Blogging Roller

I've got a build of Roller 2.1-dev running on this site now and there's a small bug in the new comment moderation feature, which is preventing new comments. I hope to deploy a fix this weekend. Hold your tongue until then.

It's really not that hard to do, but a couple of new Roller macros would make it a lot easier. After an hour or so, I ported Almost Spring to Roller. It's running on Otto's blog. I think I'm going to try a couple more.

I case you're wondering, most Wordpress themes are licensed under GPL. That means we can't include them in Roller (since Roller is Apache licensed), but somebody could offer a separately downloadable theme-pack.

One thing I noticed during this exercise is that Wordpress themes are dangerous. They're written in PHP, so you don't want Joe average user to edit them. As the Wordpress.com FAQ says templates are "untrusted code that we haven’t verified" so template editing and importing are banned. Contrast that with Roller, where templates are written in Velocity and are therefore safe for end-user customization.

Jason Caplain, a VC here in Raleigh, posted a rumor about Google to open RTP office. The story also made the Raleigh paper. The News and Observer story Google Looks for Local Offices quotes Andy Beal, who speculates that Google may be considering aquisition of local startups ChannelAdvisor or Motricity. Or perhaps they just want to syphon off some talented but bored IBM and SAS employees.