Blogging Roller: Roller 0.9.9 - here's to the complainers

Roller 0.9.9 - here's to the complainers

As I have said before: here's to the complainers. Those who care enough to complain are an important asset to any software product. Hani is the king of whiny-ass complainers, of course. He can't do anything except complain, that is the charter of his blog after all and he is locked into his own stinky little cage, but I do still appreciate the constructive criticism that he makes in his recent weblog entry about Roller. Here are the improvements that he suggested, minus the childish and poorly written bile:

Editor UI: add a dismiss button to the popup calendar
Editor UI: document plugins in Roller user guide
Editor UI: provide comment count
Editor UI: the allow comments on entry flag should default to true (fixed)
Weblog search: add paging for lengthy search results
Weblog search: problem with search results?
Main page: Font sizes too large on main page (fixed)
Main page: List weblog name rather than user name in hot blogs list (fixed)
Main page: Provide option to view main page with out excerpts
Edit user page: default locale to en and timezone to America/New_York (fixed)

We will be deploying new Roller 0.9.9 builds to JRoller over the next couple of weeks and we may have the opportunity to make some of these improvements, but these are not the only problems we are tracking and the all-volunteer Roller development team has limited time to commit to Roller. If you really want to make Roller better, it's up to you. Roller is open source software and you can help to make it better by filing bug reports and suggestions to Roller's JIRA issue tracker, by submitting patches, and by helping out with documentation on the Roller Wiki.

Roller is the most popular and successful weblogging software among Java bloggers, was recently chosen by Sun to power blogs.sun.com, and is enjoyed by thousands of webloggers worldwide. Join us, help to ensure Roller's continued success, and make a difference in the open source Java community.

Dave Johnson in Java • 🕒 05:34PM May 30, 2004

Tags: Java

Comments:

I have this strong suspicion (based on the appearance of "roller.anthonyeden.com" in someone's GUID) that JRoller has gone back to its old habit of choosing a domain-name based entirely on what was requested at the time of the last cache-refresh. I've deleted all of the last day's JRoller entries from the Javablogs databases, and set the next-update time to the day after tomorrow, by which time one would hope the canonical URL is set back to 'http://jroller.com/' Please? :)

Posted by Charles Miller on May 31, 2004 at 03:43 AM EDT #

Done. Thanks, Charles.

Posted by Dave Johnosn on May 31, 2004 at 03:51 AM EDT #

I just checked and the absolute URL is still "http://jroller.com". The URL on my site didn't change either - and I've had the same issue (entries appearing unread in NNW).

Posted by Matt Raible on May 31, 2004 at 03:51 AM EDT #

Heh. Dave must've changed this right before I checked it. I had to flush my cache in order for the change to show up in my RSS feed.

Posted by Matt Raible on May 31, 2004 at 03:55 AM EDT #

The issue with "duplicate search results" should be fixed, I dunno why that is happening. I have noticed that Lucene wasn't re-indexing as I'd like but didn't have time to investigate. Hopefully once a restart occurs the index will clean itself up (that is what I observed during development).

Posted by Lance on May 31, 2004 at 01:34 PM EDT #

i relly do not want useless critics, but i see no reference in the todo list; new Jroller entry pages looks very bad in mozilla (gecko) based browsers. Check it out with mozilla firefox or latest stable mozilla suite.

Posted by aaa on May 31, 2004 at 05:03 PM EDT #

Firefox and Safari are my primary browsers and the entry page looks fine for me. You probably need to refresh your browser cache. You can do this by holding down the shift key when you hit the Refresh button. Do that on the JRoller page and see what happens.

Posted by Dave Johnson on May 31, 2004 at 05:14 PM EDT #

Posted by Dave Johnson on May 31, 2004 at 05:15 PM EDT #

Search always wasn't a good part of Roller and now it is not using custom template anymore. It is using some ugly template that even have no link to the entry.... oh wait, there is a link from the picture. Thanks god I still can search my own blog! :-) But what about trackback send?

Posted by eu on May 31, 2004 at 09:26 PM EDT #

thanks for the mozilla tip. it works nicely. i dont know why people were whining aout the new design if they see it correctly....

Posted by aaa on June 01, 2004 at 01:13 AM EDT #

Addition to my previous comment: it would be nice that dhtml editor would work in other browsers too. Or you can improve midas a little more in the future. thanks for the grea service !

Posted by aaa on June 01, 2004 at 01:17 AM EDT #

The Midas and DHTML editors as well as the Calendar popup in the Weblog Edit page are not products of the Roller team. They are 3rd party (open source) components that we are using.

Posted by Dave Johnson on June 01, 2004 at 01:22 AM EDT #

I have a question or a Bug. I am not getting the email notifications for comments. I am running jroller.com. Any ideas? is this a bug or my problem? thanks

Posted by carlos orrego on June 03, 2004 at 08:07 PM EDT #

I'm not sure that the status of email notification for comments at JRoller. I do know that we are working on it.

Posted by Dave Johnson on June 04, 2004 at 12:14 PM EDT #