Blogging Roller

I just submitted ApacheCon EU 2006 to Dave Warlick's cool new Hitchhikr.com service, a conference aggregator that pulls together posts from Technorati and other services so that folks can "hitch-hike" to conferences via the web. Here's the ApacheCon EU landing page. So, if you're blogging about ApacheCon EU 2006, please use the tags apacheconeu2006, apachecon2006 or apachecon so the hitchhikr's (and others) can tag along.

Nick Bradbury: when I'm coding away like a madman, I don't blog (or do much of anything else!)

That's what happens to me too. For me it's this -- do I blog about the blog software I'm developing or do I continue to code? If I blog about those cool new Roller 3.0 features I'm working on, perhaps I won't finish them in time to get them into Roller 3.0. Fortunately for my blog, a mega-thunderstorm just rolled in and it's bad enough that I've shutdown my w2100z, unplugged my UPS and moved out to the porch to catchup on email and blogs.

So regarding Nick's topic of coding like a cowboy I'll say this: it's a lot more fun to just start coding and sometimes it works best to lay-down some code up-front, but if you want to work with others you need at least a little process. On Roller, we've got a pretty light process. We require that folks write proposals for features they want to add and each must include a brief requirements statement and an outline of the design. But the purpose of a proposal isn't to carve the design in stone, it's to provoke discussions, reviews and arguments about the best way to do the work. So you can code like a cowboy, but you'd better coordinate with the other cowboys so you don't run the herd off of a cliff. You know, like the lazy-consensus cowboys of days gone by.

If you want to see what those Roller-dev proposals look like, take a look at the three we're doing for Roller 3.0: New "Atlas" front-page, New URL structure and New Atlas Macros/Models. And if you want to learn more about Roller features, architecture, project status and future plans, then attend my talk next week at ApacheCon EU next week in Dublin.

The storm has passed by now. Back to work.

OMG! Roumen Strobl is taking the tech evangelist blog/caster deal to a whole new level. I think it's pretty clear now that Skerret and Scoble don't hold a candle to Strobl.

Joe Gregorio is looking for a new job. I bet he'll quickly find one, better than the last. For the sake of the annual RTPBloggers lunch, I hope it's here in the Triangle.

For more info, see the wiki.

WCF RSS Toolkit tutorial: The WCF RSS Toolkit is a Windows Communication Foundation-based framework for generating RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 content feeds. Using this toolkit, developers can easily expose a service as an RSS or Atom feed. The toolkit supports exposing a service as an RSS 2.0 feed, Atom 1.0 feed and SOAP endpoint simultaneously. The toolkit can also be extended to support other wire formats.

The announcement is here. We held up the book (yes, this is shameless plug day on Blogging Roller) to cover the Windows RSS platform and now this, the server side of equation. Don't tell Manning about it or my summer will be ruined.

According to Dare, the toolkit could be used to build WebDAV or an Atom protocol implementation, so it's all about REST. But wait, it supports SOAP too.

Like the IBM press release in my previous post, I can't figure this one out. The download includes a small amount of C# code but no docs, not even a README, and no indication of the license. Is it just a one-off proof-of-concept, an official WCF API or what? And what does this effort have to do with the server-side feed syndication platform that Niall is supposed to be building for Microsoft.

IBM press release: Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of emerging Internet technologies, declared that the technologies underpinning blogs, wikis and innovative sites like Google Maps and Wikipedia on the Web will transform the way productivity applications are developed...

...IBM's Enterprise Mashup blends external information and web services (e.g., news feeds, weather reports, maps, traffic conditions and more) with enterprise content and services, instantly "mashing" them together to create a fast, flexible and affordable application for specific business needs. Mashup, derived from the hip-hop practice of mixing song samples, are a website or applications that combine content from more than one source into an integrated user application using open technologies like Ajax, PHP and syndicated feeds (RSS or ATOM).

Nice to see IBM paying homage to blogs, wikis and feeds: the web 2.0 building blocks, but the press release is a bit nebulous. It's hard to tell if Smith is discussing an actual product, a "mashup server" as James Govenor put it, consulting services or just making reference to various IBM Web 2.0™ initiatives. If it is a server, I wonder if it's the effort that spawned the Abdera project.

Alex and I made the jump from Steve Jackson mini-games to our first full-blown wargame tonight with my old copy of Panzer Blitz.

We've been putting the final touches on RSS and Atom in Action this week and now I've actually got some dates for you: e-book release July 3 and print-book release on July 21. Hard to believe, but this time we're done for real.

This weekend, I've got to package up the examples. So you can expect the final Blogapps 1.0 release some time next week. Atom protocol fans will be happy to hear that the Atom Blogapps server and client implementations have been updated to support Atom protocol draft 8 + the new PaceMediaEntries5 proposal, which appears to have strong consensus.

Update: Blogapps server v1.0-rc1 (37mb tar.gz) and Blogapps examples v1.0-rc1 (10mb tar.gz) are available for testing.

Tropical Storm Alberto dumped a lot of rain on us yesterday. Normally I don't worry about flooding, since I'm on a hill, but we had 4-5 inches of water flowing through the backyard for a couple of hours. I waded out and took a couple of photos for Andi since she's at the beach. Also, WRAL's has a nice slideshow of Alberto-hits-the-Triangle photos.

And speaking product-oriented bloggers, the Open Solaris community is having a blog birthday party tomorrow to celebrate the first anniversary of the community launch. Hard to believe it's been a year. Check out the community metrics page to see how the community is doing.

Business blogging superstar Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft and that means it's time to warn folks again about those out-of-control bloggers, lament the loss of our last example of a productive business blogger and worry about the end of honest corporate blogging. Balderdash I say!

Are stars like Scoble of Microsoft or Schwartz of Sun the most important part of the corporate blogging value proposition? Stars speak to a broad audience and that's important, but the value of corporate blogging is that the "the people who are really doing the work tell the story to the world, directly" as Tim Bray wrote in his July 2005 piece on The New Public Relations. The thousands of employee bloggers and product-oriented bloggers that help build community around a company's products, services and initiatives are where the big value is -- especially for development platform companies like Microsoft and Sun.

Some good examples of product-oriented bloggers at Sun are The Aquarium, a group blog devoted to Java EE, Roumen Strobl, a Netbeans evangelist, and Tor Norbye of Java Creator and Java Posse podcast fame.

I'll be speaking about Atom format and protocol at the Tri-XML 2006 conference in Raleigh on Saturday July 29, 2006. I won't even have to miss  a day of work. Here are the presentation summaries -- hope I won't get in trouble for using he phrase Web 2.0 in my  summary.

User reviews and ratings are now live in the Sun online store. You can review and rate products like the Sun Fire T2000. Cool stuff, very Web 2.0 and all that, but I've got an RFE [Read More]

When: First and third Tuesdays of every month at 6:30PM
Where: Cafe Cyclo in Cameron Village (Map)

   Cafe Cyclo
   2020 Cameron St
   Raleigh, NC 27605
   (919) 829-3773

Check the new Raleigh Bloggers Wiki for more details.

I'm in the market for a new laptop and I've been thinking about doing the very same thing that Mark Pilgrim just did, switching from a Mac to a Linux laptop. I wasn't thinking about Freedom 0 so much as I was thinking about my lap and my wallet. I don't want to burn a hole in either one. I've read too many blog entries about Mac Books running too hot, too loud or not running at all. And all the while, I've been seeing rave reviews of Ubuntu everywhere I look.

I don't want to give up on Macs altogether. I like the multimedia stuff like iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto and GarageBand, but I don't necessarily need those on my laptop. I can buy a Mac Mini for that stuff. I use my laptop for work and everything I need for development would run just fine on Ubuntu or maybe even Solaris/x86 (see Sun's HCL and the one at Bolthole.com). What I need is speed, Java, Netbeans and sometimes Open Office (which I know will run better on Linux). Clearly I need to do some research. Are the Mac Books really too hot and flakey? Will be savings be significant? Will wifi and sleep-mode work as flawlessly on Linux as with Mac OS, what about Solaris? Will I be able to live without NetNewsWire?

ApacheCon.com blog: It’s only a few days left until June 6th, the deadline for the Early Bird Discount! Sign up today and save 220 EUR to be part of the ultimate Apache experience in Europe.

ApacheCon Europe 2006 will be held at the Burlington Hotel in Dublin, Ireland, June 26-30, 2006. The conference offers more than 70 top-quality sessions and 20 tutorials covering the whole spectrum of Apache projects and technologies.

We look forward to seeing you in Dublin.

I just signed up for BarCampRDU in Raleigh, July 22, 2006 on the NC State campus (at Red Hat HQ). That's the week before Tri-XML 2006, also at NC State. I'm signing-up for that one too.

• Ubuntu's Dapper Drake
  "easiest install of any operating system I've ever installed"
• Red Hat Summit, pt 1
  Joe Barr on the second annual Red Hat Summit in Nashville, Tennessee.
• Red Hat Summit, pt 2
  Joe Barr: Day 2 keynotes at the Red Hat Summit
• Red Hat Summit, pt 3
  Red Hat Summit sessions educate, stimulate
• Working with the Google Web Toolkit
  "GWT takes Java code [and] converts it into browser-runnable Ajax code"
• W.W.B.D.
  T-shirt for Micro$ofties: "What Would Bill Do"
• Jon Udell: Earth to Google PR
  "We don't have a product called Gdata that I'm aware of....."
• Verisign Personal Identity Provider
  "I was able to successfully log in to LiveJournal, LifeWiki.net, Zooomr and OpenID using my OpenID credentials"
• Firefox plugins on Solaris/X86
  Flash, Java Acrobat, Real Player, Plugger, MPlayer
• Gnoos: The Other Blog Search Engine That Launched Yesterday
  "Each result (a blog post) can be commented on at Gnoos, and rated."
• Finally! Bloglines Blog Search
  "Bloglines has been the subject of a considerable number of jokes over the last year"

Jonathan Schwartz: you'll see something very interesting next week start to appear on Sun's web pages and throughout our on-line store. You'll start to see product reviews written by users. You'll see user defined ratings, right on our products. Just like book or product reviews at Amazon. We're starting with just a few products, but it'll ultimately extend all the way up to our highest end enterprise offerings.

In other words, the on-line store is getting the Web 2.0™ upgrade.