Blogging Roller

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.