Blogging Roller

I found that and another interesting article titled J2EE Open Source on O'Reilly weblogs today.  They are dated August 30th and I guess I missed them due to my narrow-minded weblog-centric surfing habits.  Anyhow... good stuff, but why does O'Reilly call those things "weblogs" they look like plain old articles to me.

Yesterday, I drove over to Chapel Hill to visit my brother and to see the movie I Am Trying To Break Your Heart.  The movie is a rockumentary about the making of Wilco's recent and critically acclaimed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (YHF) album. My nutshell review is simple: if you like Wilco you'll love it, if you don't then you might want to skip it. I loved it.

Whether or not you like Wilco, the YHF story is pretty interesting.  Wilco's record label, Warner Brothers Reprise, gave the band the freedom to make the album on their own, working in their loft, and without a producer.  Once Wilco was done with the album, the record company decided that the album was not marketable or radio friendly or whatever.  The company dropped Wilco and let the band walk away with rights to the album.  Eventually, Nonesuch Records took interest and signed Wilco. Like Warner Brothers Reprise, Nonesuch is owned by AOL Time Warner. So in the end AOL Time Warner paid for the same record twice.  

The story of record company stupidity was covered in the movie, but the movie seemed to gloss over the file sharing story.  YHF was available in MP3 format on the Wilco website for over six months before the album went on sale, but despite this and much to the surpise of the music industry middlemen the album debuted at #13 on the Billboard album charts.

In case you don't know "the Triangle" area of North Carolina is defined by the three University towns of Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh.  In the center of the Triangle is the Research Triangle Park, a sprawling reseach park that is populated with drug, bio-medical, software, and micro-electronics companies and institutions.  The Triangle has been hit hard by Bush Recession II like the rest of the country, but the Triangle Java Users Group is thriving and next month we have two, not one, but two excellent meetings planned. Mark your calendars for:

Special meeting — September 23, 2002.
J2EE Container Shootout
With representatives from: BEA, JBoss, IBM

For more info, check the Triangle JUG's website. If you are interested in attending the J2EE Container Shootout, then the JUG urges you to submit questions for the vendors to Andrew Oliver. Please read the question guidelines before submitting questions.

Russell has put a weblog front end on this SimpleWeb Wiki software. SimpleWeb is the software that runs Russell's SimpleFace user interface design and usability website. I think every Wiki should have a weblog like front-end, it draws you in and helps to build the community spirit of the site. But, should every weblog have an integrated Wiki? That is a different question. I did a little googling and found that people have been discussing the weblog-wiki intersection for some time now.

• John Udell writes "the model according to which Wikis federate is something that the blogging community could profitably study. Peter Thoeny explained it all to me once. Now I want to look into all that again."
• Bill Seitz writes "another approach would be to make a separate Wiki node for each nugget, and the WebLog would really be the RecentChanges page..." and he indicates that he has been disucssing wikis and weblogs since September 1999.
• The Wiki Weblogs page on Abbe Normal's site has a collection of Wiki Weblog links, I just added SimpleWeb.
• 0xDECAFBAD discusses "an interesting melding of weblog and wiki over at www.tesugen.com.
• Mockerybird writes "the marriage of <a href="http://mockerybird.com/index.cgi?node=wiki&ref=wiki-weblog&t=hl" class="nodelink">wiki and <a href="http://mockerybird.com/index.cgi?node=weblog&ref=wiki-weblog&t=hl" class="nodelink">weblog. In my opinion, the next logical step in weblog evolution. It allows the weblog to become even more interconnected and relevant over time."
  

I don't agree with Russell's point that blog enties just disappear when they roll off the page. The couple blog entries in the list above are proof that entries live a long life. Google, good site search, and full-screen calendars keep those old posts alive.

Seems to me that integrating a Wiki into Roller would be pretty easy.  All Roller would need are some nice macros for displaying and linking to the Wiki pages. Am I missing something here?  Is there more to it than that?  More importantly, would it be feature bloat or useful stuff?

I forgot to remove the newuser.jsp page from my Roller installation here at rollerweblogger.org and several people helped themselves to Roller accounts. Sorry guys, I removed your blogs. They were empty anyway.

Cafe au Lait is reporting that Tomcat 4.1 has been <a href= "http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-tomcat-4.0/release/v4.1.10/"> released and has provided a nice summary of the new features (see below).

• JMX based administration
• JSP and Struts based administration web application
• New Coyote HTTP/1.1 connector
• New Coyote JK2 AJP 1.3 connector
• Rewritten Jasper JSP page compiler
• Performance and memory efficiency improvements
• Enhanced manager application support for integration with
development tools
• Custom Ant tasks to interact with the manager application directly from the build.xml scripts

Time to do some Roller benchmarking again.

Not a lot of time for blogging or web surfing today. I am working on a old model-1 JSP app and my deadline is rapidly approaching. To give you an idea of my feelings towards model-1 JSP apps, I have temporarily brought some of my original art, a short film known only as Vomit Boy, out of retirement (on the bottom right part of this page). As you can see, I am a multi-talented individual. Maybe I can make some money this way - hey, it works for <a href= "http://www.cafeshops.com/cp/store.aspx?s=boingboing">Mr. Frauenfelder.

Tonight, I'm working on moving the Roller Roadmap into <a href= "http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/Dashboard.jspa"> JIRA.

I have changed all of the 'Bugs' links on this and the other Roller pages to point to JIRA, but I was not able to disable the bug tracker at SourceForge. If you know how to do this, please tell me the trick.

Jeff Duska has posted his thoughts on the future of Roller. He has some interesting ideas on CMS-like features and slick client-side blogging UIs for the roadmap.

And Jeff: I should have told you to use macros.showEntryPermalink(entry) - my bad.

Yesterday I woke up to find an AIM message from Mike Cannon-Brooks offerering to set up JIRA for Roller issue and bug tracking. Today, I woke up to find an AIM message on the screen from Mike informing me that he has set us up and that he has already entered our SourceForge bugs into the system. This is awesome! Take a look:

• <a href= "http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/Dashboard.jspa"> Roller Issues and Bugs - powered by JIRA
• <a href= "http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?pid=10000&tempMax=25&view=rss&reset=true"> RSS feed for Roller Issues and Bugs - powered by JIRA

Thanks Mike and thanks to Atlassian. This will make it much easier for us to manage and prioritize our "roadmap" feature list and our bugs. From what I've seen, I think we will also learn a little about good user-interface design in the process.

Anthony Eden has a unique perspective on Roller because he is running a website that supports over 40 Roller users. He is our biggest customer and he needs better admin tools.

<a href= "http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd/20020903#the_future_of_roller"> Matt mentioned the idea of adding an option for drop-down menus in the Editor UI and mentioned StrutsMenu. Some time ago, I looked at StrutsMenu and it did not do quite what I wanted to to, so I set about creating a generic JSP menu tag using an MVC architecture. The Roller MenuTag reads the menu configuration from an <a href= "http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/roller/roller/deploy/WEB-INF/editor-menu.xml?rev=1.9&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup"> XML file and then calls a <a href= "http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/roller/roller/src/org/roller/presentation/tags/menu/tabbed.tpl?rev=1.2&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup"> Velocity script to render the menu.

So, creating a new drop-down menu should be as simple as writing a new Velocity script to spit out the right code to invoke CoolMenu or Hiermenu or what have you.

Looking back, I probably should have used Struts Menu as a base for my work, but I wanted to try out the ideas in Gregory Gerard's article on Accelerating JSP Tag Development with Jakarta Velocity

<a href= "http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd/20020903#the_future_of_roller"> Matt Raible responded with his thoughts on Roller and the things he is interested in developing. I'm really looking forward to the UI enhancements he wants to do.

It is really cool to hear what people are interested in doing both on the Roller dev list and on the blogs, because there are so many things that just would not have entered my mind if I had been working alone. I know the middle pretty well, Servlets and JSP, but my knowledge of the back-end database stuff and the front-end browser/XHTML stuff is pretty minimal. I'm learning a lot from the Roller contributors and I'm grateful.

As you can see, I'm proudly displaying Rebelutionary's stylin' new java.blog logo at the top of my page.

Read at ZDNet <a href= "http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2878365,00.html"> Part 1 and <a href= "http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2878628,00.html"> Part 2. I like what he had to say about Java, Solaris, and the future of Sun. <a href= "http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2878648,00.html"> Here is a ZDNet analysis of the interview. via <a href= "http://www.javalobby.org/thread.jsp?forum=61&thread=4962"> JavaLobby.[Karl Martino - paradox1x]

I'm back at work after the 3-day Labor Day weekend. I have not gotten much response to my three questions for Roller users and developers, but that's OK. I need to collect the various feature requests that folks have emailed in or posted.

It's good for the Java world to have a solid blog alternative, I hope for more great things from Roller! [Roller 0.9.5 - Rebelutionary]

Thanks for the kind words!

What with everyone talking about SnipSnap I'm wondering if we should strive to have the same features (me too, me too) or if there are avenues where we can strike some innovation. So far the Roadmap reads either like a list of "things Roller must have to be a real blogger tool" or a list of "things Roller must do because others have done them." Which do we want to be? [ Lance Lavandowska - Roller wins praise]

Those are good questions. If you are interested in using or working on Roller, I'd be interested in hearing your answers to the following questions:

1) What do you want Roller to be?

I'd like Roller to be a great weblogging system, website builder, an innovative communications tool, and a J2EE best-practices example app. Wiki features certainly fit into that sort of charter. But Roller's direction is going to be determined by what I and other contributors are motivated to do, which brings me to question #2:

2) What are you interested in working on?

Right now, I'm motivated to work on the newsfeed aggregator, to add a simple commenting system, and to add trackback-like referrer tracking. What about you?

3) What features would you like to see added to Roller?

The Roller roadmap is my answer to this question, but the roadmap is really more of an unprioritized wish-list. Help us build and prioritize the roadmap by letting us know what you wish for in Roller.

Matt Raible has successfully upgraded to Roller 0.9.5. The problems that Matt encountered were minor: a couple of Installation Guide mistakes and a problem with the Roller 0.9.4 to Roller 0.9.5 database migration script. At this point, I don't think a Roller 0.9.5.1 release is necessary. If you are going to try Roller 0.9.5 please be aware of the following caveats:

• Use the online version of the Installation Guide instead of the one that comes with the Roller download.
• If you are doing a Roller 0.9.4 to Roller 0.9.5 migration, contact us on the roller-user list and we will hook you up with the right database migration script and we will try to walk you through the migration process.

I've always been interested in UI design, but I have never been very good at it. My previous UI development experience involved Windows via MFC and Java via Swing. Webapp UI design is quite a different beast and I would like to (at a minimum) understand the basics. So I searched around a came up with a couple of key links:

• UseIT - Jakob Nielsen
• Dive into Accessibility - Mark Pilgrim
• Microsoft MSDN's User Interface page
• IBM DevWork's Usability page

And a couple of books:

• <a href= "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0789723107/104-2810709-4065544"> Don't Make Me Think - Krug and Black
• <a href= "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/156205810X/104-2810709-4065544"> Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity - Neilsen
• <a href= "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0789723700/104-2810709-4065544"> The Art and Science of Web Design - Veen
• <a href= "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596001967/104-2810709-4065544"> Web Design in a Nutshell - Niederst

Those books seem to emphasize website UI design more than webapp UI design. I'm more intested in creating usable web apps than in creating beautiful web sites. If you have some other website and book recommendations for webapp UI design, I'd like to hear about them.