Blogging Roller

• Roller 1.2: I spent most of last week working on Roller 1.2. Part of that work was for the OpenSolaris launch. We used Roller 1.2's built-in "planet" aggregator to create the OpenSolaris blog, aggregating together about 150 blogs into one big blog with it's own newsfeed. I had to write a little custom code to load the list of blogs, because the aggregator's UI doesn't have a bulk-load capability yet. Later in the week I spent a couple of days on fixing bugs, Javadocs and Velocidocs.

• Roller 1.3: We've started to talk a bit about a Roller 1.3 release to incorporate some theme management changes. We need to make it easier to manage themes and apply changes globally to all user's themes, but still allow power-users to tweak their page templates. Allen has put together a rough proposal for better theme management.

• Roller 2.0: I spent a couple of days on Roller 2.0 last week, still working on the data model and the new many-to-many relationship between weblogs and users. The OpenSolaris and Roller 1.2 contininued to put me further behind schedule, but I'm still shooting for group blogging done in August.

• Roller@Apache: Starting today, we're using the Apache incubator mailing lists for the Roller-dev and Roller-user lists, but I still haven't updated the wiki with subscribe and unsubscribe info.

• RSS and Atom in Action: Since the chapters are out of my hands, at this point all I can do is watch the Atom Protocol list. Chapter one may be coming back from copy-edit today.

Time to test the power of positive thinking: this is the month that Atom Protocol settles down and becomes stable enough for me to finish up the book.

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.

I spent most of the break working on the book and now it's time to get back to Roller. Bugs have been trickling in from blogs.sun.com. Plus, Matt and Rick over at Javalobby upgraded JRoller to Roller 1.0RC2 last week and that shook loose a couple of bugs. So, now there's a short list of bugs that should be fixed before Roller 1.0 final. Thanks to everybody who has helped out by reporting bugs.

We had nice quiet Thanksgiving and that's the way I like it. We travelled only about 30 miles, for dinner with my parents and my brother over in Chapel Hill. We had turkey, gravy, stuffing, rice, cranberry sauce, veggies, and of course, pumpkin pie and homemade ice cream. After lunch we took the traditional nice long walk around the neighborhood and this year the walk included the muddy path along Morgan Creek.

Now, we're back in Raleigh and I'm trying to get back into writing mode. I'm going to put the XML-RPC and Atom Protocol chapters on hold for a couple of days and work on revisions to the first 1/3 of the book. Reviews came back overwhelmingly positive, but that is just not good enough.

I've got a lot to be thankful for, but right now I'm most thankful for my wife's seemingly infinite patience -- that, and the fact that she is taking the boys away for a couple of days so that I can work in peace.