Blogging Roller

I told just about everybody I met at ApacheCon about the book, so I might as well go ahead and blog about it. I'm writing a blogging book for Manning Publications. We haven't decided on the final title, but the subject is blog application development: using the technologies of blogging and syndication as a platform for application development.

The first half of the book is a series of chapters on parsing, producing, and efficiently serving newsfeeds as well as using web services protocols such as the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and Atom to program blogs, wikis, and related systems. The book is a bit of a hybrid, a mix of a traditional tech book and Google Hacks style example applications -- that makes it a lot of fun for me. The second half of the book will be a collection of a dozen or more blog apps, small but immediately useful blog applications such as a blog-to-email gateway, a blog aggregator, build system blogging plugins, and others. The blog apps and other examples will also be available in both Java and C# flavors.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, I'm free to blog all about it. One of the things I'm really excited about is developing a blog client library. So, you'll hear more about that -- and I hope that will help me get a little feedback on my half-baked ideas. I'm developing a set of interfaces that define the API for a blog client library. I have implemented this API with the MetaWeblog API and now I'm working on an Atom Protocol implementation. I hope this will help me to contribute to the Atom effort and I also hope that my code can seed a blog client library subproject within Rome.

I'm about half-way done with the book, but we are not yet sure of the release date. We need to figure out what to do about Atom because there is a chance that Atom will not be complete by the time we would like to publish the book. I don't think it is necessary to wait until Atom is final, but I also don't want to have to issue a lot of corrections and errata.