Blogging Roller

I updated the Roller User Guide for Roller 2.0 today. The new user interface and group blogging features are documented with plenty of screenshots. Comments, corrections and suggestions for improvement are welcome.

In case you live under a rock and haven't heard the news yet, Netbeans 5.0 beta is out. I'm downloading it now. I tried one of the q-builds a couple of weeks ago and was amazed by the new CVS integration. This time around I'm going to take the new Matisse GUI builder for a spin and see what it can do for my clunky little BlogClient.

Quite an interesting interchange today between James Robertson, Scoble and others about the state of blog tech standards. Like many developers, James thinks the legacy specs RSS, MetaWeblog API, and OPML all suck and he's not afraid to say so. Legacy defender Scoble shoots back that he's a user and therefore he doesn't care about specs. Nevermind the fact that Scoble started the conversation by demanding that tools implement a specific spec, OPML. Anyhow, Winer joins in and says, it's a user vs. developer thing and Scoble set that mean developer man straight.

I think Scoble and Winer are right, it's about the users. When you create a data format or netwok protocol specification, your users are the developers who have to implement the spec. In the case of blog tech specs, the users think the specs suck. That's why the many incompatible variants of RSS are being replaced by Atom format and MetaWeblog API is being replaced by Atom protocol.