Blogging Roller

Search was broken in Roller 1.1, so we'll be releasing Roller 1.1.1 later today to fix that.

Update: the Roller 1.1.1 bits are available, see the Roller project blog.

As usual Josh has the details. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to make it tonight, but all a y'all IBM bloggers in the area, set free by your corporate masters, should definitely show up. Josh (an IBM'er) will want some company and Cyclo is a nice little place with outdoor seating, good coffee, smoothies and fine Vietnamese cuisine.

Andy Wismar is relieved that IBM finally has a blog policy. I can understand that.

I was a little disappointed in the news about IBM's new policy, but that's only because I was anticipating "the largest ever corporate blogging initiative." I shoulda known better than to believe a blog I'd never seen before. I'm not disappointed in the policy itself. I think it's basically sound. It's a little on the conservative side, but hey, what do you expect from IBM?

Sun's Tim Bray comments on some of the differences between Sun and IBM's policy.

Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo thinks IBM's new policy is a set-back for IBM bloggers.

I'm celebrating something of a milestone tonight: I've finished the first draft -- or "sloppy copy" as my eight year old calls it -- of RSS and Atom in Action. I've still got some serious work ahead, but the end is in sight. To celebrate, I'm going to bed before midnight.

Sun's Allen Gilliland has joined the Roller project. Allen is co-worker of mine on the Sun Web Platform Engineering (WPE) team. He designed, developed and contributed a sweet new metadata driven configuration system for Roller. After submitting codedrops for about a month, he was nominated and voted in last week. Welcome Allen!

A complete manuscript is less than a week away. Of course, I have some major revisions queued up and, as of today, a new draft of the Atom Publishing Protocol spec to contend with. On first read, the new Atom protocol spec looks good and I like the way introspection and collections work. It's going to take some work to update my Atom client and server implementations, but now's the time -- I need them both for chapter 8.

And note the new title and the new cover (in the sidebar): RSS and Atom in Action.

CNET thinks HP is going to beat Sun to podcasting. Not so fast! Bloggers at Sun have had podcasting infrastructure in place since early this year when Sun launched mediacast.sun.com, a place for Sun employees to share "media files of all types," and added support for RSS enclosures to Roller. Jonathan Schwartz's inaugural podcast was in March 2005.

Wouldn't it be awesome if you could just apt-get, pkg-get or emerge Java^TM on your favorite open source *nix platform? Wouldn't it be a wonderful thing for Java developers if Apache HTTPD came with built-in support for J2SE and J2EE? I think we just took a step in that direction.

Beware the Google Web Accelerator. It will wreak havoc on the web applications that you use (Roller included). Problem is, in most webapps HTTP GET changes things (even though it shouldn't). Read all about it on O'Reilly Radar. I don't understand this. Google employs a hell of a lot of very smart people. How did they let this one slip by?

Update: I just reviewed the Roller UI and found that, at least for deletes, we do the right thing. The pattern we follow is to use a delete link (which causes a GET), but that sends you to an "Are You Sure" page which uses a POST to do the actual delete -- so Roller is probably safe from the Google Web Accelerator.

Mark Pilgrim is soliciting co-editors for an Atom Implementation Guide.

James Robertson has done a great job writing up some of the presentations from the Business Development Institute's Blogging Goes Mainstream: Is Your Company Ready? mini-conference in NYC this week. He has created a special category bdiNYC which contains all of his posts on the topic.

The Raleigh News and Observer is blogging, powered by B2 Evolution (via Sally Green)

NCMOA has a blog, powered by Movable Type.

Tim Bray outlines SMEX-D, a really simple way to describe by REST and SOAP based web services. I like it. I'd like to see the SMEX-D for Atom Protocol right about now. Compare to Norm Walsh's NSDL.

WRAL's new Cumulonimbus Corner weather blog, powered by Blogger.com.

Status is: almost complete. I'm wrapping up the last of the new writing and getting ready to revise the chapter on feed parsing to include some things I learned writing the blog apps. We're still waiting on Atom Protocol. Competing books have already gone to print without Atom Protocol, so that will be a good differentiator for us. We've also decided to make some last minute changes in the book. I'll sum them up for you.

First, the biggest change: the title. We found that "Blogs, Wikis and Feeds" is a little confusing and leads folks to believe that the book is about using blogs, wikis and feeds when in reality the book is about developing applications using RSS, Atom and other blog technologies. The leading candidate for the new title is "RSS and Atom in Action" subtitled "building applications with blog technologies."

Next, some chopping. We're going to cut two chapters: the log to your blog with Log4X chapter, which was to show how to use Java/Log4J and/or C#/Log4N to log to a blog, and the BlogClient chapter which was going to show how to build a simple BlogClient GUI with C# and/or Java. I'm happy with this decision becuase the Log4X chapter just wasn't compelling, plus it's dead-simple to implement. And, the BlogClient chapter wasn't that interesting either, considering that there are already plenty of blog clients out there (and I've already posted the code for mine).

And finally, the bookends: new chapters at the beginning and end of the book. We're introducing a Chapter Zero to lead folks into the book, introduce the pre-requisites and the organization of the book. A new end-chapter will cover all of the cool ideas and applications that we couldn't fit in as complete blog apps.

Join us tomorrow (Tuesday, May 3rd) for the first
Raleigh/Cary Bloggers meetup of the month.

What: An open meeting to talk about blogging, 
      podcasting & whatever's on your mind
When: Tues @ 6:30 p.m.
Where: Cafe Cyclo, in Cameron Village

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

Who: Bloggers & people who want to blog (Podcasters welcome!)

Hope to see you there!

Bob Wyman: "If we are to have advertising in RSS and Atom feeds, advertisers must provide those ads in such a way that they don't break the existing blogging and syndication infrastructure. In particular, once an ad is inserted into a feed, it must not be changed unless the content in which it is embedded is also changed. "

Transmitters? Well, it turns out we do need some stinkin' transmitters. NY Times reports that "podfather" Adam Curry is to host a radio show about Podcasts.

Time to test the power of positive thinking: this is the month that Atom Protocol settles down and becomes stable enough for me to finish up the book.