Blogging Roller

It's time for the third annual mountain wiki weekend, wherein the guys leave the women-folk and girly men behind and retreat to the NC mountains where we hide-away in a beautiful house above the New River, play pool, eat pies (chicken pot, blueberry and quiche variety), monitor the giant wine cellar, laze about and, if weather permits, we hike the frozen Grayson Highlands where the wild ponies roam. It's called the wiki weekend because we're such geeks that, even without internet connectivity or cell-phone service we actually set up a wireless network and a wiki. You're probably thinking "mountain idiots weekend" at this point but I'll pay you no mind. I'm looking forward to it. Should be a nice break and this year I'm going to meetup with Codehaus Bob on the way up for lunch in Hickory.

Valentines day was a bad choice, so the talk is cancelled and we hope to re-schedule for a later date.

Phil Windley: With no fanfare at all, Google has created a universal login for anyone who wants to use it.

The Microsoft Team RSS blog explains the three major ways an application can use the new IE7 RSS platform. Very interesting. I'm going to have to commandeer a Windows box for a couple of days and try this stuff out.

Heath Stewart explains how he added A9 OpenSearch support to his blog and urges you to "consider adding OpenSearch to your site," which is something I write about and recommend in RSS and Atom in Action. Now there are at least two good reasons to support OpenSearch on your site: 1) folks can plug your search right into the A9 portal and 2) folks can plugin your search right into IE7. I hope we'll see OpenSeach in Firefox too.

Join us tonight at Cafe Cyclo at 6:30PM to talk blogging, podcasting and whatever else floats your boat. Josh has the details.

Did I miss something? When did it become possible to just apt-get the JDK as Tim does in his Nexenta review?

I spent most of the weekend proofreading part II of RSS and Atom in Action, but I also spent some time  testing a new build of the Blogapps server and examples. It had been a while since I tested the blog apps with other blog servers, so I decided to install the latest versions of Movable Type (3.2), WordPress (2.0.1) and Das Blog (1.8.too.many.numbers). Movable Type took about 15 minutes to setup and Das Blog the same, but WordPress was the killer. It took me about three hours to figure out why it wasn't working and to upgrade Debian, Apache, PHP4 common and PHP4-MySQL to make it happy. So much for the famous 5 minute install.

Tim O'Reilly: I was just browsing the buzz game, and discovered something that surprised me. While the futures market still has its money on Eclipse, in the past year Netbeans has passed Eclipse in actual Yahoo! search volume.

Linda notices that I've got a plog on Amazon.com.

Want to learn about parsing and producing RSS and Atom with Java? You're in luck. New ROME contributor Randy Ray has written an excellent intro titled Taking a tour of ROME and published it on Java.Net.



And in case you missed it I'll say it again: ROME v0.8 is available! This new (beta) release adds support for Atom 1.0 support and a bunch of new modules including "Content, iTunes Podcast, Slash, Google Base, Creative Commons, and MediaRSS."

Every time I emerge from my office, the kids ask "is the book done, is it done dad, dad! is it done!?!" so here's a little status report on book progress.

The state of the book is strong. I spent the past weekend reviewing the typeset copy for Part I and now I'm onto Part II. I'll wrap up my Part II proofreading this weekend, write the front-matter and  with luck I'll be completely done by the end of next week. I still need to get a new release of the Blogapps examples and server out there, maybe I can squeeze that in this weekend too.

You know what I'm gonna do when I'm finished? I'm gonna fire off a rocket.

Thank goodness the book is almost done, 'cause I've got lots of cool new software to play with:

Netbeans 5.0 is finally out. Thank goodness for that. I was getting tired of the constant stream of betas, q-builds and RCs. Those Netbeans guys are relentless fanatics, so watch out Eclipse.

NeoOffice 1.2, the X11-free Open Office port for the Mac, is now available. It's got the ability to read Open Document Format files (but it can't save them yet?).

ROME 0.8, the Java newsfeed wrangler (as Tim Bray called it), is available with the ability to parse and produce Atom 1.0 format newsfeeds. And ROME bloggers, please send me your feed URLs so I can add you to Planet ROME.

Jeff Blattman, of the Sun Portal team, has submitted a patch for Roller Atom Admin Publishing Protocol, which is an Atom-like protocol for managing users and blogs. Need to evaluate that and figure out how to get it into Roller.

IBM's Phay Tac Lau and Elias Torres have contributing tagging support to Roller. Elias commited the code into a development branch and  I'm hoping we can land it into the trunk in time for the next release (2.2).

Roller 2.1 is still waiting in the wings. We've got a release candidate that looks good to me, but I'm not sure anybody else has checked it out.