Blogging Roller

Via Dominic: Microsoft bloggers at blogs.msdn.com.

Rick Ross: To the rest of you who blog without identifying yourselves, have some courage and make clear who you are. Your anonymous thoughts are not interesting contributions to the larger social dialogue of the blogosphere.

Like Rick, I prefer to know, or at least to think that I know, who is behind each of the the weblogs that I read. However, I disagree that "anonymous thoughts are not interesting contributions to the larger social dialogue of the blogosphere." Anonymous weblogs play an important role, especially in places where freedom of speech is limited. I think most would agree that the anonymous Bagdad blogger made some interesting contributions and that anonymous Iranian bloggers are likely to make some interesting and important contributions as well.

That said, a Roller-based weblogging system like JRoller is not really a good place for anonymous weblogging. For true anonymity, you need something like invisiblog.com or this proposal for MovableType.

I don't even know what that means, but somehow it makes sense to me.

Jon Udell: This weekend, I was working with the Java API to Sleepycat's Berkeley DB XML, and it felt like one of those bad dreams in which you're slogging through molasses toward an ever-receding goal. I switched to Jython and quickly got the job done. And it was the same job (indexing and searching content) using the same engine (Berkeley DB XML).

I think Jon would find Groovy just as easy to use as Jython. One important advantage of Groovy over Jython, and JRuby by the way, is syntax. Joe average Java programmer is going to be able to pick up Groovy much more quickly than Jython.

Rick Ross and I were trying to diagnose some heavier-than-usual load on JRoller last night by watching the MySQL query log. We noticed that some queries were still examining way too many rows and based on this we came up with a couple of additional indexes. After we applied the new indexes, load returned to normal levels (i.e. less than 0.1). These should work on either Roller 0.9.8 or Roller 0.9.9-dev and they will be included in future releases in either branch:

create index userrole_username_index on userrole( username );
create index weblogentry_pubtime_index on weblogentry( pubtime, publishentry, websiteid );

Step off Pilgrim, Ito, Winer, and all of you A-list bloggers 'cause I'm more technoratical than all y'all. I'm #4 in the Technorati 100. Bam! Look at my numbers:

Technorati, for those who know not, is a website that rates the popularity of weblogs based on the number of links to each weblog. My modest little weblog is not very popular, so how did this happen? I assure you, I never intended to scam my way to the top. I was kidding about that secret plan.

Here's the deal. Since time began and before I ever heard of Technorati, I've been putting links to Roller developers Lance Lavandowska, Matt Raible, and myself in the page templates that ship with Roller. Some folks remove those links, but most don't and so now most every new Roller-based blog boosts our standings on Technorati. As JRoller grew to thousands of users, folks started to notice this. A couple of weeks ago, everybody was amazed to see my modest little weblog hovering around #80.

Recently, a lot of blogs named "My Moblog" started to appear in <a href= "http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/links.html?url=http%3A%2F%2Frollerweblogger.org%2Fpage%2Froller"> my Technorati Link Cosmos. Turns out, all of these blogs are running on a Roller based server at 212.180.4.202 which, according to whois, is owned by EasyNet.FR. I'm not sure what they are doing there at EasyNet, but perhaps Minerva, or one of her readers, knows. Minerva's weblog, called Geegaw contains a link to one of those EasyNet blogs with the text Top 100, here I come! See below:

What does she, or one of her readers, know that I don't? Is somebody using Roller to game Technorati and if so, why am I the beneficiary of this scam?

It was a little difficult to return to work today after two weeks off. I enjoy my job, but after two weeks of sleeping late, playing with the kids, and hacking Roller, I felt like a kid going back to school. We've got another release coming up, so I need to get in gear fast. I also need to wrap up hierarchical categories for Roller and finish up the Roller presentation that I hope to present at the February TriJUG meeting.

And welcome to 2004. Here is a thumbnail review of the highs and lows of 2003 from my microcosm:

The growing boy.	The book that almost wasn't.	The cat we lost.
The house that would not sell.	The company that would not fly.	The new employer (that I won't mention).
The school boys.	The cat we found.	The home that we are improving.