing. I posted some notes from these discussions to the Roller dev list for feedback. The posts spurred a flurry of comments and discussion that touched on topics of search (Matt R and Matt S want to fix it) and ditching container managed authentication (Matt R is interested in moving to Acegi).

I haven't been nearly so productive on the book. Before I left N.C. I picked up the same cold that hit rest of my family, so I've been sleeping instead of writing. So it goes.

Nice thing is, I was able to spend a little time with some of my other co-workers. Roller committer Anil Gangolli (more of a friend than a co-worker I guess) kindly invited me over for dinner with his wife and some friends on Sunday and we had some great indian food and conversation (Thanks Anil!). And today, I was fortunate enough to run into Tim Bray and Claire Giordano as I was wandering around looking for an empty table in the Sun cafeteria.

I'm coming back out here on the 26th for the chairman's award deal. Hopefully I'll feel better then.

I heard from Matt Schmidt today. He's porting some of the Wordpress themes over to Roller. Check out his blog to see the RedTrain theme in action. Nice work Matt.

That's where I'm going today. I'll be working at blogs.sun.com HQ from Monday through Wednesday.

What an honor! I'm proud to part of the blogs.sun.com (BSC) team, but BSC is way more than just six or seven people. BSC is a success because of the many excellent bloggers who write there.

If you want to subscribe to newsfeed of photos from the Triangle area, paste the URL below into your newsreader. You'll get photos of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, NC along with the occasional photo of Durham, England and random triangle art. I think that's a pretty good mix.

http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=raleigh,chapelhill,durham,triangle

Josh has the details on tonight's meet-up, in summary:

What: An open meeting to talk about blogging, podcasting & whatever's on your mind
When: Tues @ 6:30 p.m.
Where: Cafe Cyclo, in Cameron Village

I'll be there and I hope you will too.