Blogging Roller

One of my five ApacheCon EU 2008 proposals was accepted. I submitted a couple of proposals for customizing Roller, one for advanced Roller and one on RSS/Atom. The advanced Roller talk was accepted. Here's the abstract:

Apache Roller is a popular open source blog server designed to serve the needs of large multi-user blogging sites and typically used by large corporations, universities and government organizations. This session for managers, sysadmins and developers will goes beyond the Roller installation guide and explores the advanced issues of planning and executing a Roller deployment, including deployment architecture and configuration options as well as options for customization and automation.

ApacheCon US 2007 is only about 20 days away. I'm getting psyched up to do my Roller and blogs as a web development platform talk again (and thinking about topics for ApacheCon EU 2008). There's still plenty of time for you to register and attend. And Apache fans, please grab a banner and help promote ApacheCon on your project site and blogs.

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]

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]

Anton Zuiker wrote to tell me about the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference coming up January 20th, 2007. I just registered and I'm looking forward to learning more about how scientists are using blogs and RSS/Atom blog tech in their work.

Congrats and thanks to the organizers, volunteers, Red Hat and other sponsors for making BarCampRDU a great success. I really enjoyed it. In case you have no idea what a "barcamp" is here's the deal. According to the BarCamp wiki, a BarCamp is "an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment."

The event started around 9AM Saturday morning with a quick introduction from conference organizer Fred Stutzman. Everybody who wanted to propose a session lined up at the front of the room and gave a 30 second pitch for their idea. Most of the proposals were technical like "linux systems admin" or "atom publishing protocol," but there were some non-technical ideas too. For example there was a session on "how to juggle" and one on "how to dance with girls" (not sure how that turned out, given the M/F ratio).

After the session pitches, the session leaders claimed spots on the schedule, which was a 10-foot by 15-foot sheet of paper taped to the wall. Next attendees voted for sessions by putting tick marks on the schedule using magic markers. Based on the votes and conversations between session leaders, some sessions were combined and some were moved to smaller or larger meeting rooms -- all right on the spot. It was amazing how well that worked and how quickly we were able to arrive at a schedule and by 10AM we were all attending sessions.

The sessions themselves were not so unconventional. They were definitely more interactive than the usual tech-conference format, but generally followed the normal speaker/audience model. I'm not complaining. I enjoyed the sessions, learned a lot and heard a lot of interesting stories. I attended sessions on open source business and it's ability to innovate (Tarus Balog and ), RESTful Notification Architecture (Seairth Jacobs), social networks (Fred Stutzman) and the Atom publishing protocol (Joe Gregorio).

That's all I have time for tonight. If you want more info, Fred Stutzman has a great round-up of the blog and news coverage (and check it out -- I was mentioned in the News & Observer article) plus some guidelines for running your own BarCamp. I hope we'll do another one this year -- I'd like to help out next time around.

Tags: BarCampRDU

Robert Burke: And it was kinda cool to be the Microsoft guy running Apache and PHP on his laptop :)

I'm sorry I missed that talk.

Tags: apacheconeu2006, apachecon

I gave my talk this morning to a packed room of 40-50 people at ApacheCon EU. The talk is an updated and improved version of the talk I gave last year at ApacheCon US. It's designed to be a primer for system administrators considering using Roller and developers considering customizing or basic products on Roller. Here's what I covered:

• Roller history: how Roller got started and how it got to where it is today at Sun, IBM, JRoller, Yale, NC State, etc.
• Roller features: overview of Roller features, limitations and reasons for choosing Roller.
• Roller community: discussion of Roller community, project processes (release cycle and proposals) and status of Apache incubation.
• Roller internals - backend: overview of Roller business/persistence layer architecture, components used, XDoclet code-gen, POJOs and manager interfaces.
  
• Roller internals - front-end: overview of Roller presentation layer including the Struts/JSP based editor UI and the Velocity-based blog/feed rendering engine.
  
• Customizing Roller: brief overview of techniques for customizing Roller.
  
• Roller futures: Overview of Roller 3.0 plans.

For those who couldn't make the talk, I've made my slides avalable in PDF format. Let me know if you have questions.

Tags: apacheconeu2006, apachecon

I'm definitely suffering from some ApacheCon-fatigue, a combination of information overload and lack of sleep. I just can't sleep past 6AM when I'm on the west coast, no matter how late I stay up. Oh well, today was the last day.

I only attended one talk this morning: Michael Radwin's HTTP Cache and Cache Busting for Content Publishers. I think I learned more Roller-relevant stuff from this talk than any other at the conference. After that, I spent the rest of the morning and lunch-time helping Craig Russell and Ian Kallen get their Roller development environments set up. As I mentioned yesterday, Craig wants to help create a JDO implementation of the Roller backend. Ian (who works for Technorati) wants to contribute to Roller in the areas of tagging and micro-formats.

In the afternoon I tuned in to the Ruby for Java Developers talk and Brian McAllister's Ruby on Rails talk. Brian's talk was my favorite of the two and I especially liked the way he illustrated the talk with screencasts (via Snapz Pro X). One of these days, I'll have some time to play with Ruby -- probably right around the time it's no longer cool with the shiny new object hipsters. After the Ruby talks, the conference ended with a key-note by Jaron Lanier. Jaron's talk was little too rambling for my taste, "mono-directional blabbing" he called it, but got a lot better when he started telling jokes and doing Al Sharpton and Steve Ballmer immitations.

That's all for my ApacheCon/US 2005 blogging. Thanks to the ApacheCon organizers and all Apache-folk for another great conference. I'm already trying to figure out how I can get myself to the next one.

I spent Friday and Saturday in Greensboro, NC at the ConvergeSouth 2005 conference. I had a great time meeting fellow NC bloggers and attending talks on community building, blogging and journalism, collaboration, blog tools and podcasting. The next couple of posts will be my trip report, based on my notes and recollections. This is final installment #3 of 3.

Saturday, the focus of the ConvergeSouth conference was new media and "creativity on the web for all people" and the format was Dave Winer blogcon style "un-conference." That means there's a moderator with no prepared talk or slides who briefly introduces a topic and then the audience engages in a blog-like conversation on the topic. Interesting idea and it can work well, but I still like the old tried-and-true "expert gives engaging, insightful and interesting talk" format of conference and fortunately some of the speakers at Converge did too.

Policing the Media, Duncan Black

The first talk I attended was Policing the Media led by Duncan Black. After a fairly long introduction, he went into the blogcon format. In his introduction Duncan explained that he wants to improve the media. We deserve better. He had a litany of complaints and didn't try to capture them all. Traditional (and I'm assuming he means print) journalists ignore the rest of the media: talk radio, cable news networks, and partisan news outlets. Journalists won't admit mistakes. They don't do proper fact checking.

After his intro, Duncan didn't really get any objections from the audience and in fact the first question was from a newspaper guy who asked how papers can collaborate with bloggers. Some suggestions were to use bloggers as stringers, to use hyperlinks, and to look at what The Raleigh News and Observer is doing with its blogs and specifically Tarheel Blogwatch. From there the conversation moved to stories of policing the media, the most memorable one involved the issue of hot topic voting machines. I must say, the blogcon format worked pretty well for this talk.

Collaboration, Jimmy Wales

The next talk was on collaboration by Jimmy Wikipedia Wales. It was a traditional presentation, not blogcon format, a complete history and status report on Wikipedia and closely related projects like WikiNews and Wiktionary.

I was most interested in the discussion of real time peer review and the techniques used to keep the wiki vandals and spammers at bay. The Wikipedia folks are able to correct damage and ban the attacker within a minute of an attack. That's great, but is pretty depressing how many people they have working on "recent changes patrol." That's why I keep the Roller wiki locked down and only give username/password access to people I know. Jimmy mentioned the need for a global blacklist of spammers and vandals and that Wikipedia is the logical place to maintain such a blacklist. Roller really needs a good blacklist (for comment/trackback spam), especially now that Jay Allen has stopped maintaining MT-Blacklist.

Tools & the Future, Dave Winer

This was an open blogcon style session centered on the question what do you want from the tools. Much of the discussion was dominated by a couple of complete newbies who just wanted things to be easier, but didn't have any concrete suggestions. That's fine I guess. It confirms what I think most folks working on blogging tools already know: ease of use and simplification are the top-priority (well, ok, maybe they come second to spam-prevention). Here are the most useful suggestions that I heard during the session.

• Ability to annotate podcasts and provide metadata
• Easy point-and-click audio and video blogging
• Automatic hyperlinks
• Built-in spell checking
• Interactive and comprehensive how-to tutorial for new bloggers
• Better directories to help us find interesting blogs
• Better ways to index and query the blogs

I don't think the blogcon format worked very well in this session. We would all have benefitted from a little better preparation and a little more steering. See also: Kevin Howarth's notes from this session.

Podcasting, Herb Everett

This session was a basic overview of podcasting. While it was interesting to hear Herb's experiences, I really didn't learn anything that I didn't already know about podcasting. Talking to some podcasters after the session I learned that the Apple iTunes tags are pretty important nowadays (but have the bugs been worked out?). I'm wondering if Roller's podcast support should include them in addition to the standard <enclosure> tag. See also: Kevin Howarth's notes from this session.

Dinner and conclusion

Saturday night, I attended one of the hosted dinners and finally got to meet Ed Cone, Greensboro blogger and one of the conference organizers. I've been reading Ed's blog ever since I discovered his Jerry Garcia interviews a couple of years back. Ed interviewed Jonathan Schwartz and Tim Bray just the other week, but didn't realize that blogs.sun.com is driven by homegrown North Carolina software.

That's it for my trip report. All and all a great experience. If you want to read more about the conference, check out conference organizer Sue Polinsky's list of posts on the topic and the Technorati tag ConvergeSouth.

Tags: ConvergeSouth, Journalism, Podcasting, Blogging

My Roller talk has been accepted for ApacheCon 2005, Dec. 10-14, 2005 in San Diego, CA. I'm planning to cover Roller features and architecture as a primer for new users and developers.

Halley Suitt: Is Foo Camp literally a circle jerk of geek boys? YUCK! That must be a heckof a mess to clean-up

Go Halley!

My second JavaOne was a great experience, but it was a little stressful because up until last night I couldn't find any of my co-speakers. I spent most of Wednesday preparing to give the whole talk by myself, but luckily for me (and the attendees), Pat and Kevin showed up just in time. Unfortunately, Pat showed up with some very bad news for us at Sun: he's leaving to work at Google.

In the end, I think the talk went pretty well. Kevin did most of Pat and my slides on syndication because we had split the talk 50-50 when we couldn't locate Pat on Wednesday night (and assumed he was still in Paris). He did a good job with the material and added in some interesting points from his experience at Rojo.com where they parse millions of feeds per hour with the Java-based Apache Commons (sandbox) FeedParser.

We were a little disappointed with the turnout. I'd be surprised if the 700+ seat Yerba Buena theater was more than 30% full. The fact that were in a lunchtime timeslot on the last day of the show certainly didn't help. Anyhow, I'm relieved that it's over and ready for a nice long week off.

Last week: wrapped up documentation and final fixes Roller 1.2 release. I'm doing the build now. Also, I was able to devote several full days of work to Roller 2.0/Group Blogging and made some real progress.

This week: JavaOne! My talk is Thursday at noon (Blogging: Feed Syndication and Publishing With Java™ Technology TS-7318).

Bruce has a great list of links about the Triangle Blogger conference. The first weekly Triangle blogger meet-up is tonight at Caffe Driade in Chapel Hill (Anton Zuiker has the details).

It's a week late, sure, but I wouldn't want to let this list of the excellent ApacheCon 2004 conference bag goodies go to waste:

Magnetic LED Flasher
Watermelon Pop Rocks
Strawberry Pop Rocks
Wonka Nerds
Alien Goo
Nerd Specs Super Eye Glasses
USB rechargeable flashlight.