Blogging Roller

Dear Digg.com,

I'm one of the developers of the Apache Roller (incubating) software used by Sun and IBM and others for employee blogging. Our users want to be able to post via Digg.com, but your MetaWeblog API support is lacking.

Roller is not one of the blog servers listed in the Digg Profile area, so we have to use the "manual setup" option, but in manual setup option, you give users the abilty to set only:
- username
- password
- blog URL
- Metaweblog API URL

That won't work. Each of our users can have multiple blogs, so Digg.com needs to tell Roller which blog to post to. The standard way to do that is to use the blogid argument of the MetaWeblog API, but you don't support that -- you don't give users a way to set the blogid to be posted to.

Please add proper support for the MetaWeblog API blogid field so Roller users can blog via Digg.

I'd be glad to help you get this right and tested.

Sincerely, Dave Johnson

PS. I sent this to feedback@digg.com in September but got no response at all.

PPS. If you want the problem to be fixed, please Digg this post. I'm not sure it'll work, but don't know how else to get through to the folks at Digg.

Rich has put together a interesting blogapp that pulls all entries from a blog and turns them into a book, using either cups2pdf or OpenOffice.org Writer. I had the same idea when I was writing RSS and Atom in Action, but I was going to go the DocBook route and eventually dropped the idea because DocBook seemed a bit too complex.

I don't think Rich's work is Roller-specific. Rich used Grabber to get the entries out of Roller and into simple HTML files, so the approach should work with other blog servers that support the MetaWeblog API.

The North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, Saturday, January 20, 2007. This is a free, open and public event for scientists, educators, students, journalists, bloggers and anyone interested in discussing science communication, education and literacy on the Web.

See Bora's blog for an update on sessions, sponsors and ways you can help.

Paul Murphy: By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community - and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure, the core provisions in the community development license, and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.

That's a nice way to start the new year. No doubt plenty of Sun bloggers will be linking to Paul's predictions.