Blogging Roller

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..."

Edgar Sanchez: We are not programmers to defend and protect Java (or Visual Basic, C#, Cobol, Lisp, etc., etc.), we are not programmers to defend and protect object orientation (or relational databases, AOP, etc.), hell, we are not programmers to defend and protect Sun (or Microsoft, IBM, ...) We are programmers to create software solutions for problems that people have (those people could be programmers also, of course) and we use the better tools of the bench.

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

Shawn A. Van Ness quoted by Brad Wilson: The biggest single thing that killed hungarian within MS, for .NET, is the lack of consistency with which it's been used. That's the one thing that both the proponents *and* opponents of hungarian could agree on: the single worst variable naming convention in the world is "inconsistent hungarian". And so, nobody could come up with a perfectly consistent (yet reasonably consice) system for applying hungarian notation to such a richly typed world as .NET (viz. what's the prefix for ApplicationException?). So it's gone. End of story.

RIP.

This was one of the comments on my Eclipse 2.1 M4 out of memory! story:

Ted Stockwell: Yep. And the more third-party plugins you use the worse the problem will get. You can thank SWT for that. Java developers aren't used to dealing with the mindless drudgery of explicity releasing any and all resources that they use. It's back to the bad ole days of C++ resource management for SWT developers.

I don't know enough about this to refute it, but I never noticed any memory problems with Eclipse before M4 and I am using the same plugins now as I did before.

The other comment on the story was from a person named 'gizmo' who recommends that I start Eclipse like so: eclipse.exe -vmargs -Xmx256m.

Ben Simpson: As for javablog.com, I see a minimalist approach forming.  The minimalist approach rules out hungry Struts or greedy EJBs floating around in my 32mb of ram container. I was thinking of running the whole thing from a cached set of small html pages.

To each, his own. Ben, see my previous post. Sounds like Robert might have your blogging software. Also, javablogs.com is not based on Roller.

Erik Hatcher is not the only one with a Java port of the minimalist Perl-based Blosxom blogger software; Robert Rasmussen has one too. He says he will be moving over to it, and posting the code, soon.

Bob Lee: Roller has a class org.roller.business.castor.Import that can import Roller and Radio exports. The Roller build.xml "import" target demonstrates its usage. Wish I'd found this yesterday. Oh well.

There are a number of little undocumented nuggets like that in Roller. Want to contribute some docs?

By the way Bob, your site looks very cool but it looks less cool when linked to via permalink as I did in the block-quote above. Could some Roller template magic fix that or is a due to a limitation of Roller that you have discovered?

Elliotte Rusty Harold: JavaWorld has announced that they're going to start charging $49.99 for access to back issues, which they define as anything more than a week old.

Good thing I didn't publish the Roller article on JavaWorld.

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.

Prompted by Dan Sickles' post on side projects and The Hacker Ethic (clearly a book which I need to add to my queue), Russell writes about balancing free-time tinkering and open source development with the other parts of life. I like this part:

<a href= "http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/index.jsp?date=20030105#125855">Russell Beattie: Like I've told my wife (and this is true) there's not a single technology that I've ever started messing around with in my spare time that I eventually didn't use for work or even to get a new job. Linux and Java for me were like that... I was doing M$ VB work until I decided one day to install a Linux box at home then started looking at Java as a way to program for it... the rest is history. All this mobile stuff that I'm obsessed about now is the same thing. Blogging too. Hopefully it'll come back around for me.

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?

Matt Raible writes about how he plans to fulfill his New Years resolution to be happy and he lists a number of goals that will lead him to that. I could have written that list myself: I need to do almost the very same things.

It is interesting to see the conflict that Chris Winters mentioned between work-related goals (e.g. open source development) and personal goals (e.g. wife and kids), laid out point-by-point. Work related goals like "learn more Java" and "getting a new laptop" standing side-by-side with personal goals such as "spend more time with my family" and "get off the computer."

I've always felt very lucky that I can get paid to do what is essentially my hobby: software development. Sometimes, I wonder how I would get by if it was not my hobby. Keeping up with the constant changes, new technologies, and new techniques in software development takes a lot of time. As Rafe Colburn pointed out some time ago, you have to carefully chose how you invest your learning time. Of course, you really need to carefully choose how you invest all of your time.

I wish I had some great insight to share on this topic. I guess all I can come up with is this. Spend your free time doing things that are fulfilling and things that are fun, don't worry so much about trying to sharpen your work skills or build-up your resume. Sometimes the things that are fulfilling and fun will also be things that are work and career related, that is fine. However, if you spend too much time on the work and career side of things even as a hobby, you may regret it later. If you spend too much time with the people that you love, you'll have nothing to regret.

Bill de hOra: False Delima. Coding is important. Design is important. They're so important, we should be doing them all the time. And that's very much what programming is, designing while coding. It's a mistake to separate the two.

Bill is commenting on Tom Klaasen's comments on my comments in my post Loving what you do. I guess my post was a bit of a <a href= "http://www.rorschach.com">Rorschach test because Tom thought I was talking about programming when in fact I never mentioned the word programming or coding at all. I was talking about software development, which is, as Bill correctly points out, a combination of analysis, design, programming/coding, and other activities.

I have to admit that the idea of a guy who sucks at programming doing analysis and design is a little frightening. I hope Tom is just being self-deprecatingly modest.

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.

Now <a href= "http://www.zanthan.com/wordsintobytes/archives/000899.html#000899">there is a real dad.

Now I'm feeling inadequate. Shown below is my dad activity for the afternoon:

<a href= "http://shop.lego.com/product.asp?id=%7B96D1A1F5%2DC427%2D11D6%2D8024%2D00065BA09B53%7D&OrderBy=0&CatID=%7BA319A2F3%2D2540%2D4F7E%2DA702%2D4FF709118FB7%7D">

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 moved over to Eclipse 2.1 M4 recently and, for the most part, it has been working great. However, I have to restart it every hour or two because it keeps on running out of memory.

If you don't love what you do, then <a href= "http://rc3.org/cgi-bin/less.pl?arg=4796">Rafe is probably not going to hire you. He wants passion. He wants you to love what you do. I have to agree. When I'm involved in interviewing prospective developers, I look for the geeks: people with a passion for software development, learning, and exploring new ideas. I once heard of a developer who was asked the interview question "what do you like about software development?" and responded "that is like asking me what I like a about breathing." That is what I want to hear. Passion and enthusiasm are usually attibutes of people who are <a href= "http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000073.html">smart, and get things done.

"If you don't love it, fuck it, it's not worth doing.

"The money part is not the important part, the important part is the opportunity to get your hands wet, to go out there to jump around, fuck around, make mistakes. Try weird stuff, see what works.

[Jerry Garcia inteviewed by Ed Cone]