Blogging Roller

Those in the Triangle area, don't forget the Eclipse presentation at the Websphere Users Group meeting tonight.

Carlos likes the new Roller start page and suggests a much needed enhancement: a spellchecker. Also, Carlos noticed that cut-and-paste do not work in the <a href= "http://www.rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/20020920#we_now_resume_our_normally">Ekit HTML editor. You can fix that by putting the ekitapplet.jar in your JRE's lib/ext directory so that it is trusted and thereby allowed to cut-and-paste.

Wow, freeroller has been upgraded! I love the latest front page. . Finally, I can see at a glance which webblogs have a lot of viewership. As expected Rickard's one is on the top of the list. Speaking about improvements to Roller, I saw the otherday Jazzy an LGPL spellchecker written in Java. oh no...looks like this editor blew away what I was writing, furthermore, cut and paste doesn't seem to work.[<a href= "http://www.freeroller.net/page/ceperez/20021024#roller_improvements_and_freeroller_upgrade">Carlos E. Perez]

I'm not sure why Ekit blew away Carlos' writing, but I have noticed that the Java plugin can be pretty unstable. On my work machine, Mozilla locks up just about every other time I post with Ekit but on my home machine (same OS, same JVM, and same Mozilla versions) I never see this problem.

Granted that I have not really been following this story since the Apache Sun relationship first blew up, this sounds like an important story:

"Starting Tuesday, it will be mandatory that licenses provide for the possibility of a clean-room implementation," said Onno Kluyt, manager of the JCP Program Office. "A specification leader must offer a test suite independently of the reference implementation. It is required, going forward, that the test suite be available free of charge so that organizations like Apache don't face the hurdle of a license fee." [eWeek: Java Licensing Changes Will Open Door to Open Source]

In response to Russell's dot-net rantations, Kevin O'Neill and Rafe Colburn listed some advantages of Java and J2EE over C# and Dot-Net.  I agree with many of the points on those lists.  I think that Java's cross-platform portability and huge collection of competing open source and commercial dev tools, runtimes, and servers give Java a tremendous advantage.  Even with this advantage, Sun is going to have to push Java hard, fix the problems and open things up even more.

Russell said some pretty nice things about Dot-Net in his most recent anti-Microsoft rant, take a look:

• I've got some old coworkers and blog pals who are doing some really cool stuff with Dot-Net
• Many of the dumb ass things in Java have been fixed [by Dot-Net]
• [Dot-Net] means that you can program in any "language" that you want
• [Dot-Net Studio] is still the best IDE there is
• [Dot-Net's] WindowsForms kicks Swing's ass
• In as little as 4 or 5 years, Java could be a niche language like COBOL
• [The Dot-Net] CLR is going to be faster on M$OSes than the JVM

This sounds like a pretty bad situation for us Java advocates. Versions of our favorite open source Java tools are being ported to C#. The GNOME folks are working feverishly to port C# and the CLR to UNIX. To top it all, the chairman of our revered Jakarta Project is a <a href= "http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2002/Oct/08#x892">Dot-Net blogger.

My thoughts on this? Nobody knows who what technologies will win out in the short term or in the long term so my advice to you is: hedge your bets.

After reviewing the video of the Triangle JUG's J2EE Container Shootout, Andy Oliver has posted his summary. <a href= "http://www.superlinksoftware.com/cgi-bin/jugwiki.pl?OutSummary">Andy's summary of the shootout is much more detailed than the one I posted last month. He has written up five of the questions so far and promises to get to the rest soon.

Like <a href= "http://www.dominicdasilva.com/index.do?date=20021026#130147">Dominic, I have no idea what "Greenbaum" means. So Rickard, please dumb-down your sniper conspiracy theory a little so that us under-educated Americans can understand it.

Roller 0.9.6's referer tracker already ignored hits from pages in the same weblog, now <a href= "http://brainopolis.dnsalias.com/roller/page/lance/">Lance has added an ignoreHosts option so that a Roller admin can configure Roller to ignore hits from different hosts. That is cool, but I want a little mre control over what should be ignored. For example, I got hits today from file://<some file path>/penis.htm today. Ouch!

I think the Roller referer tracker needs a both ignoreStartsWith and ignoreContaining parameters (each being a list). You could use ignoreStartsWith to ignore hits from your own host, other hosts, and from protocols such as file: or mailto:. You could use ignoreContaining to ignore hits coming in from URLs containing certain keywords.

Searching on ignoring referers I found an interesting post from Mark Pilgrim about <a href= "http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/03/04.html#full_disclosure">an old Manila bug and the importance of properly escaping HTML displayed from referers. I think I need to address this issue in both the Roller Editor UI and macros.showReferers().

FreeRoller.net and now Matt Raible have upgraded to Roller 0.9.6.1. There is also a <a href= "http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/roller/roller-0.9.6.2.tar.gz?download">Roller 0.9.6.2 release that fixes one additional glitch. The release looks good and I encourage you to upgrade now if you want to try all the new Roller features.

Matt and I have noticed one small problem with Roller's RSS output. If you have HTML in your Roller website description or in your weblog entry titles, you may produce an invalid RSS feed. A later Roller 0.9.6.x release will fix this problem by removing all HTML from website description and weblog entry title elements in the RSS output.

<a href= "http://www.freeroller.net/page/shemnon/20021024#roller_upgrade_thank_s_anthony">Danno Ferrin commented on the new Roller features today. He likes the HTML editor, the new validating RSS2 feeds, and the referers macro.

UPDATE: Roller 0.9.6 looks good and <a href= "http://www.freeroller.net">FreeRoller.net is up and running with it.

I'm happy to announce the release of The Roller Weblogger Version 0.9.6. This release adds better support for multi-user sites like FreeRoller, lots of weblog editing enhancements, new macros, valid RSS 2.0 output, and support for creating pages that validate as HTML 4 or XHTML1. Also, <a href= "http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/BrowseProject.jspa?id=10000&report=changelog">lots of bugs were fixed. Thanks to committers Lance Lavandowska (LL) and Matt Raible (MR). Thanks to all the folks who participated on the devlist, reported bugs, as well as those who made suggestions and complaints regarding Roller. Special thanks go to my darling wife who puts up with all of this nonsense.

You can download Roller 0.9.6 at SourceForge (thanks VA Software!). Make your contribution to Roller by reporting any problems that you find to Roller's <a href= "http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/BrowseProject.jspa"> JIRA issue tracker (thanks <a href= "http://www.atlassian.com">Atlassian!).

Here are some more convenient download links:

<a href= "http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/roller/roller-0.9.6.2.tar.gz?download"> roller-0.9.6.2.tar.gz - All you need to run Roller (on Tomcat)

Summary of new features:

   Multi-user :    
   - Admin UI for deleting users (LL)
   - New start page with sortable table of all weblogs on the site (LL)
   - Referer ranking table, page and RSS hit counter in Editor UI (DJ)
   - Plugin authenticator (DJ)
   
   Weblog editing enhancements:
   - Option to save weblog entries without publishing them (LL)
   - Better control over weblog entry publish date (LL)
   - Supports creation of websites that validate as HTML4 or XHTML1 (MR)
   - Ekit HTML editor applet is available as an option to users (DJ)
   - Mitchell's DHTML editor now available as an option to IE users (LL)
   
   New and improved macros:
   - Referer ranking macro with page and RSS hit counter (DJ)
   - Big Calendar macro shows month-view with entries for each day (DJ)
   - Control over number of weblog entries displayed (DJ)
   - Protection from recursion in includePage and showWeblogEntries (DJ)
   - Expand/collapse feature in Bookmark and Newsfeed macros (MR)
   
   RSS related features:
   - Syndicator now outputs RSS 2.0 (DJ)
   - Multiple RSS feeds for each weblog, one for each category (DJ)
   - RSS feeds available with full-text or excerpts only (DJ)
   - RSS aggregation features may now be disabled (DJ)

The User Guide has not yet been updated, but it will be.

Neil Eyde has released a <a href= "http://www.eyde.net/index.do?date=20021021#204547">new version of PersonalBlog, his Struts/Tiles implementation of Russell Beattie's MiniBlog. It also includes the Mitchell HTML editor.

Now I'm testing the Ekit editor. Looks good! This time I'll comment on Russell's comment about the "whiny biatches out there in blogland" who complain about Jakarta.  Right on Russell!  I totally agree.  The good stuff produced by Apache and Jakarta far outweighs the bad.  Every big organization is going to have politics and a jackass or two, that's just human nature.

I'm testing Mitchell's IE-only WYSIWYG HTML editor.  Anthony Eden reported a bug, I fixed it, and now you are reading the test data.  While I'm here I'm comment on The Server Side's new RSS feeds: it's about time!  I'm not going to complain that they do not validate because the RSS validator just came online today and because I'm just happy to have more RSS feeds.  Now it is your turn Cafe au Lait: give us some feeds and give us some permalinks!  Please?

This is a brand new RSS validator, built from the ground up to support all versions of RSS (but optimized for RSS 2.0). Previous efforts (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0) were either not comprehensive, or not user-friendly; this validator attempts to be both. The interactive web front end is available now; XML-RPC, SOAP, and XML-over-HTTP interfaces are coming. Concept, web design, and 300 test cases by me. Coding by Sam Ruby. And of course it's open source.[<a href= "http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/10/22.html#rss_validator">diveintomark.org]

Awesome! Roller 0.9.6's RSS feed <a href="http://feeds.archive.org/validator/check.cgi?url=http://www.rollerweblogger.org/rss/roller ">validates as RSS 2.0! Thanks to Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby for this much needed new service!

As Bruce Loebrich notes, the RTP Bloggers group had it's October lunch today at Sarah's Empanadas in the RTP and a very nice lunch it was. That's Research Triangle Park for all a y'all folks who ain't familiar with the old north state.

The other day, Matt Raible wrote to tell me that my weblog which claimed via DOCTYPE to be XHTML, would not validate as XHTML. Then I realized that it wouldn't even validate as HTML. It was nothing, a jumbled mess of angle-brackets and unquoted attributes. How embarrassing. I tried to fix this yesterday, but the best I could do was HTML 4.01 Transitional. Still, it is nice to validate as something.

Roller's RssServlet now supports RSS 2.0. By default, Roller spits out RSS in the Radio style with escaped HTML content in the description element and no content element. If you pass an excerpts=true request parameter to the servlet, then it spits out RSS in Movable Type style (or is that Pilgrim style?) with a short excerpt of the content in the description element and the full content in the content tag. Thanks to Mark Pilgrim for the RSS 2.0 template.

Also, Roller now includes current day referer, page hit, and RSS hit tracking. There is a new page in the Editor UI that diplays referers in a page-able table and there is a macro for displaying the top N referers on your page. You can see the output of the macro on the bottom right of this page. I'm not sure if this is enough to earn me a Dave Rules!, but it is equivalent to the referer ranking functionality that you get with Radio.

Final release of 0.9.6 is imminent.

Senator John McCain hosted Saturday Night Live last night and played a role in just about every skit. McCain did a great job playing the role of gruff-voiced Attorney General John Ashcroft. One of his lines was something like this: "we will not be safe until every American has a barcode tatooed on his neck and a chip in this foreheard that responds to this remote control." The Ashcroft wig was spot-on as well.

Aslak: I have moved my blog: http://rinkrank.blog-city.com/
<a href= "http://radio.weblogs.com/0109827/2002/10/19.html#a1155">Brett: And where the hell is the RSS feed?

Good question. It appears that <a href= "http://www.n-ary.com/blog/overview/features.cfm">blog-city does not support RSS. I think Aslak is just afraid of having a blog that is powered by Java and XDoclet ;-)