Blogging Roller

I mentioned some time before that the Italian newspaper la Repubblica.it is using Roller for it's comments-enabled reporter and columnists blogs (for example Estremo Occidente, and see the blogroll for more). They also seem to be running, or at least in affiliation with, a site called Kataweb.it which hosts a bunch of Roller-based blogs including one devoted to reality-TV called Reality Blog.

To keep up with what's being said about Roller, I'm subscribed to search newsfeeds from Technorati, PubSub, and Feedster. My search expression looks something like this:

   roller AND ("blog server" OR "blog software")

I'm trying to compare the quality of results from the three services, but so far I can't see too much difference. Ok, on to the topic of the post.

Yesterday, PubSub scooped both Technorati and Feedster with a couple of mentions of Roller. First, in a post from D'Arcy Norman about "Massively Multi User Weblogging." Then in a follow up from James Farmer, who gives his point-of-view on each of the options. Farmer's follow-up is filled with lots of good info, until he gets to Roller where he says:

It looks to me like Roller is going to become part of Sun’s enterprise software offerings (here and here) so there’s not a heap of point following that up at the moment

Seriously flawed thinking there, so I responded:

Whatever do you mean by "It looks to me like Roller is going to become part of Sun’s enterprise software offerings (here and here) so there’s not a heap of point following that up at the moment"? If anything, that is a reason to follow up, not a reason against. Anyhow…

Roller is a great choice, Sun has over a thousand blogs running on it. JRoller.com has > 7000. There are numerous other large scale sites. Roller is open source software licensed under and Apache license and that ain’t gonna change.

Plus, Roller is Java/J2EE -- so it will run anywhere from standalone to Apache/Tomcat to big honkin' app servers like Weblogic, Websphere, and the Sun Java App Server (minor tweaks necessary for some of those app severs, but it will run).

If you're considering setting up a site for hundreds or thousands of blogs, make sure Roller is on the evaluation list.

We took Jetbrains up on their offer of free IDEA IntelliJ IDE licenses to open source projects. Today the licenses arrived and I mailed them out to the Roller committers. I'm happy to have another IDE to work with because neither Eclipse nor Netbeans completely satisfies me on Solaris x86. Swing-based Netbeans and IntelliJ run perfectly on Solaris x86, but unfortuantely Eclipse does not.

Pat Chanezon: The details are in my post to the ROME dev mailing list: it seems like mod_security, as configured at the TextDrive ISP refuses HTTP get with a user-agent containing the string 'java'! How how should java people interpret that? I guess as a compliment: if mod_security forbids Java in the user-agent, it means that even spammers and rogue spiders ended up dumping Perl for their nasty HTTP business to use Java instead: Java everywhere ;-)"

I burned several hours trying to figure out why Roller Planet (and specifically the Triangle Blogs Aggregator) wouldn't work against Textdrive hosted blogs, only to learn that the reason is an anti-Java filter. So my interpretation is %@#(*&!!! Textdrive is not our friend. They don't support Java and they appear to be actively filtering out Java clients. Perhaps I'm wrong and mod_security is the culpret?

PS. By changing my user-agent string to "Roller Planet 1.1-dev" (I considered the user-agent string "Textdrive s****" but that's just rude), I was able to get beyond the filter.