Blogging Roller

If I don't take a break from Roller development tonight, my wife will kill me. Oh sh*t, she saw me. Gotta run...

This is a release candidate. The Installation Guide has been updated, but the User Guide remains to be updated for the final 0.9.6 release. You can download Roller 0.9.6-rc1 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!). And finally, thanks to all the Roller contributors and supporters!

UPDATE: Here are some more convenient download links:

roller-0.9.6-rc1.tar.gz - All you need to run Roller (on Tomcat)
roller-src-0.9.6-rc1.tgz - Full source code, build scripts, etc.
roller-tools-0.9.6-rc1.tgz - Jars needed to build, extract into source dir

Summary of new features:

   Multi-user :
   - Admin UI for deleting users
   - Better start page: pages through users, shows time of last update
   - Allow users to change their email addresses and passwords
   - Plugin authenticator
   
   Weblog editing enhancements:
   - Ekit HTML editor applet is available as an option to users
   - Option to save weblog entries without publishing them
   - Better control over weblog entry publish date
   
   New and improve macros:
   - Protection from recursion in includePage and showWeblogEntries macros   
   - Big archive calendar macro shows titles for each day
   - Expand/collapse feature in Bookmark and Newsfeed macros
   - Users can control number of weblog entries displayed
   - New macros, including those necessary for RSS templating
   
   RSS related features:
   - Multiple RSS feeds for each weblog, one for each category
   - RSS feeds available with full-text or excerpts only
   - RSS aggregation features may now be disabled
   - RSS syndication output is now cached

I think 0.9.6-rc1 looks pretty good, so I will probably update the install guide, and release it tomorrow night. Later in the week I'll try to do some stress tests, some memory leak tests, and wrap up the user guide for a final 0.9.6 release.

Roller now supports all the right macros for RSS templating. For example, I was able to take Mark Pilgrim's RSS 2.0 template for Movable Type and convert to a Roller template to get RSS 2.0 output from Roller.

All systems go! Now it's time to add some of the new features to my templates and to do a little tweaking. I'll start my tweakings with the new big archive calendar.

A little later... Now that Roller allows you to put macros in weblog entries, mentioning the macros.showWeblogEntries() macro in a weblog entry as I did on <a href= "http://www.rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/20020927#macros_to_support_rss_templating"> 9/27/2002 is the recursive kiss of death. I think I can use a thread local storage trick to prevent this and the macros.include() page recursion. Guess that means RC2. Correction: guess that means I have some work to do before I actually release RC1.

Here is a cool new one: macros.showRSSLinks() displays links for the various types of RSS 0.9.1 feeds available from your weblog. Roller now gives you two feeds per category, one with full text and one with excerpts. You can even invoke it in a weblog entry, see:

$macros.showRSSLinks()

Ok, so the formatting is not that nice and it does not get expanded in the RSS feed. Hmmm...

Russell Beattie has had a tough week, but he is OK - at least in the physical world. In the digital world of cyberspace, however, he is not doing so well. First, he lost his client by accidentally installing Linux over his Windows partition. Next, he lost his server because his ISP, CWIHosting.com, has mysteriously shut down his account. CWIHosting tells him this is because of "police reasons." The CWIHosting support people told him that he needs to email the CTO and CEO to get any further information. Unfortunately, they are not responding to his emails. He is a little worried that he might not be allowed to get into his account and rescue his weblog archives. That is a scary thought.

Russell thinks that "police reasons" might be actually be a mis-spelling of "policy reasons" and perhaps he simply overloaded his shared Java VM by misconfiguring something when he set up OSCache. I hope that is the case. Anyway, Russell is setting up a new account at JohnCompanies.com ISP and hopes to be back on line by Monday or Tuesday. Good luck Russell!

Russell Beattie's site has been down for a day or so. I hope everything is OK. Anybody know what is going on?

Last minute features and fixes are underway for Roller 0.9.6. Stay tuned!

OSCache does in fact rock. And it rocks even if you are not using JSPs, as I have mentioned before. Roller pages don't use JSP and they are still able to take advantage of OSCache goodness.

The Mozilla Composite Editor works pretty well, but it seems to eat some spaces every once andawhile (see what I mean) . I have also had intermittent problems getting it's link editor to work. The editor is only at version 0.0.5,so I have confidence that it will be fixed and will eventually become my editor of choice.

I've been using the Ekit editor, but it has some problems as well. The main problem with Ekit is the Java Plugin. The Java Plugin is just not that stable, at least not on Mozilla 1.1. Every third or forth time I hit the post button to submit a weblog edit, Mozilla locks up! I wonder if this is a JRE 1.3.1/WinXP/Mozilla specific issue. Has anybody else(hi Matt and  Russell) experienced such flakeyness on other platforms?

With this idea in place, we would single-handedly and instantly capture the entire blogging market [...] Husband and wife Ben and Mena Trott, creators of the perl-based Movable Type, are going to be like deer in headlights when Skribe moves Movable Type over into the junkyard! [a post from the Skribe dev forum]

That is some tough talk for a project whose CVS archive is empty.

Wow, that looks cool! I'm editing this post with it now. Very nice.

Here is one for the reading queue: Jeff Lowery's new OnJava article about Castor JDO.

Scott: Hey! I clicked the Next button below your calendar, but it failed to show me tomorrows blog! I want tomorrow's news today! What gives? I did enjoy the "There are four lights" title to one of your blurbs, though. It made me snicker. Or snigger. Or whatever.

Dave: What is so friggin funny about "There are four lights?"

Scott: I snickered (sniggered) because of the four lights that always shine on "four lights the clown." Don't tell me you don't know about old "four lights!" He's the funniest clown around, save Lemons.

Dave: Mark Pilgrim seems to like torture people with obscure literary and pop-culture references. I could find nothing about four lights the clown, but I did find this StarTrek TNG reference.

Scott: I thought that it was you, not Mr. Pilgrim, that decided on the "four lights" blurb title.  Of course there's no "Four Lights the Clown!" Of course I knew it was a STNG reference. That's why I thought it was so great -- because of the wonderful obscurity, yet definite applicability, of the blurb title. Four Lights the Clown. Heh heh.

Dave: now who is applying the torture?

Why does www.websphere-world.com run on PHP? Shouldn't they be eating their own dogfood? And yes, I know they are not affiliated with IBM.

Looks like Hugh Brian is experimenting with combining the Roller weblogger, the Chiki wiki, and the Jetspeed portal to form a corporate website. Looks like a useful combo and it looks like a fun project. I hope he will give the Roller project some feedback and tell us how we can help to make this sort of integration easier.

BTW, I don't know Hugh, but he popped up in my referrers log this morning. Now you know why Roller does not have a referrers feature yet: I've still got a valid Radio account.

I attended this J2EE shootout. I was the person that asked the question about JDO. [...] I also spoke to some of the other speakers. In general, the people were not knowledgeable at all about JDO, they did not have a JDO solution to offer, so they dodged the question. I also got the impression that these EJB vendors simply viewed JDO is minor competition. The fact that JDO can be used with their existing products seemed surprising to some of them. [JDO expert Dave Jordan, from a JDO Central thread].

It has been one year since Mark Pilgrim took a stand for his right to write online and lost his job for doing so.

"The IDE from BEA is very difficult. It isn't the traditional IDE that most Java developers are used to working in, with an editor, compiler, debugger-type of tool," Murphy said. WebLogic Workshop is oriented toward Visual Basic programmers, while TogetherSoft offers a traditional J2EE development, he said. [ InfoWorld, BEA, TogetherSoft partner...]

Wait a minute here, the IDE from BEA is both "very difficult" and "oriented toward Visual Basic programmers?" That sounds like a bit of a problem, doesn't it? I'm sure adding some UML tools is the key to dumbing it down to VB level... not! I do hope TogetherSoft can straighten those BEA guys out.

Turns out, there is a Perforce plugin for Eclipse! It is called P4Eclipse. I just installed it and it looks awesome, even though it is only a v0.0.8 release.