Blogging Roller

A couple of people have asked me if Roller helped me to land my new job. I'm happy to report that the answer is yes, Roller helped. I'll explain that, but first, realize that when I say "Roller" I mean a number of different things. When I say Roller I mean developing the Roller software, writing the Roller article for O'Reilly, participating in the Roller project, and writing for my weblog.

I must admit that I was a little worried that Roller might hurt my chances of getting a new job. I was concerned that an employer would see Roller, my weblog, and my writings as a diversion that would keep me from getting real work done, or, that some potential employer would read my weblog and either strongly disagree with something I said or decide that I am only rambling nut-job. That is only one small part of my personality. Those who know and love me know that I am much, much more than just a rambling nut-job.

Roller helped me out in several ways. Roller gave me experience with and knowledge of new software development technologies, techniques, and tools. I wouldn't have Struts, Velocity, XDoclet, Castor, and Hibernate on my resume if not for Roller. I also learned a lot about software project managemement including source code control, release management, issue tracking, developer/customer support, etc. This is why I listed Roller on my resume and gave it equal billing with my other previous jobs.

Roller also me exposure, but more importantly Roller exposed my code, my writing, and the ways that I work with others. My new employer did not find me via my weblog, but once they did find me they were able to download and review my code, read my technical writings, and could even have searched the Roller mailing list archives to see how I interact with other developers and end-users of my software.

Roller was certainly not the only factor, as I do have a strong resume even without it, but Roller was an important factor in landing the new job.

The Swiss edition of InfoWeek features what looks like an interesting article on weblogging by Urs Bertschy: New Kids on the Blog that covers weblog features like trackback, referers, blogging clients, and RSS. Too bad I don't read German. The Babelfish translation only goes so far, literally. The article mentions Roller and lists my weblog in a section titled "Interessante IT-Blogs". Nice.

I caused a little stir yesterday with my "oh the shame" post, Sam Ruby picked up on it and several others took notice. I think most people realize that I was just having some fun with words and ranting. I know Sun didn't actually steal anything from O'Reilly and I don't really think O'Reilly's weblogging software is rinky-dink. However, there was some truth there. I do think the java.net blogs would benefit from more advanced blogging features. I'd like to help and I would (obviously) love to see them use Roller.

If the blogs on java.net are just provided for simple project news and RSS feeds, then I can understand the desire to keep the blogging module simple. If, on the other hand, these are going to be real weblogs with the personality and character of the blogs we read on java.blogs, then something better is needed.

Part of the java.net charter is to support the open source Java community and foster open source Java projects. I'd like to see java.net eat it's own dogfood and use open source Java rather than the open source Perl, PHP, Python, or whatever else it is that they are using now. Instead of the O'Reilly blog software, why not use Roller, Blojsom, JSP Wiki, or Snipsnap? If these aren't good enough, let's figure out why and make them better.

By the way, I have registered http://roller.dev.java.net (pending approval) to reserve the name and to start exploring the java.net features. If it looks good, I may migrate the Roller CVS, downloads, and mailing lists from SourceForge.

I enjoyed Shlomi Fish's Rules of Open Source Development and Charles Miller's Handling Bug Reports today. I saw a couple of parallels:

Charles Miller: give users empowerment equal to their station.

Rules of Open Source Development: The user is always right unless proven otherwise by the developer.

Customer success is important, but hey, let's get real.

Ok, I've been a bit preoccupied recently and I missed the anniversary by one day, but what the heck. I've been running my blog on Roller for one year an a day. Yay!

Lance Lavandowska: I believe Patrick is our first Switcher from another blog tool. I've seen a few people appear on FreeRoller, stating they came there from elsewhere, but this is the first instance of someone switching their own installation that I'm aware of.

When FreeRoller was attacked the other day, the system slowed to a crawl. I assumed that the problems were my fault and I started to look for performance problems. I noticed that we are running the RequestFilter, which is responsible for parsing the URL and handling request parameters, for every incoming request. The RequestFilter also hits the database to determine if the requested page and user are valid. Since many requests are for simple files, such as GIFs, JPGs, and CSS, this is not wise. So, I changed the Roller web.xml. I replaced this, which causes every request to go through the RequestFilter:

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>RequestFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

With this, which only puts page, rss, comments, *.do, and *.jsp through the ringer:

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>RequestFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/page/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>RequestFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/rss/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>RequestFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/comments/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>RequestFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>RequestFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>*.do</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

This seemed to have a significant effect on FreeRoller performance and on the MySQL load. I'm still looking at some Java code changes to optimize RequestFilter and RollerRequest, but the above change is easy to apply, so if you are running Roller 0.9.7 (or later), give it a try.

JavaLobby is still working on restoring the FreeRoller machine, which serves several purposes other than just FreeRoller, so FreeRoller will be down again, probably for the rest of the night.

Thanks to the hard work of Matthew Schmidt of the JavaLobby, the FreeRoller is back up and running. The server that hosts FreeRoller was attacked and Matt spent the day in the data center reinstalling/upgrading the OS, restoring FreeRoller, etc. Thanks Matt!

I just got word from JavaLobby that they are going to be taking the FreeRoller server down today for an OS reinstall. FreeRoller will probably be down for the rest of the day.

I had to do some addional work on the RollerWikiPlugin to get the plugin to work for RSS feeds as well as weblog pages. To do this I had to introduce a new concept: the EntryRenderer.

You might have noticed that FreeRoller has been pretty sluggish today and has been down a couple of times. The FreeRoller machine is experiencing some "technical difficulties" and the JavaLobby is working to resolve them as soon as possible.

This is a test of the RollerWikiPlugin, Roller's new JSPWiki powered Wiki plugin. I upgraded this site to Roller 0.9.8-dev this morning and the Wiki plugin is working great, check that link for a little user/setup guide.

Heading 2#

Heading 3#

Heading 4#

• item 1
• item 2
  • subitem 2.1
  • subitem 2.2
• item 3

bold and italics and external links

what about inline images?

Yes, everything seems to be working.

Here is the weblog entry text for this post:

This is a test of the RollerWikiPlugin. I upgraded this site 
to Roller 0.9.8-dev this morning and the Wiki plugin is 
working great, check that links for a little user/setup 
guide. If you read that, you'll understand why the comments 
link is missing from this post.

!!!Heading 2
!!Heading 3
!Heading 4

* item 1
* item 2
** subitem 2.1
** subitem 2.2
* item 3

__bold__ and ''italics'' and [external links|http://rollerweblogger.org]

what about inline images:

[http://www.rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/leo5mo-sm.jpg]

Yes, everything seems to be working.

Oliver offers a very nice little HOWTO that explains how to enable comments on your Roller 0.9.7 or later weblog. However, he shows you how to do this using the old legacy $macros.

Moving forward, you should start using the new Roller Macros instead. Take a look at the User Guide section on Customizing your theme with Roller Macros for more information, or check the Wiki for a Roller 0.9.7 translation of Oliver's post.

Anthony Eden wrote:
> Oh, and in case I haven't made it obvious: this is an awesome release!

I think we're all glad that our labor's are finally available to 
"the masses." Thanks for the compliments. - Lance 

And thanks to you, Anthony, and to The JavaLobby, for providing FreeRoller. By the way, FreeRoller is now hosting 964 weblogs.

FreeRoller is down right now, so I'm assuming the upgrade is not just on the way, it is underway. YAY!

Patrick posts about Wiki-blog integration and wonders how Wiki-blog integration plays into the future direction of Roller. Here are my thoughts on that. Roller is first and foremost a weblogging system. I don't want to incorporate a Wiki into Roller, and I think the other Roller developers agree with this, but I do want to make it possible to integrate Roller with an external Wiki.

For now, Wiki-Roller integration means allowing weblog entries to be authored using Wiki syntax, making Wiki links in weblog entries link to an external Wiki, and allowing each weblog entry to have it's own Wiki link to an external Wiki, as Patrick describes.

I'm doing this integration by adding an (optional) Wiki plugin to Roller. I use JSPWiki for the Roller Wiki, so I'm creating the plugin using JSPWiki. I have this working now on my homebox (without code changes to JSPWiki), next, I'll create a Wiki-blog demo here on this site so you can see how it works.

It took a little more work, but I was able to come up with a JSPWiki-based Wiki plugin for Roller. I just committed it to CVS. It works just as well as the Radeox plugin that I did the other night. Now, I need to hook-up CamelCase links so that they point to a Wiki specified in the Roller config. Janne Jalkanen, the developer of JSPWiki, suggested that I develop a XMLRPCPageProvider, but I don't think I'll need to do that to meet my simple requirements.

I just committed new Radeox Wiki and Textile plugins for Roller. The Textile plugin works beautifully, but as I mentioned earlier, the Radeox plugin still needs some work. I used the open source Blojsom Textile plugin, but I had to follow Winer's rule and pay for the software by giving credit to Mark and Dave. Thanks guys. I would have used JTextile, but it relies on GNU regex and the code is not as pretty as the code from Blojsom.

I spent some time today hooking the Radeox Wiki engine into Roller so that weblog entries may be authored using Wiki syntax. This was amazingly easy to do, but I've got a ways to go before it is really useful. For example, I'd like to be able to tell the plugin where my Wiki is and then have it treat all CamelCase words in my posts as links into that Wiki. Since my Wiki is JSPWiki-based, I guess I'd have to do more than just telling the plugin where my Wiki is located. I'd also have to tell it how to form Wiki page URLs.

As a JSPWiki user, I prefer the JSPWiki syntax. JSPWiki syntax appears to be much more powerful than the Radeox Wiki syntax, but I'm pretty new to Radeox so I could be wrong about this.