Blogging Roller

When I lived in Jamaica, there was one TV station and on this one TV station there was one weekly Reggae show. The show was called Reggae Strong. In the canned intro to the show, the announcer would always explain that "a weekly show about Reggae could be called Reggae Week, but reggae nah weak: Reggae Strong!"

Roller is certainly going strong. At the start of the week I forked 0.9.6 off into it's own branch in case we need to do a bug fix release. Since then, Lance has checked in two great new features: support for <a href= "http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/page/lance/20021109#andy_oliver_wants">comments on weblog entries and a <a href= "http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/page/lance/20021114#s_p_e_l_l">spelling checker for the weblog editor. Great stuff. Matt Raible has kindly opened up a <a href= "http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd/20021114#wanna_try_roller">demo account on his Roller install so you can try the new features.

The Roller-driven weblogs over a FreeRoller are also going strong. There are some great weblogs and some real bona fide Java gurus writing over there. They are bringing in lots of readers. Roller is going strong, but I don't think it is strong enough withstand getting slashdotted. Thank goodness Rickard posted his J2EE-vs-DotNet review on a real webserver.

I've been trying to take it easy with Roller, but I have been doing a little work. I did some work reduce the per-session memory usage in Roller and I thought I had eliminated all leakage. Unfortuntely, the leak remains, but it is a much slower leak. I've also been trying to figure out why old stories show up as new in aggregators such as Aggie and Feedreader.

With the cool new comments and spell checking features checked in, I think we need to start thinking about a 0.9.7 release (after we plug the memory leak of course).