Blogging Roller

The Mozilla Composite Editor works pretty well, but it seems to eat some spaces every once andawhile (see what I mean) . I have also had intermittent problems getting it's link editor to work. The editor is only at version 0.0.5,so I have confidence that it will be fixed and will eventually become my editor of choice.

I've been using the Ekit editor, but it has some problems as well. The main problem with Ekit is the Java Plugin. The Java Plugin is just not that stable, at least not on Mozilla 1.1. Every third or forth time I hit the post button to submit a weblog edit, Mozilla locks up! I wonder if this is a JRE 1.3.1/WinXP/Mozilla specific issue. Has anybody else(hi Matt and  Russell) experienced such flakeyness on other platforms?

Wow, that looks cool! I'm editing this post with it now. Very nice.

Looks like Hugh Brian is experimenting with combining the Roller weblogger, the Chiki wiki, and the Jetspeed portal to form a corporate website. Looks like a useful combo and it looks like a fun project. I hope he will give the Roller project some feedback and tell us how we can help to make this sort of integration easier.

BTW, I don't know Hugh, but he popped up in my referrers log this morning. Now you know why Roller does not have a referrers feature yet: I've still got a valid Radio account.

Reading more on Skribe in the Noumenauts Yahoo Group, I found an interesting email exhange about revenue schemes. Apparently, one idea is to build blogging software that allows bloggers to establish different categories of blog posts and then charge money to readers who wish to read premium categories. Then Noumenauts takes a cut of that money. Apparently, they hope to appeal to celebrities (they mention luring Wil Wheaton away from Movable Type as an example) who want to make money off of blogging.

Hey Russell, this might be the ticket! Pull an all-nighter, add premium categories to MiniBlog, and fund your trip to Esther Dyson's big-blowout in Berlin. "Want to know how I feel about lawyers? Just enter your credit card number and hit the submit button."

This " competitors" document keeps on showing up in my referrers logs and finally piqued my interest enought to get me googling. Apparently Anna and friends are working on Skribe , an "Open Source, Java-based, robust, flexible, dynamic web journaling application" developed using a modified RUP process. Hey guys, why re-invent the wheel? You all ought to sign up as developers on the Roller project. You are looking for an architect, right? I'll be happy to tell you what to do ;-)

I don't like having comments on my Web log because I believe if you want to comment then you should do so on your own Web log. If I'd wanted to host a discussion forum, I'd have installed discussion forum software, not Web logging software! [ Hixie's Natural Log, Whitepaper: Pingback vs. Trackback found via diveintomark]

I still think comments are a nice feature, if only for those hapless folks who have no weblog.

From the looks of Roller's JIRA roadmap, it looks like Roller 0.9.6 is not very far off, perhaps next weekend?

Anthony Eden's FreeRoller site had some Roller problems today and CWinters caught it as a screenshot. Man, I hate that! I noticed it too. I'm hoping that this was caused by a simple DBCP database connection pooling configuration problem. The Roller Installation Guide suggests a DBCP maxWait of 100 milliseconds which is way too low. The maxWait should probably be set to 20000 or 30000 milliseconds on a big site like Anthony's.

The problem may have been amplified by the Roller page caching mechanism. You see, Roller uses OSCache to cache weblog pages. If an error occurs, a page full of error messages might find it's way into the cache and not get cleared out until either the weblog's author makes a change or the cache entry times out. Maybe Roller should invalidate the cache when an error occurs? Hmmm...

If we had the right macros, or at least the ability to specify which day template to be used in the macros.showWeblogEntries() macros, we could easily build an RSS 2.0 template based on Mark Pilgrim's RSS 2.0 template for Movable type. This is Roller issue <a href= "http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/ViewIssue.jspa?id=10090"> ROL-50.

Initially I was using Roller's newsfeed aggregator to monitor what was going on in the blogs which I find interesting. Now I am finding more and more that I am going to a few blogs all of the time and then jumping to other blogs from their blog lists. I think this is partially because the Roller aggregator is not very good (all real-time, pain to add new feeds, etc.) [ Anthony Eden, Interesting...]

So true. I'm surprised you were able to endure the pain for so long. I would like to add better aggregation features to Roller and have been toying with the idea of adding a full featured aggregator. I'm not sure a full-featured aggregator belongs in Roller, maybe Rickard is right in saying that aggregation is a client side job. Here are the reasons that I think a server-side aggregator should be integrated into Roller:

• Many users will subscribe to the same news sources and so can share a cache of the newsfeed data.
• Having an integrated aggregator will allow us to add a "Post about this item" button to each news item thus making it easier to comment on the posts of others.
• Roller already allows you to display newsfeeds, via the macros.showNewsfeed() directive, on your blog and having the newsfeed data cached will make these directives perform a lot better

Here are a couple of reasons against including an aggregator in Roller:

• Will not scale. Running a multi-threaded scheduling engine in process with a Servlet Engine, Roller, etc, will be a big burly memory eating bear. And what if you want to distribute Roller accross multiple worker processes?
• Web UI is clumsy. Wouldn't you rather have a pretty little JFC, SWT, Thinlet, or dot-Net app running on your PC as your aggregator?
• Others disadvantages that I can't think of because I am biased towards the server-side?

Anthony Eden, who has been generously offering free Roller accounts for a couple of months now, has just renamed his Roller site FreeRoller. What a cool name! This gives me another opportunity thank Anthony for doing what he is doing. Not only is he making possible a bunch of cool weblogs, but he and his bloggers are giving us some great feedback on Roller. Not everbody is totally happy with Roller and that is fine, but I'd like them to be specific about the things that suck (I can take it ;-) and even file some bugs if they have the time. Thanks again Anthony.

Jason Carreira is find some interesting things in his quest to build an RSS aggregator. The Informa RSS Library for Java project looks very promising.

Congratulations for Niel Eyde for releasing PersonalBlog, a new and Struts-ified version of Russell Beattie's MiniBlog Java weblogger. It is nice to have a light-weight, but not light on features, alternative to Roller out there and it is nice to have another example Struts app to pick apart. Thanks Niel!

Maybe us bloggers should band together and buy Howard a certificate for Ekit? I wonder if that would solve the Ekit copy-and-paste problem?

OK, so I was wrong about about applet security. When I first tried Ekit, I found, as Russell did, that you cannot copy-and-paste into a Java applet from another application. I found that if you drop the applet jar, ekitapplet.jar in this case, into the trusted extensions directory of your Java Plugin JRE then copy-and-paste works fine. But then, I found that you cannot access the applet via JavaScript if the JavaScript is loaded from one place (rollerweblogger.org) and the applet is loaded from another place (my PC).

I have finally come upon a solution that is less expensive than paying the $200 plus $100/year to Thwaite for a digital certificate. I just put the following into my Java Plugin JRE's java.security file:

   grant codeBase "http://rollerweblogger.org/ekitapplet.jar" {
   permission java.security.AllPermission;
   }                                                                                        

Now, this is fine for me because I trust myself. But, for example, what if Anthony Eden was to ask his users to do this, substituting roller.anthonyeden.com for rollerweblogger.org in the above snippet? Anthony would be asking his users to trust in the following things:

• Neither Howard Kistler, Dave Johnson, nor Anthony Eden have put malicious code in Ekit
• An evil hacker will not break in to Anthony's site and replace ekitapplet.jar with malicious code

Is that too much to ask of Anthony's Roller users? If it is, then we need to buy a certificate for Ekit and hope that this one certificate would be good for all Roller users.

BTW, this is my first Ekit post using Mozilla.

<a href= "http://www.rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/20020920#weblogger_com_update">That post cannot be the last post in the Weblogger.com vs. Roller story.  Erin apologized.  I need to say this: I accept Erin's apology.  We all make mistakes.  Erin is proud of his business and is overprotective, generally speaking that is a very good thing.  From all accounts I have read, Weblogger.com is a great company and deserves the support of the weblogging community.

Howard Kistler, you rock! Howard shares his toys and this toy is the coolest of all. This Ekit editor applet is a dramatic improvement over the previous Roller editor which was just <input type="text" ... > . This is my first post using Ekit.

The Ekit WYSIWYG HTML editor applet is coming soon in Roller 0.9.6. Thanks Howard and thanks hexicode codex!

Ok, so I just discovered that there are some problems with images. I think we are going to need some sort of macros or hotwords for including images in post. Anyhow, now that I've switched back to the plain old text editor, I can show you a screenshot:

<img alt="Ekit applet screenshot" src="/resources/roller/ekitthumbnail.jpg">

Weblogger.com/Erin Clerico has officially recinded the threat of lawsuit, apologized on Sam Ruby's site, apologized on Erin Clerico's site, and I have added a disclaimer to the main Roller Weblogger page. Thanks to the good and courageous people who came to my defence, even through some may have gone a little overboard with the language ;-)

I can understand the outrage involved when lawsuits are threatened and I felt this outrage myself, but try to understand that there are two sides to every issue. Both sides are human. I truly hope this is my last post on this topic.

I do not need a registered trademark to sue you. Ask your attorney. I take it by your attitude here you are ready for a fight. You will hear from my attorney next. -Erin

That is the latest. What a sweet guy. As I said before, I welcome any advice, assistance or pointers to sites/organizations that might help me research my case.

Below is the email that Weblogger.COM sent to me.  As far as I can tell, these guys do not own the word 'weblogger' and therefore do not have a case, but I am still researching this and looking into free legal resources.

Hello, my name is Erin Clerico and I own Weblogger:
http://www.weblogger.com

You have selected a name for your product, 'RollerWeblogger', which is too close to our Copyrighted name: 'Weblogger.' Since your product closely resembles our service offerings I must ask you to stop using this name immediately.

We have used this name to market our services for years, I would be more than happy to have our attorney contact you if you have any questions about our rights to this name in this market space.

I look forward to your prompt reply on this matter.

Respectfully yours

Erin Clerico