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Sunday Apr 27, 2008

Happy 4th birthday to blogs.sun.com

I remember how freaked-out I was to see the referrer hits start rolling in (pun fully intended) from http://blogs.sun.com/roller. I can't believe it's been four years already. Thanks to Linda for the reminder.

Wednesday Apr 16, 2008

Social Media SkROCKi star

My former co-worker Linda Skrocki and Program Manager for Sun's community sites (blogs, wikis, planets, forums and mediacast at sun.com) got some well deserved recognition from ReadWriteWeb.com the other day. She was named one of Seven leading Corporate Social Media Evangelists. Congrats Linda!

Tuesday Mar 25, 2008

My A list

Here's a concept that I've been using to help me both in my blog writing and to filter all the incoming feeds, tweets, photo sharing and social bookmarking items that come in via my feed reader: my A list. It's not made up of famous folks and big blog names like Scoble or Winer or Arrington. My A list is made up of people that I know or work with and that I believe are following me in some way, reading my blog, subscribing to my tweets or working with me on a project. I've got a folder in my feed reader and my A list is always the one I read first. Sometimes I don't get much farther than than before hitting the mark all read button. And when I do blog, that folder helps remind my of who I'm writing for. "A" stands for audience.

Monday Mar 03, 2008

HOWTO: Configure caching in Apache Roller

Since the early days, Roller has included a pluggable caching system for blog pages and feeds. In Roller 2.1 (early 2006), Sun's Allen Gilliland rewrote the whole cache system and made it much more flexible and much easier to configure. But, apart from comments in the configuration file, we never provided any documentation for the cache system. In this post, I'll start to correct that. I'll explain the basics of how the cache works and how to configure it.[Read More]

Thursday Feb 21, 2008

Social Software for Glassfish screencast

fish1 fish2 fish3

I mentioned the Social Software for Glassfish (SSG) EA2 release before the winter break, but I never got around to posting any details. Since then some documentation has appeared, Manveen Kaur blogged it, The Aquarium too and now screen-cast master Arun Gupta has created an excellent Social Software for Glassfish screencast that walks you through the features in this very early access release. Now I don't have to say nearly as much.

Tuesday Feb 12, 2008

wwwin-blogs.cisco.com

Apparently, CISCO has a pretty active internal blog server and it's running Roller. I can tell from my referrer logs. If any CISCO folks are reading this, drop me a line. I'd love to know how Roller and internal blogging in general is working out for you.

Monday Feb 04, 2008

Lots of latest links: social networking APIs and more

Here are my links for the past week or so and notes about social networking APIs, using the web itself as a social network, JMaki, Abdera and more. [Read More]

Friday Jan 04, 2008

Roller Strong #12

I have just one item for Roller Strong today: the post below from James Snell of IBM, which lists some pretty impressive stats for IBM's internal blogging system. James doesn't mention it in the post, but I've been told that the site is powered by Apache Roller v3.1.

Growth: Quick note: IBM’s internal blogging environment currently has 95k+ entries, 94k+ comments, 41k+ registered users, 11k+ Blogs (about 13% of which are considered “active”), 20k+ distinct tags, and 6k+ ratings on entries (entry rating has only been around since June of 2007). On average, there are just under 150 new entries posted to about 115 blogs per day. The number of comments per day fluctuate between 80-230 per day. A range of between 200-400 tags are used each day. Update: in the first three days of January, the server access logs show 109,439 unique visitors, 3,265,739 hits, and 61.37 GB of data transferred.

And that's internal boggers only. Just think what they could do with an external blog site. Roller works well outside the firewall too.

;-)

Thursday Dec 13, 2007

How to create a Roller 4.0 theme, part 2

In part one I explained how to create a theme directory and add the required template and resource files. Now I'll wrap things up by explaining what goes into a theme.xml theme definition file and how to deploy your new theme. [Read More]

Tuesday Dec 11, 2007

Blog server as social networking platform?

Anne Zelenka, Gigaom: Could open-source blogging platform WordPress serve as your next social networking profile? Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency, thinks so. He’s started a project called DiSo, for distributed social networking, that aims to “build a social network with its skin inside out.” DiSo will first look to WordPress as its foundation.

This could be the next step towards the unified social graph that some technologists wish for. WordPress suits the purpose because it provides a person-centric way of coming online, offers an extensible architecture, and already has some features — such as an OpenID and a blogroll plugin — that can be pressed into social networking service. And its users represent exactly the sort of audience that might appreciate the permanent, relatively public identity that DiSo aims to offer.

Interesting. I think that blogs should be the corner-stone of social networking and I'd much rather have my blog be my social network profile rather than some page inside somebody else's container. Then again, as a blog server developer I'm pretty biased.

Monday Dec 10, 2007

How to create a Roller 4.0 theme, part 1

The Roller 4.0 Template Author Guide explains how to customize your Roller theme by editing the page templates that define, but it doesn't explain how to create an all-new Roller theme. This is the first of two posts that explain how to create theme for use with Roller 4.0. [Read More]

Wednesday Dec 05, 2007

Roller 4.0 released


Finally!

http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/roller-cartoon-140x126.png

Apache Roller 4.0 has been released and is now available for download.

This is a major new Roller release which includes easier blog theme customization, a much more simple installation/upgrade process, infrastructure improvements and numerous other small fixes. You can get the release files and the official documentation via the Apache mirrors at this page:

http://roller.apache.org/download.cgi

And you can read about the new features on the What's New in Roller 4.0 page of the Roller wiki.

Project releases are approved by vote of the Apache Roller Project Management Committee (PMC). Support for a release is provided by project volunteers on the project mailing lists. Additional free support is provided by many other volunteer subscribers to the list. Bugs found in a release may be discussed on the list and reported through the issue tracker.

Roller is a Project of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), formed by a resolution of the ASF Board of Directors. As an ASF Project, Roller is subject to the ASF Bylaws and the direction of the ASF Board. The user mailing list and issue tracker are the only support options hosted by the Apache Roller project.

Cross posted from the Roller project blog.

Wednesday Nov 14, 2007

Roller and blogs as a web dev. platform presentation

I just posted the slides for my ApacheCon US 2007 talk on the ApacheCon wiki. It's basically the same talk that I gave at ApacheCon EU earlier this year, but I spent some time tweaking the slides, simplifying removing unnecessary bits and adding a little Abdera coverage. That, and the fact that the power did not fail, seemed to make the talk go more smoothly this morning. Here are the slides:

Apache Roller and blogs as a web development platform (2MB PDF)

Monday Oct 22, 2007

ConvergeSouth 2007, day 2 notes and wrap-up

I'm back from ConvergeSouth 2007 now and caching up on email, blogs, etc. I enjoyed day two as much as day one. Here are my notes, quotes and paraphrased thoughts from two of my favorites sessions on Saturday, Social Networking and Corporate Wikis. [Read More]

Saturday Oct 20, 2007

More on AtomPub and Windows Live Writer

Joe Cheng posted another entry in his series explaining the details of AtomPub support in Windows Live Writer (WLM), titled WLW+AtomPub, Part 2: Authentication.

Wondering what WLM looks like? Travelin' Librarian has a nice set of screen-shots of WLM on Flickr including shots of the installation process, HTML mode, preview mode and more. Looks pretty sweet.

Screen-shot of Windows Live Writer

Friday Oct 19, 2007

ConvergeSouth 2007, day 1 notes

I'm in Greensboro today, a couple of hours away from home, attending ConvergeSouth 2007 -- "the annual tech users' conference in Greensboro, North Carolina. A combination of a blogger-con and a creativity center." Here's a summary of notes and quotes I scribbled in my notebook on day #1. [Read More]

Wednesday Oct 03, 2007

They do listen

Solaris back in the race: Last week, I wrote about us discarding Solaris for a new project. Most large companies will not care and not listen to their customers. Many of us have dealt with Verizon, Time Warner, Creative Labs, etc and know what I mean. After all, when you have so many customers, it is cheaper to lose a bunch of them and provide overall bad service than it is to fix real problems. After my short experience with Sun, I assumed it was the same:I WAS WRONG. They do listen!

That's my experience too. Folks at Sun are very tuned into the blogs, forums and other sites where our products might be discussed. We subscribe to RSS/Atom keyword search feeds so we can find out who is talking about our products, we join the conversations and we try our best to make things right when they go wrong. Critical blog posts about us almost always set off a flurry of activities on our internal bloggers mailing list. It's nice to see when those "inbound messaging" efforts pay off.

Tuesday Oct 02, 2007

Blogapps 2.1 released

RSS and Atom in Action image The next releases that I'd like to announce are the Blogapps 2.1 Examples and the Blogapps 2.1 Server.

If you'd like to learn more about the Blogapps examples and server then read The Blogapps Project article at Java.net. Here's a quick summary:

The Blogapps project hosts a collection of useful RSS and Atom utilities and examples from RSS and Atom In Action by Dave Johnson. They're designed to be useful even if you haven't read the book and they're available under the Apache License 2.0 so you can use the code in your applications and you can modify and redistribute them as you wish.

What's changed since 2.0? The examples have been updated to include the latest version of ROME Propono, which means that most of them now support the final Atom protcol spec. The server has been updated to include Roller 4.0 RC5, which also includes Atom protocol support and JSPWiki 2.4. And of course, various bugs have been fixed. Here are the release files, installation instructions and release notes.

This blog entry was posted via Atom protocol and the MatisseBlogger blog-client, which you can see in the screen-shot below (which was also posted via Atom.

screenshot of MatisseBlogger

What's next? Not sure at this point, but I will do another Blogapps release once ROME 1.0 is released.

Tuesday Sep 25, 2007

FilmBabble blog dead in the water, can't get help from Google

My brother's popular film blog FilmBabble, hosted on Google's Blogspot site, is now dead in the water and he cannot find any way to get help from Blogspot or Google. He's followed the help links to send support requests to both Google and Blogger.com last week, but Gmail tells him that his email address does not exist!

Could this be another case of mass email deletions at Gmail.com? Personally, I wouldn't trust Google to host my blog or my email; I only use Gmail for mailing lists that are archived elsewhere. Seems like my caution might be well justified.

So please help, Google folks. Please tell us: how do you get help from Google when your email address and therefore your Google identity is apparently deleted?

Update 1: apparently Dan filled out this help request form on Friday. I wonder what kind of turn around time they have for this type of issue. Guess we'll find out.

Update 2: Google responded today and restored Dan's account, after only two business days. I must say, that's pretty damn good for a free service. Still, the "that email address does not exist" message is pretty damn scary. It's pretty nerve wracking to get locked out of your blog.

Friday Sep 07, 2007

ApacheCon US 2007 - still time to be an early bird

ApacheCon US 2007 logo

ApacheCon is coming up fast. I just faxed in my speaker's agreement and I'm starting to update my talk to cover the latest changes in the upcoming Apache Roller 4.0 and 4.1 releases.

I've been four times now and ApacheCon is always a great conference. It's small and cozy enough, but almost all of the Apache projects are represented. So it's easy to find the experts, make new friends and get all of your questions answered. The session line-up looks great this year; here are ones that caught my eye:

Want to go? There's still time to shave a couple of hundred dollars off the conference fees by registering early. Early bird pricing has been extended to Sept. 22, 2007.

And the Weston looks like a pretty nice place for a conference:

Westin hotel

ApacheCon US 2007 | Register here
November 12-16, 2007
Westin Peachtree Plaza
Atlanta, Georgia

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Copyright 2002-2007, David M Johnson (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org)

This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.