Blogging Roller

I'll be speaking on RSS and Atom next week (Wednesday August 9th) at the Triangle .NET user group. I'll cover RSS and Atom feed formats, the Windows/IE7 RSS Platform and the Atom protocol. Details are on the Tri-NUG website.

Tags: topic:[RSS], topic:[Atom], topic:[IE7], topic:[.NET]

Here's the abstract of the talk I gave this morning at Tri-XML 2006:

Beyond blogging: Atom format and protocol. Like XML-RPC and SOAP before, feeds and publishing protocols were born in the blogopshere and quickly moved beyond blogging. Nowadays, web service providers are using RSS/Atom feeds and REST-based publishing protocols as lightweight alternatives to SOAP. And developers are finding new ways to combine web services from different sites into new applications, known as "mash-ups" in the lingo of Web 2.0. If you'd like to do the same, then attend this talk to learn about the new IETF Atom feed format (RFC-4287) and the soon-to-be-finalized Atom protocol, which together form a strong foundation for REST-based web services development.

Here's a rough outline of the talk:

• Introduction
• Beyond blogging
• Blogs hit the hit time
• The web is bloggy
• Atom as an alternative to WS-*
  
• Understanding feeds
• Birth of RSS
• RSS 1.0: the RDF fork
• The simple fork and RSS 2.0
  
• Atom: the standard
• Parsing feeds
• Fetching and parsing feeds
• Universal Feed Parser
• ROME utilities
• Windows RSS platform
• Serving feeds
• Approaches for generating and serving feeds
  
• Feed autodiscovery
• Styled feeds
  
• Atom protocol
• Compared to MetaWeblog
• REST based approach
• Introspection
• Collections
• Extending Atom
• Atom protocol in action
  
• Getting a service doc
• Getting collections
• Posting an entry
• Posting an image
• Demo: interacting with an Atom server via command-line
  

And here are the slides: TriXML2006-BeyondBlogging.pdf

Tags: topic:[Atom Publishing Protocol], topic:[Atom], topic:[APP], topic:[RSS], topic:[feeds]

I'm glad to hear that Socialtext Open is now the first "commercial open source" wiki and I'm interested to see how the Socialtext move plays out. I do wonder why they choose MPL instead of CDDL, which is basically MPL plus bug fixes (see the summary of changes).

Tags: topic:[CDDL], topic:[Open Source], topic:[wiki]

That's the title of Joe Gregorio's latest article on XML.com, which shows how to implement most of the Atom protocol (draft #8) in Python. No matter what language you program in, the article is an excellent introduction to the protocol.

Tags: topic:[Atom Publishing Protocol], topic:[Atom], topic:[APP]

Joe Gregorio mentioned in his BarCampRDU session that Microsoft Word 2007 will be able to blog via the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP). Not sure how I missed this news back in may when Tim Bray blogged it, but I did. I need to tune-up my Technorati searches.

And speaking of Tim and the APP, Tim's talking APP at OSCON this week. He's going to talk about APP as universal web glue and maybe even doing some demos that involve Roller and my work-in-progress APP implementation.

And by the way, I've made a number of small fixes to Roller's APP implementation this week and I'm considering doing a Blogapps server 1.0.1 release these weekend -- just in time for the book, which ships on August 1st.

Tags: topic:[BarCampRDU], topic:[OSCON], topic:[APP], topic:[Atom], topic:[Atom protocol]

Congrats and thanks to the organizers, volunteers, Red Hat and other sponsors for making BarCampRDU a great success. I really enjoyed it. In case you have no idea what a "barcamp" is here's the deal. According to the BarCamp wiki, a BarCamp is "an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment."

The event started around 9AM Saturday morning with a quick introduction from conference organizer Fred Stutzman. Everybody who wanted to propose a session lined up at the front of the room and gave a 30 second pitch for their idea. Most of the proposals were technical like "linux systems admin" or "atom publishing protocol," but there were some non-technical ideas too. For example there was a session on "how to juggle" and one on "how to dance with girls" (not sure how that turned out, given the M/F ratio).

After the session pitches, the session leaders claimed spots on the schedule, which was a 10-foot by 15-foot sheet of paper taped to the wall. Next attendees voted for sessions by putting tick marks on the schedule using magic markers. Based on the votes and conversations between session leaders, some sessions were combined and some were moved to smaller or larger meeting rooms -- all right on the spot. It was amazing how well that worked and how quickly we were able to arrive at a schedule and by 10AM we were all attending sessions.

The sessions themselves were not so unconventional. They were definitely more interactive than the usual tech-conference format, but generally followed the normal speaker/audience model. I'm not complaining. I enjoyed the sessions, learned a lot and heard a lot of interesting stories. I attended sessions on open source business and it's ability to innovate (Tarus Balog and ), RESTful Notification Architecture (Seairth Jacobs), social networks (Fred Stutzman) and the Atom publishing protocol (Joe Gregorio).

That's all I have time for tonight. If you want more info, Fred Stutzman has a great round-up of the blog and news coverage (and check it out -- I was mentioned in the News & Observer article) plus some guidelines for running your own BarCamp. I hope we'll do another one this year -- I'd like to help out next time around.

Tags: topic:[BarCampRDU]

BarCamp RDU is here! I'm getting excited and getting reading to drive over to Durham for the pre-event party tonight. Tomorrow's line-up looks awesome and Atom protocol is on the agenda thanks to Joe Gregorio.

Forrester: As an open source solution, Roller has been deployed only in a few instances, but it has been used by thousands of bloggers on a single installation. It features an excellent ability to allow administrators to manage permissions across blogs, but individual blog management is cumbersome, and robust content management workflow tools are lacking. Roller is ideally suited for companies that want to deploy blogs in an enterprise where content management and oversight will be minimal.

Since I participated in the study, I was able to read the full report, both the Roller report ($795) and the market overview ($995). Roller didn't do so well in the comparison chart (see Charlene Li's post), but we're still ranked as a strong contender -- especially for companies interested in Sun-style trust-your-employees blogging. Overall, I think the report is fair and accurate. I definitely agree that parts of Roller's authoring/admin UI are cumbersome and in need of redesign, but Forrester isn't very specific about the areas that need improvement.

• ROME2 Proposal2
  "Updated write up and bean model source based on the received feedback"
• BarCampRDUClaimedSessions
  Line-up for this Saturday looks good and includes session on Atom protocol
• Feathered Blogs, powered by Roller
  Henri Yandell setup a Roller server fo Apache projects, esp. Jakarta Commons
• bLaugh » Microsoft’s Latest Acquisition
  Micro$oft: We now own syndication, it will hereby be known as OurSS
• Queso - a Semantic Web/Web 2.0 server
  Elias writes about IBM's Java EE and Abdera based Atom protocol server
• Apache Incubator board report July 2006
  Lots of progress in Apache Roller on multiple fronts

If you want to learn all about Apache Roller (incubating) project status, features, architecture and all the cool new features coming in Roller 3.0 then you'll want to make plans to attend ApacheCon US 2006 in Austin, TX. In other words: my Roller talk was accepted.

For more info, see the Raleigh Bloggers wiki.

• Marc Hadley: Mapping WADL to Java
  Using WADL to generate "strongly-typed client-side stubs layered on JAX-WS and JAXB" for REST based web services
• The Codehaus Foundation, Inc.
  Articles of incorporation
• Codehaus Foundation: Bob McWhirter
  "I’m just the smiling face on the front of the cereal box"
• Java DB in Java SE: John Reynolds
  "Data is really important, and an RDBMS is a really good tool for handling data"
• Java DB in Java SE: Simon Morris
  "a lopsided enterprise-heavy Java community is having a detrimental effect on Java's desktop efforts?"
• Java DB in Java SE: Romain Guy
  "Adding a DB in the JDK is a good move from Sun"
• BBC News: What if...
  "These 'thought experiments' help philosophers clarify their understanding"

It's been a very busy week and I've scarcely had time to catch up on email and blog reading and other critically important activities. I spent almost the entire week deep in Roller 3.0 development. Here's a quick update on our work.

Things are looking really good in Roller 3.0 and I'm really happy with the refactoring work we've done in the blog/feed rendering system. Our charter for 3.0 was to completely rework Roller's URL structure and to introduce the concept of a site-wide frontpage blog, but doing that work required a lot of refactoring -- a lot of ripping out crufty old and patched-up code with clean and shiny new abstractions. The results look great.

Thanks to Allen's new URL work, the rendering system is now pluggable, the caching system is easier to understand and maintain, we're approaching a point where we'll be able to offer the option of static rendering and, of course, the URL structure is much nicer, more conventional, logical and able to handle multi-language blogs.

As part of the new frontpage blog work, we introduced some new page models an macros to make it easy to display site and planet-wide blog community information, including a user and blog directory. But we didn't stop there -- we've implemented a completely new set of models and macros for all blogs and we hope to deprecate all of the old macos and old themes. We'll still support them, of course, but moving forward we believe the new macros will make it much easier for bloggers and theme authors to build a library of great themes -- something that Roller is missing.

We've been working hard this week because we're really supposed to be done by now, but I've got no regrets. We set some aggressive goals and, like I said, the results look great. Now we need to quicky stabilize things, get a test build together and get some feedback from the community and especially from theme authors.

You can now get RSS and Atom in Action from the Manning Publications site as an e-book. You should be able to get the print edition on July 21. But I won't believe it's done until I get my box'o'books.

All in all it was a great trip. We spent seven nights in Ireland, stayed in six different towns and drove about 800 miles around the island. It was our first vacation away from the kids in about ten years and we really had a great time together exploring the country-side and towns in the west and south of Ireland. In case you're considering a trip there too, here are some observations and a list of our favorites experiences.

Lodging. B&B's are numerous in Ireland, but we favored guest houses when we made our lodging plans. Looking back, our favorites were Davitt's guest house in Kenmare and the Buttermilk Lodge in Clifden.

Food. We found lots of choices for food and we had indian, chinese, Irish contemporary and pub-grub. Our favorite meals were at Punjab Balti in Dublin, Davitt's restaurant in Kenmare, Laken House in Kilkenney and the Porterhouse in Dublin.

Connnectivity. Mobile phone signal is strong all over the island -- four bars everywhere. Internet access can be found in post offices, coffee shops and other businesses. Wireless internet is a little difficult to find, but we found it at the video store in Clifden, a coffee shop in Galway and a computer store in Kenmare. Price was around four euro / hour.

Prices. Food and fuel are pretty expensive in Ireland right -- and the USD to Euro exchange rate doesn't help. Renting a car is also very expensive, which must be due to the dangerous roads.

And finally here are links to the previous posts in this series:

• <a href= "http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/ie_vacation_day_1" target="_self">.ie vacation day #1: Dublin to Clifden
  
• <a href= "http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/ie_vacation_day_2" target="_self">.ie vacation day #2: Clifden to Kilkee
  
• <a href= "http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/ie_vacation_day_3" target="_self">.ie vacation day #3: Kilkee to Kenmare
  
• <a href= "http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/ie_vacation_day_4" target="_self">.ie vacation day #4: Kenmare and Ring of Kerry
  
• <a href= "http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/i_e_vacation_day_5" target="_self">.ie vacation day #5: Kenmare to Kilkenny
• <a href= "http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/i_e_vacation_day_6" target="_self">.ie vacation day #6: Kilkenny to Dublin and home
  

And that's it for the vacation. Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Today (Thursday) we woke up early and got an early start. We drove north towards Dublin, took the scenic route through the Wicklow mountians and stopped at Glendalough, the beautiful double-lake valley where St. Kevin and his followers built a monastic city. We walked around the ruins, the lakes and up to the small waterfall there. Glendalough is only about an hour south of Dublin by car or tour bus, and it's worth the trip.

Next, we stopped briefly at the seaside town of Bray before heading back to Dublin. Thursday was our list night in Ireland, so we stayed near the airport in a Eagan's guest hour. We didn't want to venture all the way downtown, so we ate at the Porterhouse restaurant just a couple of blocks away. Porterhouse is a micro-brewery with an awesome selection of beer, and a very interesting guide to beer on every table, and reasonably priced food. I didn't expect much from the place, but it turned to be one of the best dining experiences of the trip.

When we arrived at the airport, we found chaos and another bomb-scare in progress. Somebody left a rucksack under a stairway in the arrivals area, so the authorities order an evacuation and called the bomb-squad. Our flights were delayed for a couple of hours, but we both made it home safely by the end of the day.

Today (Wednesday) we got an early start, had an excellent breakfast at Davitt's and headed out from Kenmare towards Kilkenney. We didn't make any stops and the trip took about 3.5 hours. We spent the rest of the day exploring the town, doing a little shopping and taking a tour of the Kilkenney Castle, which was the home of the Butler family until 1935 when the family moved out, auctioned off the contents and left the castle to fall into complete disrepair. In the 1990's the castle was restored to it's Victorian-era state and much of the contents was returned to the castle. They did a great job and as a result the tour was excellent.

Tonight we're staying at the Laken House, a restaurant and 10-room guest house across the river from the castle. The room is nice and our package-deal included dinner which was excellent, but the place is empty and the dead-quiet is a little disconcerting. Tomorrow we're off to Dublin for the last night.

Finding internet access here in Ireland has been difficult and when I have been able to get online, I've had only enough time to upload photos, post a blog entry and correspond with the folks who are so kindly caring for the kids. With a couple of exceptions (e.g. Manning Press) I haven't had time to read or respond to my growing backlog of email. I'll be back online Sunday night, so you'll just have to wait until then. Cheers!

Today (Tuesday) we explored the southern part of the Ring of Kerry, which is a 110-mile route that follows the coast of the Iveragh peninsula and was apparently carved into the seaside slopes by thousands of years of tour bus traffic. The mountain and coastal views are truly amazing, even on a grey and overcast day as we had today. Starting in Kenmare, we drove west and stopped in the small town of Sneem for a relaxing walk through the town's nature park along the river. We saw a pretty pair of swans there.



Next we stopped at Staigue Fort, a well-preserved iron-age fortress -- really just a 15-foot tall circular stone wall -- about 4km off the main road between Sneem and Castlecove. It was an interesting sight, but the narrow one-lane road was a real problem. From there we drove on to Waterville, where we took another short walk by the ocean and then decided to turn around and backtrack our way home. On the way home we stopped at Derrynane House, the home of Daniel O'Connell who campaigned for and won equal rights for Catholics in Ireland. The house itself was not all that impressive, but the history lesson was very interesting and the park there was beautiful. We took a walk along the beaches to the ruins of the old abbey nearby. After that we made our way back to Kenmare to enjoy a nice dinner at Davitt's guest house (our second night in Kenmare). Tomorrow, we're off to Kilkenny.



As usual, photos are on Flickr.

On Monday morning we headed south again, driving through Kilarney and stopping to do some hiking around the lakes near the Muckross house. We took the tour of the house, which was quite interesting thanks in part to an entertaining tour guide.



After that we made our way over the mountains, stopping at the Ladies View for a breather. The driving was quite nerve-wracking and frankly, we were thankful to make it to our next stop Kilmare alive. Driving on the left, swerving to avoid the big buses roaring around the narrow mountain road switch-backs and the faint smell of burning in the air really brought back some memories for us -- memories of our first year of marriage, which we spent in Jamaica. Did I mention that we're here to celebrate our 15th anniversary?



We arrived at Kenmare, definitely a "cute" and colorful little town with nice restaurants and tourist oriented shops. Andi loves it. We checked into Davitts, a restaurant to guest house right in the middle of town, to find a modern, large and well decorated room. After we check-in via the internet tomorrow we'll explore Kerry and if the weather holds up we'll find another place to take a hike.

Photos are on Flickr.