Blogging Roller

Somehow I missed the Jan. 22, 2007 announcement, which was made on Covalent's Roller-based blog. According to the announcement, Covalent will support Roller, eleven other Apache and Spring on a "per incident basis."

Trey Drake explains what you have to do to get Roller 3.x working with OpenDS. He's right, its a kludgey process and I hope we can improve it. The bug he mentions "after registration the user must close and re-open the browser" will be fixed in Roller 3.1 which is just about ready for release.

I can't get to pipes.yahoo.com (due to heavy web traffic I assume) so I haven't had a chance to check it out myself, but Pipes sounds pretty amazing. According to Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Jeremy also posted a list of the blogs that are covering Pipes and every one that I read is a rave review. Tim O'Reilly calls it a "milestone in the history of the internet." Apparently, I'm not the only one who wants to put feed creation, aggregation and filtering tools in the hands of ordinary folks and not just developers Everybody seems to think this is a great idea and Yahoo appears to have executed it very well, so it will be interesting to see how well it works and how it is put to use.

Niall Kennedy and Anil Dash both posted a screen-shots of the Pipes UI, here's one from Niall's blog:

Cool stuff.

A possibly related side-note: ROME co-founder Alejandro Abdelnur now works for Yahoo. 

And I mean that in the nicest way possible, i.e. the Codehaus way.

Bob McWhirter: Ultimately all open-source survives and grows based upon goodwill. Tending to the community is required, else you risk alienating your own users. I aim to use my experiences from a variety of open-source projects and communities to make sure the JBoss community is one of which I’m proud to be a member.

Congrats Bob. Sounds like a great new job. This mean you'll be coming to Raleigh more often?