Blogging Roller

Josh has the details on the last meet-up. We're going to do it again next week, same bat time same bat channel.

Time: 6:30PM
Date: Tuesday March 15, 2005
Location: Cafe Cyclo, Cameron Village, Raleigh

I've been working like mad to wrap up the Planet Roller UI and finally, it's ready for testing. I'm so confident in the code, that I even deployed it (and latest CVS Roller 1.1-dev) to this site. You can see the new aggregated main page in action here:

Main page - http://rollerweblogger.org/planet.do

RSS 2.0 feed - http://rollerweblogger.org/planetrss

As you can see, there is now a Technorati rankings bar that complements the Hot Blogs list, since Hot Blogs only works for the on-site blogs. I included a bunch of Roller-related blogs in the aggregator. If you blog about Roller and you'd like to be included in (or excluded from) the aggregator, let me know.

Update: some Planet Roller usage/testing notes are on the wiki (with screenshots).

My hometown makes me proud and activist bloggers played a part From the News and Observer:

CHAPEL HILL -- They swooped in by the busload to the town they said was filled with "dead churches" that "disregard the Bible," hoping to win over some sinners.

"I came here because I love Chapel Hill," said the Rev. Ron Wood, pastor of Celebration Assembly of God on Weaver Dairy Road and a member of the anti-gay-rights group Called 2 Action.

"I'm an ordained minister, too," he added, referring to several speakers at the Town Council meeting Monday who identified themselves as clergy members. "But I'm not one who believes I have the right to disregard the word of God."

Their message was rejected by the majority of Chapel Hillians who met them at Town Hall with signs, T-shirts and buttons proclaiming their support for gay rights.

I'm not sure how many of the reported 2,800 internal blogs at IBM are running Roller, but it's pretty clear that the blog in the screenshot is a Roller based blog. I've heard from multiple sources that they're running a forked version of Roller (looks to me like circa 0.9.7). It's time to upgrade to 1.0 guys and join the fun on the Roller dev-list. We'd love to see your mods.

Josh has the details. I'll be there. I hope Josh, Grace, David and others will be there too. Come join us at 6:30PM at Cafe Cyclo, Cameron Village in Raleigh, NC.

Danny Ayers lists some of the RSS and Atom related books coming out this year. Don't forget Blogs, Wikis, and Feeds In Action, which is due out in July.

Patrick Peak's been off writing <a href= "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1932394419/theartofwar-20/102-4163380-5716141">Hibernate Quickly for Manning, but now he's back with a slick new Roller theme. He's written a nice couple of posts attempting to debunk some of the Ruby hysteria that's been infecting Java bloggers of late.

Here is an XSL transform for converting a flat OPML file (like those produced by PlanetPlanet sites), to a Roller Planet config file (with all subscriptions in one group): opml2planet.xsl

Planet SST has converted from PlanetPlanet to Planet Roller. OK, so "Students and former students of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute" is not a big planet, but it is a start.

Planet Roller is a community aggregator, a tool for creating a website that combines related but separately hosted blogs together into one blog with it's own newsfeed. Planet Roller will eventually be part of Roller, but for the upcoming Roller 1.1 release it's in the Roller "sandbox" and will only be available in custom builds. There's also a standalone verion of Planet Roller, which I'll describe below.

Here's some status. I spent most of the week creating the infrastructure needed for configuring and running Planet Roller inside of Roller. That means storing the subscription and group configuration in a database, rather than an XML file. And, it means doing aggregation via a database query rather than spinning through a bunch of hashtables. Once I'm done, we'll have a custom-build of Roller that puts every Roller blog on the system into the aggregator and allows us to add separately blogs into the mix.

Want to try Planet Roller? I've been testing a standalone command-line version of Planet Roller, which I call Planet Tool, by running a site called Triangle Bloggers, which combines a bunch of local blogs in the Raleigh-Durham area. So, one way to try Planet Roller is to visit that site and subscribe to the feed. Triangle Bloggers has been a good testing experience because I've been forced to deal with a wide variety of Atom and RSS feeds. Planet Tool can handle Atom and just about any form of RSS, as long as it has item level publication dates (i.e. must be RSS 0.93 or later).

If you want to try running Planet Tool and creating your own aggregated blog, you can get the tool here: planet-roller-1.1-dev.tar (source is included). If you have Java installed, all you need to do is download it, un-tar it (with tar or Winzip), open a command window, and either run planet-tool.sh or plannet-tool.bat. It reads an XML config file and then generates the HTML and XML files needed for an aggregated blog. To keep your aggregated blog up to date, you'll need to run Planet Tool on a schedule, so run it as a cron job or as a Window Scheduled Task.

For more information on the config file and on page templates see this blog entry:
Rome + Texen = Planet Roller

For more information on how Planet Tool works:
Planet Roller Internals

Though they don't admit it anywhere on their site, Syracuseblog.com is power by Roller.

You can't say goodbye to Leo without going through this routine:

Hug
Kiss
Bunny nose
High five
Low five
Tickle five

It's a little inconvenient at pre-school drop off, but I love it.