Blogging Roller

<img class="photo" src="http://photos12.flickr.com/14918440_1cc4ce82ec_t.jpg" align="left" alt="Sunstone" />

Leo and I spent the night at my parent's place in Chapel Hill last night and we all went to the Carborro farmer's market this morn in search of berries. I snapped this photo in Mom's garden with my new Treo.

Leo's done surprisingly well this weekend, BTW. He didn't cry at all when we dropped his Mom and brothers off at the airport and he's hardly mentioned them at all since then. He has been very clingy and constantly wants to sit in my lap, so I think he is a little uneasy. On the way home from the airport, we stoppped by the RTPBloggers lunch at Crazy Fire (Leesville Rd.) and the lucky little dude got to meet Rafe Colburn, Scott Parkerson, Mark Pilgrim, Sam Ruby and Josh Staiger.

Fortunately for me, I was able to work my normal routine on Friday because he was in preschool during the morning and had a nice long nap in the afternoon. But, he and the 70F weather is going to make it difficult to finish the chapter 5 rewrites by Monday.

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.

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!

I've used Ecto before with Roller (I bought a license), so I was a little surprised that Tim found a problem with it. He said that it was able to post, but it issues an error message RPC handler object "mt" not found, which indicates that perhaps Tim's Ecto is configured for Movable Type instead of plain old MetaWeblog API access.

Let's see if I can edit a post in place.

I'll post this now and then open it for editing... back in a sec.

Yep, that worked. However, something odd happened. When I opened up the post, my <p> tags were stripped out. I had to add them back in by hand. Hmmm.... an Ecto bug? But the re-post did work, in fact, when I clicked the Publish button Ecto popped up a dialog that asked "Old or New? This entry has been posted before. Should I submit a modification or create a new entry?"

Update: I was able to get Ecto to stop stripping my <p> tags by setting the "Convert line breaks in rich text mode" option.

To make it easier for folks to try Roller 1.1 and the new experimental Planet aggregator, I've created a standalone Roller demo by bundling Roller with JSPWiki, Tomcat, and the tiny pure-Java HSQLDB database. Everything is preconfigured and ready to run. All you need to do to try Roller is the following:

1. Download roller-demo-1.1.tar.gz from Java.Net (a 22MB download)

2. Unzip the file into a directory on your hard-drive 
   (directory name should have no spaces)

3. Ensure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to point to your JDK

4. Ensure that CATALINA_HOME is NOT set in your environment

5. To start Roller, either:
   - on Windows: open the Roller bin directory and double-click on startup.bat 
   - on UNIX: cd to the Roller bin directory, chmod +x on all files, run ./startup.sh

6. Point your browser at http://localhost:8080/roller

7. Login as nina/nina, admin/admin, or register as a new user

8. Get rollin'

Read all about it on the Roller project blog: http://rollerweblogger.org.

I'll have a new build of the standalone demo version of Roller ready today so you can check out the Planet Roller aggregator (which is not included in the standard build).

Dave Hyatt: Safari 1.3 supports HTML editing, both at the Objective-C WebKit API level and using contenteditable and designMode in a Web page.

And you don't even need to upgrade to Tiger to get it. Cool. I hope that means the RTE Editor will now work in Safari. Update: nope, RTE still does not work on Safari.

I've had a very productive week so far in MPK and I'm heading home early tomorrow. Working with new blogs.sun.com developer Allen Gilliland, I wrapped up first drafts of requirements and design for group blogging in Roller (check the wiki if you want the details). Allen and I also spent a lot of time discussing possible "supportablity" enhancements like configuration consolidation and load balancing. I posted some notes from these discussions to the Roller dev list for feedback. The posts spurred a flurry of comments and discussion that touched on topics of search (Matt R and Matt S want to fix it) and ditching container managed authentication (Matt R is interested in moving to Acegi).

I haven't been nearly so productive on the book. Before I left N.C. I picked up the same cold that hit rest of my family, so I've been sleeping instead of writing. So it goes.

Nice thing is, I was able to spend a little time with some of my other co-workers. Roller committer Anil Gangolli (more of a friend than a co-worker I guess) kindly invited me over for dinner with his wife and some friends on Sunday and we had some great indian food and conversation (Thanks Anil!). And today, I was fortunate enough to run into Tim Bray and Claire Giordano as I was wandering around looking for an empty table in the Sun cafeteria.

I'm coming back out here on the 26th for the chairman's award deal. Hopefully I'll feel better then.

I heard from Matt Schmidt today. He's porting some of the Wordpress themes over to Roller. Check out his blog to see the RedTrain theme in action. Nice work Matt.

IBM Adopts Open Development Internally: "Following on the success of its Eclipse open-source development platform, IBM has quietly been using a form of open-source development internally to create technology the company will sell commercially.

IBM calls its model Community Source, which it defines as a collaborative, internal, open-source-style environment for developing and testing new technology.

Danny Sabbah, vice president of strategy and technology for the IBM Software Group, in Armonk, N.Y., said IBM is using its Community Source model across 100 projects and 2,000 developers in the company. These projects span the IBM Software Group, Systems Group, Research and Global Services, he said."

Very interesting. I'd like to learn more about that. What parts of the so called open source development process have they built into the Community Source model? I've found that most developers have different definitions of the open source development process (via Ross Gardler).

In case you missed it, Google has added satellite images to maps.google.com. They've got coverage for the entire US and low resolution images for the Caribbean and South America.

are the most believable ones (and I mean that in the nicest way possible).

Currently, a Roller user can ask Roller to "ping" weblogs.com when a new post is made. That was a nice feature back in the day, but in modern times there are many different ping targets. Some users might prefer to ping Javablogs.com, while others might prefer to ping Technorati. Some might even want to configure a different ping target for each weblog category.

Anil Gangolli has written a proposal for configurable pings in Roller and has asked for comments. If you're interested in joining the discussion you can join the Roller dev mailing list, comment in the wiki (write me for a login), or if you're really lazy leave a comment here.

I meant to blog about this earlier, but last week was a very busy one. Simon Phipps spent a day working with the command-line version of Planet Roller last weekend and built something very cool: an aggregated blog (at www.webmink.net) that brings together posts from all of his sites: his Sun blog, personal blog, Java.Net blog, del.icio.us links, and Flickr photo stream -- all aggregateed together to form one blog with it's own feed. Subscribed!

Lars Trieloff has created a very nice bookmarklet that makes it easy to add bookmarks to Roller's bookmark manager. I've tried it and works. It and captures both the URL of the page you are currently on, as well as the newsfeed URL (if the page includes the autodiscovery tags). Read more here: Roller bookmark bookmarklet

AIM Terms of Service: "Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses. "

So, basically, don't say anything on AIM that you would not like to see displayed on the jumbotron or (perhaps, someday) re-enacted on Time Warner's new AIM-dialog based reality TV show.

I've been working like mad to wrap up the Planet Roller UI and finally, it's ready for testing. I'm so confident in the code, that I even deployed it (and latest CVS Roller 1.1-dev) to this site. You can see the new aggregated main page in action here:

Main page - http://rollerweblogger.org/planet.do

RSS 2.0 feed - http://rollerweblogger.org/planetrss

As you can see, there is now a Technorati rankings bar that complements the Hot Blogs list, since Hot Blogs only works for the on-site blogs. I included a bunch of Roller-related blogs in the aggregator. If you blog about Roller and you'd like to be included in (or excluded from) the aggregator, let me know.

Update: some Planet Roller usage/testing notes are on the wiki (with screenshots).

I'm not sure how many of the reported 2,800 internal blogs at IBM are running Roller, but it's pretty clear that the blog in the screenshot is a Roller based blog. I've heard from multiple sources that they're running a forked version of Roller (looks to me like circa 0.9.7). It's time to upgrade to 1.0 guys and join the fun on the Roller dev-list. We'd love to see your mods.

Here is an XSL transform for converting a flat OPML file (like those produced by PlanetPlanet sites), to a Roller Planet config file (with all subscriptions in one group): opml2planet.xsl

Planet SST has converted from PlanetPlanet to Planet Roller. OK, so "Students and former students of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute" is not a big planet, but it is a start.