Blogging Roller

A Wiki and the beginnings of a FAQ. Currently, only Roller committers can edit pages. FYI: we are using JSPWiki.

Matt has put together a nice Roller 0.9.7 TODO list for himself. Cool stuff. The "remember me" feature sounds especially useful. Apart from finishing-up the linkback feature, the main thing I would like to do is to fix comments. I would like to eliminate the pop-up comment window and instead allow users to specify a template for displaying comments. I would like to make it possible for Roller users to have a comment page like the one on Sam Ruby's site: comments, linkbacks, pingbacks, and trackbacks are displayed in chronological order and are grouped by day. You can view comments per item, or you can view recent comments on all items.

Also, for FreeRoller, we need to move RollerConfig into the database so that Roller can run accross multiple background worker servers and fix the performance problems with the index.jsp page. The caching works great on index.jsp, but refreshing the cache is still painfully slow.

Wow, that's a lot of work...

Apparently, Carlos Perez's notorious 101 reasons why Java is better than Dot-Net posts have the Java-based FreeRoller server crawling along on the floor, coughing up teeth, and begging for mercy. The main page does not seem to be working properly anymore and weblog pages are rendering very slowly. Maybe FreeRoller has reached the limit of what one instance of Tomcat can handle, even with page caching, database connection pooling, etc. I wonder if Roller.Net would do any better.

Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim, who both have weblogs with automatic linkback implementations, both linked to my Introducing Automatic Linkbacks in Roller post the other day. This created a linkback feedback loop. Luckily, I anticipated that some linkbacks would have to be hidden and I added controls to the Roller UI to allow weblog authors to pick which linkbacks are to be shown and which are to be hidden. Using those controls I've been able to hide the results of the feedback loop, but I would like a more automatic solution.

Who needs an HTML parsing linkback extractor, just grab the refering site's RSS feed and XML parse out the goodies. Very cool! Why didn't I think of that! Sam Ruby explains how to do it. What about sites that don't have an RSS feed and don't indicate it's presence via a link tag? They don't deserve a linkback!

Update: I was kidding, of course. Some of my favorite blogs do not have RSS Autodisovery. I agree with Bruce's earlier post, a linkback implementation should use a combination of HTML extraction and RSS parsing to get the refering post's permalink and excerpt.

The Automatic Linkbacks feature still needs some work. In addition to title and excerpt, I need to extract a permalink for the refering entry. I also need to add a linkback editor so that linkback URLs, titles, and excerpts may be edited. Right now, linkbacks can be shown or hidden via the Roller Editor UI but that's all - other edits require SQL.

As you can see below under the "For further reading on today's posts" heading, I have completed work on Automatic Linkbacks. I'll tell you a little bit more about the implementation later, but right now is pizza time.

Saimon Moore describes how to setup HEP for RSS aggregation as as a blogging client to Roller via Roller's Blogger API support. Thanks Saimon.

Found via Andy Oliver's blog. Is this to be followed closely by Roller's first court-ordered restraining order or a long-distance blogging relationship?

<a href= "http://www.freeroller.net/page/chiara/20030110#way_too_weird">Chiara: I put a long blog last night after reading Rickard's response to Ted Neward's AOP!=Interception blog. but, hey, when i finished it, and click on publish, it took me out to the "login" screen. And this morning, I see that my blog is gone.

Chiara, sorry to hear you lost your post. Did you enter your username and password and procede to login? If you had, then your post should have been saved. That always works for me. BTW, welcome to blogging and welcome to Roller.

Here is my cut of <a href= "http://www.rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/LinkbackExtractor.java.txt">LinkbackExtractor.java. Compare this to <a href= "http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/10/11.html#further_reading_upgrades">Mark Pilgrim's linkbackparser.py

As I've been working on Roller's further-reading feature for the 0.9.7 release, which is essentially the same as Mark Pilgim's automatic backlinks and further reading implementation, I've been trying to learn more about other weblog entry linking mechanisms such as Movable Type's Trackback feature and Ian Hickson's Pingback.

Luckily for me, Ted Neward, Simon Fell, and Sam Ruby have been blogging about this recently. Ted wonders which technique is most popular, Simon says trackback is the leader, and Sam explains some of the differences between Trackback, Pingback, and harvesting backlinks from referer logs (a.k.a. automatic linkbacks).

In an earlier post, Sam suggested a very interesting WIBNI enhancement to Trackback: "Wouldn't It Be Nice If instead of URL encoded parameters, one could simply POST the RSS item that contains all the yummy goodies that one could imagine and let the server decide what pieces it wanted to keep and what pieces it chooses to ignore? This is how the RESTLog API works today..."

Lance points out another free Roller service. Awesome! That brings the total to three: FreeRoller, blogs.application-server.com, and the newest Kalixia.

I've successfully moved Roller referer tracking into the database and now I'm working on diveintomark.org style "futher reading on today's posts" and "futher reading on this post" functionality.

I'm not sure if the futher-reading comments and links should be shown in-line with the rest of the weblog entries, as Mark does, or as part of each weblog entry's comments page. After all, a comment is a comment is a comment. I'll probably try to make it flexible, so users can choose either style by including the appropriate macros in their page templates.

Matt Raible: Upgrading Roller and Happiness. I've been meaning to upgrade this site to use the latest Roller CVS source for quite some time (about a month), but haven't got around to it. However, Dave and Lance have been checking in enhancements like mad lately, so I don't know if it's such a good idea.

Yep, now is not the time to grab Roller from CVS and upgrade your Roller-based weblog. I'm in slash-and-burn, rip-and-replace, and code-away-the-night mode, and upgrading Roller right now is not the path to happiness. Wait a couple of days until things settle down a bit.

Matt also has some cool ideas about the Rollers comments feature, which still needs some work. He also wonders what defines Roller 1.0. That is a good question.

I like the philosophy of under promise and over deliver, and in this case I think that means that we should announce plans only for the next release, which in our case is Roller 0.9.7. I also like the philosophy of release early and release often, and in this case I think that means we need to try to polish up a 0.9.7 release in the next month or so.

I'm not sure exactly what features we need in Roller to call it Roller 1.0, but I do think that we will know when we are there. What features do you think are must-haves for Roller 1.0?

James Strachan: Using Wikis for documentation in open source projects. One day it'd be nice if open source projects used a combination of wiki and blog for project news, design documents and documentation.

It sure would make the Roller site easier to maintain and easy to add stuff on-the-fly.

Lance and I have been doing some Roller work this week. Lance has been working on improving theme editing/switching and pluggable persistence. I have been working on improving Roller's referer tracking capabilities. Also, I ripped out Roller's lame little logging interface org.roller.Logging and replaced it with Jakarta Commons Logging.

I was able to get MozBlog to work with my local copy of Roller 0.9.7-dev. The problem was in the Blogger API getUsersBlogs() method. Roller was returning an empty string for each user's blog URL. One blogger client (w:bloggar) had no problem with that, but MozBlog choked on it. Next, I'm going to try to get blog titles titles to work via MozBlog and w:bloggar. I think this can be done without going to Blogger API 2.0, but I'm not absolutely sure about that yet.

I'm back and getting geared up to do some Roller work again. I'll probably start out by upgrading to Eclipse 2.1 M4 tonight, then who knows? I still need to address the FreeRoller main-page performance problems. I'll also be catching up a bit on blogging, which I have been neglecting.

Congratulations to Matt on his <a href= "http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd/20021214#new_job_struts_testing_frameworks">new job.