Blogging Roller

Linda Skrocki: I find it interesting that although trust is a two way street, the focus in the blogoshpere is often on companies going out on a limb by trusting employees to blog on a corporate sponsored site, but the fact is, employees also go out on a limb for companies when they contribute content to the company blog site (whether it's personal or not).

Solaris back in the race: Last week, I wrote about us discarding Solaris for a new project. Most large companies will not care and not listen to their customers. Many of us have dealt with Verizon, Time Warner, Creative Labs, etc and know what I mean. After all, when you have so many customers, it is cheaper to lose a bunch of them and provide overall bad service than it is to fix real problems. After my short experience with Sun, I assumed it was the same:I WAS WRONG. They do listen!

That's my experience too. Folks at Sun are very tuned into the blogs, forums and other sites where our products might be discussed. We subscribe to RSS/Atom keyword search feeds so we can find out who is talking about our products, we join the conversations and we try our best to make things right when they go wrong. Critical blog posts about us almost always set off a flurry of activities on our internal bloggers mailing list. It's nice to see when those "inbound messaging" efforts pay off.

<a href= "http://www.amazon.com/dp/1932394494?tag=bloggingrolle-20&link_code=as3&creativeASIN=1932394494&creative=373489&camp=211189"> The next releases that I'd like to announce are the Blogapps 2.1 Examples and the Blogapps 2.1 Server.

If you'd like to learn more about the Blogapps examples and server then read The Blogapps Project article at Java.net. Here's a quick summary:

The Blogapps project hosts a collection of useful RSS and Atom utilities and examples from RSS and Atom In Action by Dave Johnson. They're designed to be useful even if you haven't read the book and they're available under the Apache License 2.0 so you can use the code in your applications and you can modify and redistribute them as you wish.

What's changed since 2.0? The examples have been updated to include the latest version of ROME Propono, which means that most of them now support the final Atom protcol spec. The server has been updated to include Roller 4.0 RC5, which also includes Atom protocol support and JSPWiki 2.4. And of course, various bugs have been fixed. Here are the release files, installation instructions and release notes.

• Blogapps server install instructions
• Blogapps Server-2.1.tar.gz
• Blogapps-Server-2.1.zip

• Blopapps example release notes
• Blogapps-Examples-2.1.tar.gz
• Blogapps Examples-2.1.zip

This blog entry was posted via Atom protocol and the MatisseBlogger blog-client, which you can see in the screen-shot below (which was also posted via Atom.

What's next? Not sure at this point, but I will do another Blogapps release once ROME 1.0 is released.

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/rome-logo.png" alt="ROME logo" align="right" />

The first release to discuss is ROME Propono, which includes a ROME based Atom protocol client library, Atom protocol server framework and an Blog Client library abstraction that supports both Atom protocol and the MetaWeblog API.

I've been working on Propono 0.6 off-and-on since May, keeping it in sync with the latest version of the Atom protocol, testing it against Tim Bray's APE and adding various improvements needed in my other projects. Over the weekend I finally had enough time to get a release out. You can find the full-details at the link below but basically this release adds support for the final Atom Publishing Protocol specification and better support for relative URIs.

• ROME Propono 0.6 release notes / change list
• API documentation
• Propono 0.6 Binary tar.gz
• Propono 0.6 Binary zip
• Propono 0.6 Source tar.gz
• Propono 0.6 Source zip

What's next? Once ROME 1.0 is released Real Soon Now, I'll get a another release out and I'll probably call it ROME Propono 1.0.

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/tmbg-logo.jpg" alt="TMBG logo" align="left"/> I've got some new releases to blog about today on this first day of October. More about that later. October is going to be a busy and fun month. I've got a lot going on at work, some paper proposals to write for ApacheCon EU 2008, a cool conference to attend (ConvergeSouth) and a They Might Be Giants show to wrap up the month.