Blogging Roller

10 years ago today

2012-04-17T07:41:07+00:00

Ten years ago on this day, O'Reilly published an article that I wrote called Building an Open Source J2EE Weblogger, the article that introduced the Roller weblogger (now known as Apache Roller) to the world. It changed my career and my life in a bunch of nice ways and 10 years later I'm still benefiting from my choice to create Roller and write that article. So you can get a taste of the times, here's the intro:

Building an Open Source J2EE Weblogger: As a Java developer, you should be aware of the tremendous wealth of open source development software that is available for your use -- even if you have no desire to release any of your own software as open source. In this article, I will introduce you to some of the most useful open source Java development tools by showing you how I used these tools to develop a complete database-driven Web application called Roller.

Roller fits into the relatively new category of software called webloggers: applications that make it easy for you to maintain a weblog, also known as a blog -- a public diary where you link to recent reading on the Web and comment on items of interest to you.

The Roller Web application allows you to maintain a Web site that consists of a weblog, an organized collection of favorite Web bookmarks, and a collection of favorite news feeds. You can define Web pages to display your weblog, bookmarks, and news feeds. By editing the HTML templates that define these pages, you have almost total control over the layout and appearance of these pages. Most importantly, you can do all of this without leaving the Roller Web application -- no programming is required.

I've written and talked about Roller and the history of Roller numerous times. If you're interested in learning more about it here's my most recent Roller presentation, which covers Roller history in some detail:

Whats New In Roller5

View more presentations from snoopdave

These days, Roller isn't really thriving as an open source project. Wordpress became the de facto standard blogging package and then micro-blogging took over the world. There are only a couple of active committers and most recent contributions have come via student contributions. Though IBM, Oracle and other companies still use it heavily, they do not contribute back to the project. If you're interested in contributing to Roller or becoming part of the Apache Software Foundation, then Roller needs YOU!.

Roller Beginner's Guide available

2010-02-25T07:54:11+00:00

I blogged about Alfonso Romero's Apache Roller 4.0 Beginner's Guide book before. It's a great resource for folks who want to get the most out of their Apache Roller-based blogs, and not just beginners. As you can see in the photo on the right, I've got my copy. You can get yours directly from Pakt publishing:

Buy a copy of Beginner's Guide to Apache Roller 4.0

To publicize the book, Pakt publishing has been publishing some useful excerpts and even a complete sample chapter online. Here's summary of the excerpts so far:

If you've been following Roller development you know that Roller 5.0 is on the way. Most of the changes in Roller 5.0 are "under the hood" so 5.0 won't make Alfonso's book obsolete. Except for a couple of pages in Chapter 5 "Spicing Up Your Blog" that need updated screenshots, I believe everything in the book applies to Roller 5.0 as well.

Latest Links: August 11, 2009

2009-08-11T21:12:00+00:00

Your blog still loves you
"it's time to use the web again to store our ideas, and instead of relying on Silicon Valley companies to link our stuff together, let's just use the Internet."
ZDNet Asia: 'Ferociously loyal' users to stand by Sun
"47,000 enterprise customers and a ferociously loyal customer base"
The Connections Blog: Full house! Lotus Connections 2.5 video demos
screen-casts for 8 of the Lotus Connections components
Chromium Blog: Google Chrome Developer Tools for Eclipse Users
"Set breakpoints, inspect variables and evaluate expressions from within Eclipse"
First impressions of Google Wave | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com
"won't be ejecting existing enterprise collab tools from the workplace any time soon"
Shindig-based OpenSocial Container from Lockheed Martin
"written in Java and is based on open source projects such as GWT, Hibernate..."

Social data flow

2009-08-10T16:52:47+00:00

(Note that I wrote this over weekend, before we all learned about Facebook acquiring FriendFeed. It's hard thinking about how things will change because we have no idea what Facebook will do with FriendFeed, but I'm guessing that this acquisition will end-up making Google Reader a more central part of my flow.)

Every time I find something that I want to share with others online, I have to think about how I want to share and whom I want to share it with. Perhaps I've created too much complexity for myself. This diagram below illustrates the situation. It's my social data flow diagram. Take a look and then I'll explain.

The diagram

The boxes are web sites and the arrows indicate data that flows automatically between those sites. I think of the sites on the left as source sites, places where I share blog entries, post photographs, tag interesting articles and indicate that I like specific songs. The sites in the middle are aggregation sites. Things I share on my source sites are aggregated together so that my Facebook and FriendFeed friends see the things that I do on those source sites and make comments.

Different audiences

I treat Facebook and FriendFeed differently. I try to be Facebook "friends" with only people that I know and trust. I feel more free to share some personal things there; family news, political views, etc. because, in theory, only my good friends can see them. For some reason, I'm leery of Facebook and I don't feel like committing too much information to them. For example, I'd rather upload photos to Flickr. That's one of reasons I share on other sites like FriendFeed, Twitter and Delicious.

FriendFeed, on the other hand, I treat as totally public. Everybody can see what I post there and I'll follow people I don't know so well. In fact, everything I do except for Facebook and some Flickr photos is public. This brings me to the topic of Twitter.

Reducing complexity

Since I'm a geek, I don't mind a little complexity. The one part of my flow that I would like to simplify is link sharing. I use Google Reader heavily but when I want to share a link, I feel that I need to post it over to Delicious because I've got a wealth of links there and infrastructure in place to send daily "Latest Links" post over to my blog. Now that Reader has made it so easy to share, tag and comment on links I'm considering dropping Delicious and doing all of my sharing through Reader. Another thing I'm considering is a little more automation.

Automate everything?

To me, Twitter is like a huge public chat-room where you only have to listen to the people you want to listen to. All of my tweets are automatically posted to my FriendFeed account. Because of the chat-room nature of Twitter and the fact that many of my Facebook friends don't understand Twitter, I don't like automatically pumping my entire Twitter stream into Facebook. I use Facebook Application callled Selective Twitter so that only tweets that include the string "#fb" go to Facebook.

I don't like automatically pumping things into Twitter either. I often re-share things that I have shared on my blog by posting them to Twitter, usually using a URL shortening service (bit.ly) because tweets must be short (max ~140 characters). This is not an automatic process and I do it only for specific things that I want to share and comment about on Twitter.

Question is: should I automate the flow between FriendFeed and Twitter? If I did so, my Twitter followers would see a tweet every time I share something on any of my source sites. That would be good, right? The conventional social media wisdom for success on Twitter seems to be that you should ABC or "always be linking." Sounds a little slutty, sure, but there is something to that approach: the more you share, the better your chances of connecting with interesting people. I haven't done it yet because I worry that it's too spammy in a chat-room like setting.

Month of blogging

2009-08-02T16:04:33+00:00

Crammed into one post...

After a month of blog neglect, the automatic Latest Links posts from my Delicious.com account started to pile up in my blog editor. Back in the glory days of this blog, I blogged about things instead just saving links or tweeting about them and would never have let a month go by without blogging. I realized that, by adding some commentary/opinion for each, I could turn a month's worth of links into a month's worth of blog posts and thus gain total absolution for my sin of going a full month without a post. So that's what I did.

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Category: Blogging

Joe Gregorio: Comment system review
"Comparing Disqus, IntenseDebate and Google Friend Connect." Joe Gregorio looked at commenting systems and ended up chosing Intense Debate.
Integrating Disqus and Roller Weblogger on blogs.sun.com
"I've recently updated my site to use Disqus the blog comment hosting and conversation site." Sun UK CTO Wayne Horkan explains how (and why) to use the Disqus in a Roller, with code and helpful comments from Disqus CEO Daniel Ha.
Official Google Blog: New Blog Search tools
"Feeds, Hot Queries and Latest Posts." Nice to see Google is still working on blog search despite the rumored death of blogging.

Category: Feeds

pubsubhubbub - Google Code
"A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom." Collaboration between Google and SixApart folks to allow quick notifiation of new content to feed subscribers and reduce load on feed publishers. Hub implementations are underway for AppEngine/Python, Erlang, Python and Ruby. Hmm... no Java?

Category: General

The Ryding List | Why Not?
"I have found a wealth of great things to do in Raleigh." Great list of things to do around Raleigh by newcomer John Ryding, one of my coworkers at IBM.
The Different CTO Roles - All Things Distributed
"there is no well established definition of what a CTO actually does." Of special interest to me now that I work on a CTO's staff.
Life During Wartime video from Stop Making Sense - Boing Boing
"This is the best concert movie I've ever seen." Me too.

Category: IBM

Integrating and Extending Rational Team Concert 2.0
Great guide and presentation on Team Concert development via the Jazz Server SDK. Referring to this a lot these days.
Eclipse Galileo for Mac: Cocoa or Carbon?
"Carbon is more mature and thoroughly tested, the new Cocoa implementation offers advantages and improvements." And the answer is: 32-bit Cocoa. Yep, I'm paying attention to Eclipse again. It's really the only way to do Jazz development.
Whitepaper: e4 Technical Overview
Lots of detail on the apparently massive changes coming in Eclipse e4 including the ability write Eclipse components in JavaScript and to run "existing SWT applications to be executed on web platforms such as ActionScript/Flash."

Category: Java

James Strachan: Scala as the long term replacement for Java
"if someone had shown me the Programming Scala book back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy." I'm sure that sent a lot of folks to Amazon, including me.
Google App Engine plugin in NetBeans
"With a video showing how easy it is to develop Google App Engine application in NetBeans. You can see that Hello World takes just 1 minute. :-)" Looks good and apparently it's an open source side-project. Hosted at Kenai.
Trails of EasyExtend: Java Spring - or the Biggus Dickus effect
"Looking at the API alone Spring feels like reading a parody on Java enterprise software." Schadenfreude for me; never been a fan and always thought of it as a big grab bag of insidious crap I don't need.

Category: Open Source

NYTimes.com: For Mozilla and Google, Group Hugs Are Getting Tricky
"Google pays Mozilla hefty fees in return. The deal accounted for 88 percent of Mozilla's $75 million in revenue in 2007." Makes you wonder about the future of Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.
Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS
"The software architecture is simple: Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel." Yet another Linux distro. That's cool with me; I like Linux distros.
The Java Wars, continued (Scripting News)
"most people want XP on their netbook, not Linux. That was true yesterday and it's still true today." Dave Winer's take on Google's Chrome OS. I think he's probably right at the moment but things are changing rapidly.

Category: Social Software

Creating a Google Data Gadget - Google Data APIs - Google Code
"This article will walk you through creating a Blogger gadget." Google and OpenSocial Gadget support for OAuth makes things easier, but it's still a PITA.
Writing OAuth Gadgets - Gadgets API - Google Code
"send mail to oauthproxyreg@google.com with the following information to register your OAuth Consumer Secret." If you want to write a Gadget that uses OAuth to access Twitter there's an icky manual registration step involved. Apparently the solution to this problem is for Twitter.com to enhance their "OAuth configuration to accept digital signatures directly from iGoogle."

Category: Sun

The end of Sun
"And that is why Schwartz isn't here, I believe. Because he genuinely loved Sun and its employees." A depressing article for former Sun employee to read, or anybody I guess. I do think there is something to this quote about Scwhartz.
Oracle-Sun Creating Churn - Forbes.com
"Suns loyal customers are defecting in droves." Not really very surprising considering the conventional wisdom, which seems to be that Oracle will gut Sun's software efforts and ditch the hardware entirely.
Computerworld Blogs: Is Oracle getting ready to kill OpenSolaris? -
"Sun, Oracle and third-party sources are telling me that OpenSolaris developers are afraid." This article is typical of what I've seen from the author: dumb speculation of the mean-spirited variety.
Justice department extends Oracle-Sun probe
"All that's left is one narrow issue about the way rights to Java are licensed." I don't there's a chance in hell that it is, but wouldn't it be fun if this was all about the Sun-Apache Terms of Use controversy?

Web development

InfoQ: Twitter, an Evolving Architecture
Brief overview of Twitter architecture, use of caching and message queue technologies.
Evaluation of Javascript Libraries
"jQuery and YUI come out on top, Prototype at the bottom." Helped convince me that, now that we have YUI, we don't really need Prototype and Scriptaculous in Roller.
"MooTools vs JQuery vs Prototype vs YUI vs Dojo revised
"Prototype is among the slowest." More justification for ripping out Prototype and Scriptaculous.

And now, back to your regular schedule of blogging, or not.

Thanks, tweeple

2009-01-26T12:20:01+00:00

Even when you're mentally prepared for a layoff and you know it's probably for the best, its still a life-changing shock when it happens, a loss. It's hard not to feel fear, anger, sadness, self-recrimination and all those stages that fellow RIFee David Van Couvering blogged about. I still cycle through those, but not as frenetically as before.

I got over the sadness and fear part pretty quickly thanks to my tweeple, the very supportive network of friends, colleagues, former coworkers, etc. that's grown around my blog, my work at Sun, my involvement at Apache Software Foundation and my social network accounts like Twitter. I got the word out on Twitter first and word spread quickly. I posted to my blog and some very kind friends, Tim Bray, Ted Leung and Robert Donkin helped spread the word on their blogs and said some very nice things about me in the process. Within hours a flood of supportive tweets, emails and calls come rolling in, including about a dozen real live job leads.

So, thanks folks. I really appreciate the help. I'll keep you posted.

Comments fixed

2009-01-13T10:05:35+00:00

In case you were itching to comment about the new Fauxcoly theme or Eclectic Roller hacks, comments now work again. I had broken them in my quest for XHTML validation.

New Year and new theme

2009-01-05T11:42:26+00:00

Happy New Year 2009 to one and all! I took a nice long break from work, complete with a Florida vacation, hot tubbing, theme parks and a mini-vacation to rest-up from the main vacation and now I'm back. I think I'm rested and ready to restart some things including work, of course, and this blog.

Restarting a blog is not easy, or so I've heard. Here's what I did. I drew a big diagram on the white board with multiple colors, circles and arrows. I did some calculations and eventually figured out that what I need is a new theme. A little bit of eye candy for the couple of folks who end up here after a search gone wrong or accidentally clicking through as they skim over my blog in Google Reader; that's just what will re-ignite my blogging activities. My problems all have technological solutions. Funny how that works.

So, if you've clicked through to my blog then you're looking at my new theme and newly restarted blog. Thrilling, huh? It's a simple faux-column deal like my old theme, but this time I'm taking advantage of Roller's new 'action' pages, I'm using YUI Grids CSS to define the layout and I'm including content from my other sites (Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, etc.) via aggregation. I'll provide some more details about the theme and it's features (and a download) in a subsequent post, after I've gotten some real work done.

Technologies of Friendship

2008-11-24T08:42:19+00:00

I'm honored, excited and now I'm prepared.

I just finished writing up some notes for tonight when I'll be one of four guest speakers talking to Fred Stutzman's Technologies of Friendship class at UNC. Here's Fred's reminder post:

Reminder: Guest Lectures on Work, Organization and Action.

Happy 4th birthday to blogs.sun.com

2008-04-27T17:30:43+00:00

I remember how freaked-out I was to see the referrer hits start rolling in (pun fully intended) from http://blogs.sun.com/roller. I can't believe it's been four years already. Thanks to Linda for the reminder.

Social Media SkROCKi star

2008-04-16T13:37:51+00:00

My former co-worker Linda Skrocki and Program Manager for Sun's community sites (blogs, wikis, planets, forums and mediacast at sun.com) got some well deserved recognition from ReadWriteWeb.com the other day. She was named one of <a href= "http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/seven_leading_corporate_social_media_evangelists_today.php"> Seven leading Corporate Social Media Evangelists. Congrats Linda!

My A list

2008-03-25T11:34:33+00:00

Here's a concept that I've been using to help me both in my blog writing and to filter all the incoming feeds, tweets, photo sharing and social bookmarking items that come in via my feed reader: my A list. It's not made up of famous folks and big blog names like Scoble or Winer or Arrington. My A list is made up of people that I know or work with and that I believe are following me in some way, reading my blog, subscribing to my tweets or working with me on a project. I've got a folder in my feed reader and my A list is always the one I read first. Sometimes I don't get much farther than than before hitting the mark all read button. And when I do blog, that folder helps remind my of who I'm writing for. "A" stands for audience.

HOWTO: Configure caching in Apache Roller

2008-03-03T12:15:00+00:00

Since the early days, Roller has included a pluggable caching system for blog pages and feeds. In Roller 2.1 (early 2006), Sun's Allen Gilliland rewrote the whole cache system and made it much more flexible and much easier to configure. But, apart from comments in the configuration file, we never provided any documentation for the cache system. In this post, I'll start to correct that. I'll explain the basics of how the cache works and how to configure it.

Overview

Displaying a blog page can take dozens of database queries and database queries can be expensive. They take time, consume CPU cycles and typically use network bandwidth. Roller's built-in caching system addresses this problem by caching generated pages and feeds. By default, Roller caches pages and feeds in memory using a Least Recently Used (LRU) algorithm and by default caches are configured appropriately for a 100 blog system. If you are running a site with more blogs or a very high-traffic site, you should consider changing the caching configuration. First, let's discuss how the caches work.

Cache invalidation and expiration

When Roller generates a page, it puts a copy of that page in a cache. The next time that a request comes in for that page, Roller returns the page from the cache. When a blog changes, Roller invalidates the blog's cache enties, i.e. it throws that blog's pages out of the cache. And by default, when the cache is full and we need to add a new entry to the cache, we push out the least recently used entry in the cache to make room; that's the LRU algorithm I mentioned before.

Sometimes, a blog page includes things that change frequently like a list of referrers or a server-side hit counter or data from some other source. We don't want to invalidate a blog's cache entries every time a hit is counted. That would defeat the purpose of the cache. So, by default Roller uses an expiring cache that automatically invalidates cache entries after timeout period.

Cache configuration

To configure the Roller caches, you add properties to your roller-custom.properties properties override file. You can learn more about this override in Section 6 of the Roller 4.0 Installation Guide and you can find a complete list of the properties you can override in Section 11.

First, let's cover the default caching mechanism. If you're running a large and high-traffic site, you might want to consider using the non-expiring cache or setting the cache timeout very high (4, 6 or 12 hours). Here's how you tell all caches to use the non-expiring cache:


   cache.defaultFactory=org.apache.roller.util.cache.LRUCacheFactoryImpl

However, if you do that, then blogs that use Roller's built-in hit counter or that display referrers will not be updated as often as your users would like. So, you might want to consider removing the #showReferrersList() macro from any themes in use on your site.

Configuring Roller's four page and feed caches

You can configure caching differently for the different types of pages and feeds produced by Roller. There are four separately configurable caches. Here are their names and an explanation of each:

weblogpages: this cache is used to cache weblog pages
weblogfeeds: this one is for weblog RSS and Atom feeds
sitewide: this is for the aggregated front-page blog and it's RSS/Atom feeds
planet: this is for feeds produced by Roller's built-in aggregator

And for each one of these caches you can configure these properties:

enabled: for debugging purposes you can completely disable a cache by setting it's enabled property to 'false'
size: sets the total number of entries allowed in a cache, each entry holds one page or feed response.
timeout: the number of seconds that an entry is allowed to remain in the cache. After this time expires the entry will be removed from the cache.
factory: set the classname of the cache factory to be used for this cache, otherwise default cache will be used

Cache property names follow the pattern cache... The best way to understand how this works is to look at the default cache configuration used by Roller:


# Weblog page cache (all the weblog content)
cache.weblogpage.enabled=true
cache.weblogpage.size=400
cache.weblogpage.timeout=3600

# Feed cache (xml feeds like rss, atom, etc)
cache.weblogfeed.enabled=true
cache.weblogfeed.size=200
cache.weblogfeed.timeout=3600

# Site-wide cache (all content for site-wide frontpage weblog)
cache.sitewide.enabled=true
cache.sitewide.size=50
cache.sitewide.timeout=1800

# Planet cache (planet feeds)
cache.planet.enabled=true
cache.planet.size=10
cache.planet.timeout=1800

The default cache configurations above are setup for a 100 weblog system. To some extent, this is guess-work. For example, we've decided to cache 4 pages and 2 feeds for each blog. That's how we arrived a cache.weblogpage.size=400 and cache.weblogfeed.size=200. And we've decided to cache blog entries for 30 minutes and feeds for one hour. That's how we arrived at cache.weblogpage.size=400 and cache.weblogfeed.timeout=3600.

You might decide to do things a little differently on your Roller system. Copy the properties above to your roller-custom.properties file and set them to values you thing are appropriate for number of weblogs, average page size, traffic levels and JVM heap size of your Roller installation.

Conclusion

Roller default cache configuration will work well without modification for a small to medium size Roller installation, but for large high-traffic sites you should increase cache sizes and think carefully about timeouts. And if you're running Roller in a cluster you might want to consider using a distributed caching system like memcached. I'll discuss that in my next HOWTO.

Social Software for Glassfish screencast

2008-02-21T16:13:44+00:00

I mentioned the Social Software for Glassfish (SSG) EA2 release before the winter break, but I never got around to posting any details. Since then some documentation has appeared, Manveen Kaur blogged it, The Aquarium too and now screen-cast master Arun Gupta has created an excellent Social Software for Glassfish screencast that walks you through the features in this very early access release. Now I don't have to say nearly as much.

wwwin-blogs.cisco.com

2008-02-12T21:21:20+00:00

Apparently, CISCO has a pretty active internal blog server and it's running Roller. I can tell from my referrer logs. If any CISCO folks are reading this, drop me a line. I'd love to know how Roller and internal blogging in general is working out for you.

Lots of latest links: social networking APIs and more

2008-02-04T14:00:07+00:00

First, some links from open source projects I'm trying to follow. Check out the JMaki Webtop widget, it looks pretty useful. Now that I've got JMaki support in Roller, this could be the basis for some cool drag-and-drop blog layout. Wish I had time for that; I'm still trying to carve out some time to dig into the Abdera server framework.

jMaki Webtop
Cool iGoogle style portal interface via JMaki
JSPWiki: JSP Wiki 3 Design
JCR back-end, wiki spaces and more...
Abdera Server Implementation Guide
"The Abdera Server module provides a framework for constructing Atom Publishing Protocol server implementations."

I'm also following OpenSocial and Shindig (the reference implementation of OpenSocial) pretty closely, but thus far have not had time to dive into the code. There's lots of activity on the Shindig list, but thus far there's no server-side and security is still up in the air -- both are pending change to the spec itself. Marc Cantor has an interesting perspective on the OpenSocial.

ShindigStarted - hyves_api - Trac
"a small guide on how to get started on Shindig."
CNET Mark Cantor: Waiting for the OpenSocial hammer to drop
"We all hope that MySpace, Bebo, and others will open up and go beyond the original scope of OpenSocial to lay the groundwork for a truly open world of social networking."
<a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/17/kickapps-publishes-api-kit-adopts-facebook-and-opensocial-platform- standards/">KickApps Publishes API, Adopts Facebook and OpenSocial standards
"KickApps has adopted Googleâ€™s OpenSocial developer platform standards and is working with Facebook to adopt that companyâ€™s standards as well."

I'm also following Facebook. While Google and friends scramble to catch up, Facebook Apps are getting easier to write, thanks to a new JavaScript API, and easier to deploy thanks to Amazon Web Services.

Facebook Extends Platform to the Web - The Unofficial Facebook Blog
"This is a huge step in Facebook extending their platform beyond the Facebook.com domain and letting people leverage the power of the social graph"
JavaScript Client Library - Facebook Developers Wiki
"Applications that use this client library should be configured to load in an iframe, not be rendered with FBML"
Facebook JavaScript Client Library
"This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications"
Amazon Web Services Blog: AWS For Facebook Applications
"we've teamed with Facebook to collect all of the resources that you need to be the next big success story in one convenient location."

Personally, I really like the idea of the web itself as the social network and your blog as the home for your personal profile. So, I think the new Social Graph API is a step in the right direction, as is the blog-based Distributed Social Networking (DiSo) project.

BuzzMachine:The internet is the social network
"The internet doesnâ€™t need more social networks. The internet is the social network."
Social Graph API - Google Code
Project homepage
Google Social Graph API Released on Dion Almaer's Blog
"Would you like to be able to make a quick call to get a JSON response that ties together a social graph made up of resources available on the Web?";
diso - Google Code
"DiSo (dee â€¢ zoh) is an umbrella project [for] as Chris puts it: 'to build a social network with its skin inside out'"
The Existential DiSo Interview on Vimeo
Factory Joe interviews himself re: Distributed Social Networking

And, I'm happy to see support for Twitter-like microblogging in Wordpress and Facebook like activity streams from Movable Type.

Introducing Prologue: WordPress.com
"Weâ€™re fans of Twitter around here, [but] while the format appealed to us it really just whetted our appetite for something more"
Building Action Streams - MovableType.org
"framework for collecting your actions from services around the web into one place for you to share back out as you see fit."
Action Streams | Plugin Directory | movabletype.org
"aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web "

And to wrap up: maybe I don't need to worry about the intersection of Blogging and Social Networking at all. Maybe there's no need to following all these APIs. Maybe the hype has peaked and Facebook and friends are about to go the way of the CB radio. Apparently, folks aren't spending quite as much time Facebooking as they used to:

ZDNet.com: Ohmigod! Social networkers just canâ€™t take it any more!
"it is entirely possible that people are beginning to question just how much time they spend socially networking, rather than socially living."

Roller Strong #12

2008-01-04T15:27:04+00:00

I have just one item for Roller Strong today: the post below from James Snell of IBM, which lists some pretty impressive stats for IBM's internal blogging system. James doesn't mention it in the post, but I've been told that the site is powered by Apache Roller v3.1.

Growth: Quick note: IBM's internal blogging environment currently has 95k+ entries, 94k+ comments, 41k+ registered users, 11k+ Blogs (about 13% of which are considered active), 20k+ distinct tags, and 6k+ ratings on entries (entry rating has only been around since June of 2007). On average, there are just under 150 new entries posted to about 115 blogs per day. The number of comments per day fluctuate between 80-230 per day. A range of between 200-400 tags are used each day. Update: in the first three days of January, the server access logs show 109,439 unique visitors, 3,265,739 hits, and 61.37 GB of data transferred.

And that's internal boggers only. Just think what they could do with an external blog site. Roller works well outside the firewall too.

How to create a Roller 4.0 theme, part 2

2007-12-13T13:14:53+00:00

This is part two of a two part series:

How to create a Roller 4.0 theme, part 1: directory structure and required files
How to create a Roller 4.0 theme, part 2: the theme.xml file

In part one I explained how to create a theme directory and add the required template and resource files. Now I'll wrap things up by explaining what goes into a theme.xml theme definition file and how to deploy your new theme.

Create a theme.xml file

The example1 theme that I discussed in part one has a preview image, a Stylesheet Override file, a weblog template, a _day template, a custom template that displays an about page and a single image called aquadot.jpg. The theme.xml theme definition file below includes each of those items.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<weblogtheme>    
  <id>example1</id> 
  <name>Example1: minimal theme</name>
  <author>Dave Johnson</author>     
  <preview-image path="preview.jpg" />

  <stylesheet>
    <name>Override</name>
    <description>Stylesheet override</description>
    <link>override.css</link>
    <templateLanguage>velocity</templateLanguage>
    <contentsFile>override.css</contentsFile>
  </stylesheet>

  <template action="weblog">
    <name>Weblog</name>
    <description>Main template of weblog</description>
    <link>weblog</link>
    <navbar>false</navbar>
    <hidden>true</hidden>
    <templateLanguage>velocity</templateLanguage>
    <contentType>text/html</contentType>
    <contentsFile>weblog.vm</contentsFile>
  </template>

  <template action="custom">
    <name>_day</name>
    <description>Displays one day of entries</description>
    <link>_day</link>
    <navbar>false</navbar>
    <hidden>true</hidden>
    <templateLanguage>velocity</templateLanguage>
    <contentType>text/html</contentType>
    <contentsFile>day.vm</contentsFile>
  </template>

  <template action="custom">
    <name>About</name>
    <description>About this weblog...</description>
    <link>about</link>
    <navbar>true</navbar>
    <hidden>false</hidden>
    <templateLanguage>velocity</templateLanguage>
    <contentType>text/html</contentType>
    <contentsFile>about.vm</contentsFile>
  </template>

  <resource path="images/aquadot.jpg" />   
</weblogtheme>

Now I'll break it down and explain each element.

Inside

The root element of the XML file contains some theme meta-data, an optional stylesheet, one or more templates and zero or more resources. Here's a run-down of the meta-data you must include in each theme:

- the unique ID, by convention this is the same as directory name
- name of the theme
- name of theme author
- path to image preview file, relative to theme directory

The override

Following the theme meta-data is the stylesheet declaration, including all of the required elements:

- name of stylesheet
- description of stylesheet
- value used in stylesheet URI (e.g. http://example.com/../page/styles.css)
- in 4.0, this must be 'velocity'
- path to theme file containing stylesheet, relative to theme directory

The elements

Next are the template elements, one for each page template. Each element must have an 'action' attribute that declares on which action the template will be invoked. Here are the possible values of the action attribute:

weblog: Each theme must have a weblog template, which displays the main page of the blog
permalink: (optional) template which will be used when displaying individual entries
searchIndex: (optional) template to be invoked to display search results
tagsIndex: (optional) template to be used when displaying entries by tag
custom: (optional) You can add as many custom templates as you want.

And here are the elements that must be included in a :

- name of the template
- description of template
- value used in stylesheet URI (e.g. http://example.com/../page/mypage)
- true if page should be include in navigation menus generated by standard macros
- true if page not to be called directly and only used as an include
- in 4.0, this must be 'velocity'
- the content-type to be generated by the template
- path to theme file containing template, relative to theme directory

Including resources

After the template elements, we include the one element we need for the one image that is included in the theme. The path is relative to the theme directory.

Deploying your theme to Roller

To make your theme available to Roller, copy the theme directory into the Roller themes directory. Restart Roller and watch the logs to see that your theme is deployed correctly. If there is an error in your theme.xml file you should see an XML parser error in your roller.log file. You can also turn on additional theme debugging by adding the following to your roller-custom.properties override file.


log4j.category.org.apache.roller.weblogger.business.themes=DEBUG

If you want to share your theme with an even wider audience, then consider contributing it to the Roller Support project, a site that hosts additional themes that are not included in the official Apache Roller release because Roller ships with only four core themes.

That's all

I think that covers all the bases. Let me know if it works for you or what parts of the doc could be improved. I hope to get this into the next rev of the Roller Template Guide (which you can get from the Roller download page in PDF form).

Here's the example1 theme that I discussed in this post:

Blog server as social networking platform?

2007-12-11T19:39:25+00:00

Anne Zelenka, Gigaom: Could open-source blogging platform WordPress serve as your next social networking profile? Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency, thinks so. Heâ€™s started a project called DiSo, for distributed social networking, that aims to â€œbuild a social network with its skin inside out.â€ DiSo will first look to WordPress as its foundation.
This could be the next step towards the unified social graph that some technologists wish for. WordPress suits the purpose because it provides a person-centric way of coming online, offers an extensible architecture, and already has some features â€” such as an OpenID and a blogroll plugin â€” that can be pressed into social networking service. And its users represent exactly the sort of audience that might appreciate the permanent, relatively public identity that DiSo aims to offer.

Interesting. I think that blogs should be the corner-stone of social networking and I'd much rather have my blog be my social network profile rather than some page inside somebody else's container. Then again, as a blog server developer I'm pretty biased.

How to create a Roller 4.0 theme, part 1

2007-12-10T16:58:46+00:00

This is part one of a two part series:

How to create a Roller 4.0 theme, part 1: directory structure and required files
How to create a Roller 4.0 theme, part 2: the theme.xml file

The Roller 4.0 Template Author Guide explains how to customize your Roller theme by editing the page templates that define it. It tells you how to use Roller's template language (Velocity), what objects are available to your template code and what macros you can use to generate HTML and other content. You can download it here in PDF form.

But the template guide does not tell you how to create a complete new Roller theme, one that you can share with other Roller site admins. That's a problem because I'd really like to see more themes, so I'm going to rough-out some docs right here on my blog. In part one I'll explain how to get started, what files you must provide and the new Roller 4.0 Stylesheet Override feature. In part two I'll explain how to create the new theme.xml theme definition file that you must include in your theme. Let's roll.

Getting started

Just as before, a Roller theme is a directory of files, some page templates and some "resource" files, which are typically images. So, your first step in creating a new theme is to create a directory to hold those files. Give it a simple one word alphanumeric name with no spaces.

In the next sections, I'll explain what files you need and I'll show some example templates from a minimal theme called "example1." This example theme is made up of seven files, including three Velocity templates (.vm files), a couple of images and a theme.xml file. Here's the directory layout of example1.

Add Weblog and _day templates

A theme must have at least a weblog template with the name "Weblog" and you'll find an example of one below. It's advisable to also have a _day template, which is responsble for displaying one day's worth of blog entries.

Here's the Weblog.vm file for the example1 theme, with

<html>
<head>
  <title>$model.weblog.name #if($model.permalink) 
     : $model.weblogEntry.title #end</title> 
  #showAutodiscoveryLinks($model.weblog)
  <style type="text/css">
  h1 { color:red; } 
  h2 { color:orange; }
  a { color:orange; text-decoration:none; font-weight: bold; }
  </style>
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="$model.weblog.stylesheet">
</head>
<body>
  <table width="80%" align="center">
    <tr>
      <td valign="top">
        <h1>$model.weblog.name</h1>
        #set($rootCategory = $model.weblog.getWeblogCategory("nil"))
        #showWeblogCategoryLinksList($rootCategory false false)
        #set($pager = $model.getWeblogEntriesPager()) 
        #showNextPrevEntriesControl($pager)
        #showWeblogEntriesPager($pager)
      </td>
      <td valign="top">
        #showPageMenu($model.weblog)
        #showAuthorMenu(true)
      </td>
    </tr>
  </table>
</body>
</html>

And here's the corresponding _day template:

<h2 class="dayheading">$utils.formatDate($day, "MMM dd, yyyy")</h2> 
#foreach($entry in $entries)
  <h2 class="entryheading">
    <img src=$url.resource("images/aquadot.jpg") />&nbsp;
    <a href="$url.entry($entry.anchor)">$entry.title</a>
  </h2>
  <p>$utils.formatDate($entry.pubTime, "HH:MMa z") by $entry.creator.fullName</p>  
  <p>
  #if($model.permalink)
    $entry.displayContent
  #else
    $entry.displayContent($url.entry($entry.anchor))
  #end
  </p>
#end

You can read more about the Weblog and _day templates in the Roller Template Guide, what I'd like to highlight now is a new 4.0 feature called the Stylesheet Override. Notice that the Weblog.vm file above includes some CSS styles, followed by a to a CSS file with URL $model.weblog.stylesheet, that's the Stylesheet Override file. Let me explain.

Add a Stylesheet Override file

Roller 4.0's new Stylesheet Override feature makes it possible for users of your theme to to change font, colors and other things without having to edit any of the templates that define the blog. Instead, they edit a CSS file known as the override file and that file is included in the right places when the blog is displayed.

To support Stylesheet Override your theme must provide an 1) override file, 2) an entry its theme.xml file and 3) must reference the override file in the right place as shown above in the example Weblog.vm file.

When you create your override file, keep in mind that your theme should stand-alone without the override file. The override file is for specifying additional styles above and beyond what your theme already provides. It's perfectly OK and even a good idea for your theme's override file to be empty, or containing a comment like this:


  /* add your own custom CSS here */

Add other resources required by your theme

If your theme requires any static resources, i.e. images for the banner or for the background, then include them in the theme directory or its sub-directories. You must reference each one in your theme.xml definition file.

Your theme must also provide a Preview Image, an image (recommended size ~350x400) that will be shown to users as they browse possible themes within Roller. To satisfy this requirement, you include a preview image file in your theme directory and reference it from your theme.xml file.

In part 2, I'll explain how to create that theme.xml file with references to all the tempate files and images that make up a theme.

Roller 4.0 released

2007-12-05T13:16:32+00:00

Finally!

Apache Roller 4.0 has been released and is now available for download.

This is a major new Roller release which includes easier blog theme customization, a much more simple installation/upgrade process, infrastructure improvements and numerous other small fixes. You can get the release files and the official documentation via the Apache mirrors at this page:

http://roller.apache.org/download.cgi

And you can read about the new features on the What's New in Roller 4.0 page of the Roller wiki.

Project releases are approved by vote of the Apache Roller Project Management Committee (PMC). Support for a release is provided by project volunteers on the project mailing lists. Additional free support is provided by many other volunteer subscribers to the list. Bugs found in a release may be discussed on the list and reported through the issue tracker.

Roller is a Project of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), formed by a resolution of the ASF Board of Directors. As an ASF Project, Roller is subject to the ASF Bylaws and the direction of the ASF Board. The user mailing list and issue tracker are the only support options hosted by the Apache Roller project.

Cross posted from the Roller project blog.

Roller and blogs as a web dev. platform presentation

2007-11-14T17:09:31+00:00

I just posted the slides for my ApacheCon US 2007 talk on the ApacheCon wiki. It's basically the same talk that I gave at ApacheCon EU earlier this year, but I spent some time tweaking the slides, simplifying removing unnecessary bits and adding a little Abdera coverage. That, and the fact that the power did not fail, seemed to make the talk go more smoothly this morning. Here are the slides:

Apache Roller and blogs as a web development platform (2MB PDF)

ConvergeSouth 2007, day 2 notes and wrap-up

2007-10-22T11:41:16+00:00

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/convergesouth-logo.gif" alt="ConvergeSouth logo" height="72" width="360" align="right" vspace="10px" hspace="10px" /> I'm back from ConvergeSouth 2007 now and caching up on email, blogs, etc. I enjoyed day two as much as day one. Here are my notes, quotes and paraphrased thoughts from two of my favorites sessions on Saturday, Social Networking and Corporate Wikis.

Social Networking panel

This panel was made up of Ruby Sinreich, Soni Pitts and Elisa Camahort. Ruby started off by explaining that she specializes in network centric advocacy, which like social networks is not a new thing. Online social network services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. are just just new parts of the existing social fabric. Online and off, aspects of an effective social network are the same. Those are: social ties, common stories, dense communication grid, shared resources and clarity of purpose. Good social software can support all of those. See also: Leonard Witt's post, Laurie Writes' post and Ruby's Network Centric Advocacy slides on Flickr.

Soni spoke next about how she helped businesses use social networking when she worked as a business coach. Then Elisa spoke and expressed some caution and skepticism of Facebook and social network services in general. Those thoughts were echoed in the audience discussion that followed which covered privacy issues, the creepies, LinkedIn vs. Facebook, owning your data and some good advice about managing your online identity from Wayne Sutton.

Near the end, Ed Cone spoke up about his recent articles in CIO Insight about Wachovia Bank's new Microsoft SharePoint-based 110,000 employee-strong social networking site. The articles Will Microsoft Become Facebook for the Enterprise? and Social Networks at Work Promise Bottom-Line Results are well worth a read if you are interested in business applications of social networking.

Corporate Wikis

This session wasn't well attended, but it was very informative and I enjoyed meeting session leader and wiki consultant Natalie Koeplinger. Natalie presented slides on wiki basics, how to select a wiki, best practices and measuring wiki success. Natalie works most with MediaWiki and Microsoft SharePoint, which now has some basic wiki functionality, just enough to make it a player even without help from Microsoft partners SocialText and Atlassian.

Wrap-up

The last session of the day was a short wrap-up and gave the attendees and opportunity to speak up about how to improve the conference. I agreed with pretty much all of the suggestions from the audience: don't end the conference so early each day, keep the how-to sessions but convert part of the conference to bar-camp format, try to get the NC A&T students more involved and establish and make use of a conference wiki. Later in the evening FilmBabble Dan and I attended the ConvergeSouth film festival, which was very good. It had to be pretty good to keep me in that horribly uncomfortable chair for three plus hours ;-)

That brings me to the end of my ConvergeSouth 2007 coverage. Thanks to Sue Polinsky, all the other organizers and host NC A&T University for a great conference. I hope to make it back next year for ConvergeSouth and BlogHer, which will be in Greensboro the very same weekend.

More on AtomPub and Windows Live Writer

2007-10-20T17:08:19+00:00

Joe Cheng posted another entry in his series explaining the details of AtomPub support in Windows Live Writer (WLM), titled WLW+AtomPub, Part 2: Authentication.

Wondering what WLM looks like? Travelin' Librarian has a nice set of screen-shots of WLM on Flickr including shots of the installation process, HTML mode, preview mode and more. Looks pretty sweet.

ConvergeSouth 2007, day 1 notes

2007-10-19T17:30:10+00:00

I'm in Greensboro today, a couple of hours away from home, attending ConvergeSouth 2007 -- "the annual tech users' conference in Greensboro, North Carolina. A combination of a blogger-con and a creativity center." Here's a summary of notes and quotes I scribbled in my notebook on day #1.

Keynote: Jason Calacanis and Ed Cone. Billed as a fire-side chat, the keynote turned out to be a pretty straight-forward interview of Jason Calacanis by Ed Cone. Ed started with some biographical questions, then moved to questions about Jason's businesses Weblogs.com and Mahalo. Along the way Jason dispensed business advice like "it takes the same time investment to build a small business as to build a big one" so "think big, but take small steps." Ed urged Jason to connect the dots between his psychology degree and his business success, which led to the observation that "most people are motivated not by money but by recognition and affiliation." I guess that's the motivation Jason harnessed with weblogs.com and the same one he hopes will lead to great human-authored search results for Mahalo.

Moving from old to new media: Dan Conover, Will Bunch and Joe Killian. In this panel-session, three newspaper writers discussed the difficulties that local papers are having making the move to the new world of blogs, wikis and social media. Some of the complaints were that newspaper hosted blog-authors do not reach out to other bloggers, don't connect to community and are rarely given enough time to run a successful blog. Newspapers are so far behind because "the culture of innovation is so alien to newspapers." That explains why "Google, the ultimate non-local entity is kicking local paper's butts."

We agree to disagree: Dan Conover, Ruby Sinreich, Chris Rabb. Despite the title, this panel was about how community and non-traditional news sites are changing the way folks relate to news. Ruby talked about Orange Politics, the site she started to help Orange County folks understand and get active in local politics. Chris talked about his site Afro-Netizen and the motivations behind it. Then the panel ranted a bit about progressive politics, the insular white-maleness of Daily Kos, the pros and cons of media "objectivity" and a variety of other topics. All good stuff; I could listen to these guys ramble on for hours.

Affiliate marketing and Web 2.0. This was an overview of affiliate marketing programs by Sam Harrelson. It seemed to cover all of the affiliate bases, but I didn't really understand the Web 2.0 tie-in. I guess I'm only marginally interested in the topic and probably should have chosen a different session.

Sociable web as a social force. This session led by Anton Zuiker and Jason Calacanis discussed how blogs and social networks can quickly bring folks together around issues, get your opinions indexed in Google right next to the evil corporation that just screwed you over and other scenarios familiar to anybody who has read the Cluetrain Manifesto. Brian Russell also talked about his efforts to use the sociable web to jump start his Carborro Coworking business. To demonstrate the power of social networks, Jason twittered his phone number, asked folks to call and we spent the rest of the session listening to his cell phone ring. Despite that, good session.

All and all, an interesting and thought provoking day -- though it did cover a lot of familiar ground for me. It's not over yet. I'm getting reading to head out to the BBQ now.

They do listen

2007-10-03T14:26:08+00:00

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.

Blogapps 2.1 released

2007-10-02T21:49:40+00:00

<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.

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.

FilmBabble blog dead in the water, can't get help from Google

2007-09-25T11:51:39+00:00

My brother's popular film blog FilmBabble, hosted on Google's Blogspot site, is now dead in the water and he cannot find any way to get help from Blogspot or Google. He's followed the help links to send support requests to both Google and Blogger.com last week, but Gmail tells him that his email address does not exist!

Could this be another case of <a href= "http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/28/gmail-disaster-reports-of-mass-email-deletions/">mass email deletions at Gmail.com? Personally, I wouldn't trust Google to host my blog or my email; I only use Gmail for mailing lists that are archived elsewhere. Seems like my caution might be well justified.

So please help, Google folks. Please tell us: how do you get help from Google when your email address and therefore your Google identity is apparently deleted?

Update 1: apparently Dan filled out this help request form on Friday. I wonder what kind of turn around time they have for this type of issue. Guess we'll find out.

Update 2: Google responded today and restored Dan's account, after only two business days. I must say, that's pretty damn good for a free service. Still, the "that email address does not exist" message is pretty damn scary. It's pretty nerve wracking to get locked out of your blog.

ApacheCon US 2007 - still time to be an early bird

2007-09-07T18:48:10+00:00

ApacheCon is coming up fast. I just faxed in my speaker's agreement and I'm starting to update my talk to cover the latest changes in the upcoming Apache Roller 4.0 and 4.1 releases.

I've been four times now and ApacheCon is always a great conference. It's small and cozy enough, but almost all of the Apache projects are represented. So it's easy to find the experts, make new friends and get all of your questions answered. The session line-up looks great this year; here are ones that caught my eye:

Hacking Atom with Apache Abdera - Garret Rooney
A little REST and Relaxation - Roy Fielding
WS-* vs. REST: Facts, Myths and Lies - Sanjiva Weerawarana
Go Light with Apache Struts 2 and REST - Don Brown
How to Run a Business Around The ASF - Sanjiva Weerawarana
Open Source Community Anti-Patterns - Ted Leung
RIAs using Apache Derby and Comet - Jeanfrancois Arcand & Francois Orsini
Apache Derby - Saucer Separation - Rick Hillegas
JCR in Action - Content-based Applications with Apache Jackrabbit - Carsten Ziegeler

Want to go? There's still time to shave a couple of hundred dollars off the conference fees by registering early. Early bird pricing has been extended to Sept. 22, 2007.

And the Weston looks like a pretty nice place for a conference:

ApacheCon US 2007 | Register here
November 12-16, 2007
Westin Peachtree Plaza
Atlanta, Georgia

Latest Links and commentary

2007-08-24T12:45:08+00:00

I haven't been bookmarking things in del.icio.us quite as often as I used to, for a variety of reasons, but I still do about 2-3 links per day. So I setup my FeedPoster to post my latest links to my blog each day as a draft post, which I can edit and post later if I want. So here are my edited links from the past week with some added commentary to make them a little more interesting (hat tip to Rafe Colburn).

Atom protocol "features" extension

I try to follow the Atom community pretty closely, but sometimes I fall out of the loop. For example, I missed the discussion on James "Mr. Atom" Snell's important new extension proposal for Atom protocol features, which will enable blog servers to declare what features they support. For example, Roller could inform blog clients that you can enable/disable comments for each post, limit comments to N days on, "pin" a blog entry to to site's main page (if you are an admin) and more. Hopefully, we can get blog server developers to agree on a common set of features and blog client developers to support that set.

Publishing critical info with Atom

And I had to bookmark James Snell's excellent and important article Publish critical public warnings on the Web, with the sub-title "Atom publishing can provide a powerful and flexible way to distribute critical, life-saving information."

Sun Portal's blog porlet, powered by Atom protocol

This next Atom link comes from docs.sun.com. It's some documentation for the Sun Portal Server 7.1 - Blog Portlet. I did not realize that the Sun Portal blog portlet uses Atom protocol to enable publishing to Roller. It was developed and tested against Roller 3.1, so it probably does not conform to the final Atom protocol.

What to call Atom protocol?

And finally, folks are wondering what to call Atom Publishing Protocol. Is it APP or Atompub or Atom protocol? Ian Bicking says Iâ€™ve decided to make a conscious effort to call it Atompub from now on." I don't have a strong opinion, but I do think APP is to vague to be useful.

Lightweight image editors for Mac

I've got a copy of Photoshop Elements for the Mac, but I really hate to have to start it up when I want to crop or resize an image. So I twittered about it. Ryan Irelan pointed out ImageWell "the Free and Lean Image Editor". Rich Sharples recommended Skitch, a Web 2.0-ish desktop app that makes it easy to snap, draw and share images from your desktop. I'm on the waiting list for an invite. On my own, I found Seashore, which is a Gimp based open source image editor Mac, one that does not need X11, and it's pretty light-weight. I'm not ashamed to admit, I love the Gimp.

Whew! I've got a couple more links but my lunch break is over so there you go.

Film Babble scores mention in NY Mag

2007-08-06T11:52:23+00:00

My brother Dan is a great writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of films, rock and pop music in general, and he's blogging, so it's only natural that folks start to notice. This weekend he got another boost, this time it's a mention in New York Magazine: The week in Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman.

Roller Strong #3

2007-06-15T23:07:30+00:00

This week was a big week for Roller, development and deployment-wise. As you may already know from Linda Skrocki's blog, Roller 4.0 went live this week at the premier corporate blogging site blogs.sun.com (BSC) with some nice new themes, easier blog customization and a UI that has been completely rewritten to do use Struts2. Check the What's New in Roller 4.0 page to learn more about the upcoming release.

But don't get too excited, you can't download Roller 4.0 just yet. Sun deployed a pre-release version of Roller and if you want to do the same, you'll either have to build it yourself or wait for the official Apache Roller 4.0 release coming out this summer. And don't be too disappointed, that's one of the nice things about Roller: before we make a release, the code is battle tested on blogs.sun.com. Big thanks to .Sun Engineering for that.

A couple folks wrote into to tell me that GIS software developer ESRI is blogging with Roller, something I've been meaning to mention for quite some time. In fact, I've been meaning to mention it for over a year and now it's time to wish ESRI a happy 1st blogaversary. Man, how time flies.

That's it for this weeks installment of Roller Strong. Y'all come back now.

Film Babble Blog on the IMDb Hit List

2007-06-14T11:32:00+00:00

My brother Dan's blog, Film Babble is listed on the front page of IMDb today. Well, OK, you have to scroll-down a little but it's there. Dan's recent post on 20 Great Modern Movie Cameos caught the attention of some folks at IMDB and elsewhere. Congrats Dan.

MovableType is going GPL

2007-06-06T09:55:14+00:00

Looks like Mark Pilgrim got what he wanted, but a couple of years too late.

Via Justinsomia.

JavaOne bloggers bash

2007-05-08T18:44:27+00:00

Sun is throwing another JavaOne bloggers bash at Thirsty Bear this year, at 6PM on Wednesday night. I'll be there and I hope to see other Roller users and developers there too.

Happy 3rd birthday to blogs.sun.com!

2007-04-27T11:35:18+00:00

It's hard to believe it's been three years since the blogs.sun.com (BSC) launch. Sun bloggers are having a birthday party of sorts around the tag bsc3years, so check out all the posts. My favorite is Linda's, which sums up the successes and reasons for the success of BSC. I think she's right on the money with her comments about employee blogging. Let me add this: you don't need a marketing team or a blog consulting firm to write your company's blogs. Trust your employees. Encourage them to blog and, if you can, provide the enabling infrastructure. I think I may have said that before

I still remember how amazed, surprised and pleased I was to learn that Sun was using Roller. I found out on May 5, 2004 via Roller; I noticed referrers from blogs.sun.com and just couldn't believe my eyes. Shortly after that I wrote to Tim Bray, who introduced me to Will Snow and soon I managed to become part of the BSC phenomenon. I'm proud to have played a part in the BSC success, but the success was certainly not due to the Roller software; it's the bloggers who made BSC. So here's to the BSC bloggers: happy birthday!

Blogapps 2.0 released

2007-04-23T15:26:34+00:00

I just uploaded the files for the Blogapps 2.0 release. It includes the new Blogapps Examples, which have been reorganized, expanded and modified to use ROME Propono instead of the old Blogapps Blog Client. It also a new Blogapps Server, a super easy-to-install blog/wiki server based on Roller (4.0 code-base), JSPWiki 2.4 and Derby. You can find the full release annoucement here on the Blogapps site.

Roller graduation and 3.1 announcement

2007-04-23T13:53:28+00:00

Finally! Roller has graduated to become a top-level Apache project and we've shipped the long awaited Apache Roller 3.1 release. You can find the full announcement on the Roller mailing list and on the Roller project blog and our new top-level site at http://roller.apache.org.

5th anniversary of Blogging Roller

2007-04-11T09:40:53+00:00

Today is the fifth anniversary of this blog, which I started on April 11, 2002 to promote the Roller blog software that I had just finished writing.

Roller wasn't really ready for deployment at the time, so I started blogging using Userland Radio radio.weblogs.com. You can find my first post on Radio here FIRST POST!!! You can also find the original Roller 0.90 user guide on the old site, complete with screen-shots. A couple of weeks later, my article on Roller was published at OnJava.com and folks started to take notice of Roller.

Now, five years later, Roller has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become Apache Roller, blog-tech is my full-time job at Sun and I'm still Blogging Roller. Thanks to Roller users and contributors everywhere for helping to make this possible.

The O'Reilly Code

2007-04-09T15:44:44+00:00

Most of Tim O'Reilly's proposed blogger's code of ethics is common sense stuff, but some of it seems to conflict with the informal, conversational and public nature of blogs. It's flawed and besides that, it's unnecessary.

It's not always important to "connect privately before we respond publicly" to "misrepresentations or conflicts" as the code states. Blogging is supposed to be a public conversation, not a bunch of back-channel emails and phone calls. If you think somebody misspoke you might want to check with them before you totally lay into them, but you can do that gently on your blog e.g. "I was reading Bob's post and wondering if he really meant to say 'all foo is bar' because that just doesn't seem right."

It's not necessary for every blogger to take action "when we believe someone is unfairly attacking another;" especially if others are already responding well and being heard. It's OK to lurk.

And I definitely do not believe that anonymous comments should be banned. So I'm glad to see that O'Reilly now says (in the comments to his own post) that part should be optional.

For me the bottom line is that bloggers should follow the same rules as everybody else. We don't need special blogger's code of ethics, a sheriff badge or the blog police. The fundamental things apply: common sense, decency and the laws of the land.

planet.sun.com

2007-04-07T18:28:39+00:00

We haven't released the standalone Roller-Planet application yet, but the .Sun Engineering team quietly deployed the latest bits at planet.sun.com a couple of weeks ago in response to requests from the Glassfish, SWDP and other teams for planet-style web sites. You can follow the links on the main page to find planets for Glassfish, SWDP, Sun India, Sun Alumni, Sun Java System Web Server, web services and globalization bloggers.

What's Roller-Planet? It's a community aggregation server, similar to Planet-Planet but with some key differences: it's got a web UI that enables groups of users to run their own planet sites, it's based on Java and it uses the ROME feed parser and fetcher. I've written about it before. We don't have a release plan yet for Roller-Planet so if you really want to try it you'll have to fetch and build it from the Apache Roller SVN repo.

Geertjan's blog

2007-04-03T23:01:08+00:00

I've really been enjoying Geertjan's blog recently. Lots of interesting details, screenshots and his passion for his work really comes through. His posts on the Netbeans Schliemann generic languages framework and today's Capturing Matisse make me want to drop everything and start hacking Netbeans. And I'm especially happy to see that somebody is interesting in Breathing Life Back into a Dead Coyote (part 1 and part 2), which is currently the main vehicle for Groovy language support in Netbeans -- I'd hate to see Groovy dropped in the mad rush to Ruby.

Happy 10th birthday to Scripting News

2007-04-01T23:51:51+00:00

Happy 10th birthday to Dave Winer's Scripting news blog. I often disagree with Dave's opinions but I learned about blogging by reading his blog. I respect the guy and his work and that's why I keep on reading to this day. BTW, his Userland Radio software is what inspired me to write Roller back in 2001.

@ApacheConEU: Roller and blogs as a web dev. platform

2007-03-27T15:27:04+00:00

Last week was deadline week for JavaOne and ApacheCon EU presentations, so I was busy. Fortunately for me, other deadlines were postponed, I did some begging for time and I actually had time to take a short vacation; a family reunion at Stone Mountain park, Georgia.

ApacheCon EU is only a couple of weeks away now and it's before JavaOne so I'll tell you about my ApacheCon talk first. My ApacheCon EU talk is a new. The title is "Roller and blogs as a web development platform" and it explains how blogs, planets, wikis and feeds can be automated and integrated. And how Apache Roller can be extended and customized via templates, scripting and plugins. Here's an outline of the talk:

Overview
   The self-service web
   With no code at all
   Or with a little...
   Feed based integration
Blog, wiki and feed Web services
   MetaWeblog API, methods and Java examples
   Propono Blog Client and Java example
   Atom Publishing Protocol
   Service Doc, Collections and Entries
   Propono Atom Client and Java example
   Roller Admin Interface
   WikiRPCInterface
Blog customization via templates
   Template Editor
   Weblog Templates
   Model objects
   Data Model
   Generating JSON for Dojo and screenshot
Blog server customization via plugins
   Which parts of Roller API to use
   Weblog Entry Plugins and examples
   Page Model Plugins
   Page Rendering & Renderer plugins
   Request Mapping & Request Mapper plugins
   Comment Validator plugins
Example: Scripting languages in Roller
   BSF Renderer plugin
   JRuby via BSF Renderer plugin
   Other Renderer plugins
   Roller admin scripting with Groovy
Planet server aggregation
   What is a Planet server?
   Roller-Planet
   Roller-Planet plans
Use case: Software business blogs
   Blogs in development
   Development Dashboard
   Blogs in Marketing
   Product news & links blogs
   Developer & evangelist blogs
   Blogs in the on-line store
For more information
Summary
Q & A

Photophys.com updates

2007-02-27T23:59:30+00:00

Dad has posted Chapter 8: How To Make Lenses That Are Good Enough for Photography on his blog. At his request, I added an about page for him with a mug-shot and links to his other books.

Raleigh Bloggers meetup Wednesday (change of time & venue)

2007-02-27T21:59:20+00:00

We've decided to change the time and place of our Raleigh Bloggers meet-up. Too many folks complained about Tuesday night, so we've moved to the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of each month. Now we'll find out if "Tuesday's not good for me" was just an excuse to avoid hanging with the tech/geek patrol. And we've moved from crowded and loud Helios Coffee to the quiet Raleigh Times Bar (yeah, right). I mean, if nobody's gonna show up we might as well drink, no?

When: Second and Fourth Wednesdays of every month at 6:30PM

Where: The Raleigh Times Bar (Map)

14 E Hargett St
Raleigh, NC  27601
919.833.0999

Other blogging

2007-02-22T23:35:03+00:00

I've been slacking off with the blogging this week, but there's some other Johnson blogging going on. Dad's enjoying his Photophys blog and getting good feedback on the draft chapters of his book. He's posted the first seven chapters now. By the way, my multi-domain hack seems to be working pretty well -- photophys.com is hosted on the same Roller instance as this site rollerweblogger.org.

And brother Dan is keeping the blogging going at Film Babble blog. Check out his Oscar predictions. He's also writing at Helium.com and up to 119 posts there, each a mini movie or music review.

Re: javax.ws.rest

2007-02-15T10:57:12+00:00

I've been updating my javax.ws.rest post with links to blogs about JSR 311: Java (TM) API for RESTful Web Services. I went from a couple to nine links today and I'll probably keep on linking, but I'm about to go quiet for couple of days. It's wiki mountain weekend time again.

Redmonk on Roller, Covalent and IBM

2007-02-14T09:29:01+00:00

James Governor: Covalent gets its mojo back and refocuses on its core competence - supporting open source code, and doubles down on Apache projects, going back to its roots. The latest example of Covalent seeing an opportunity and nailing it is the companyâ€™s announcement of support for the Roller blog platform. Thatâ€™s now two companies, IBM and Covalent, making direct revenues from a platform originally built by a Sun employee, but for which Sun has no business model. Here is a hint Sun - perhaps its not software you need to sell but service and support. That is what Covalent is nailing.

I appreciate the support from James and the Redmonk crew. They always seem to be rootin' for Roller.

Of course I'd like to see better support for Roller all around, but at this point I can't say much beyond this: I'm focused on building a great blog platform and support is a very important part of any platform.

A couple of small corrections for James. I was not a Sun employee when I originally developed Roller. Second, IBM hasn't shipped Connections, so they're not any making "direct revenues" yet. Third, I don't know if Covalent has "nailed" anything -- I haven't heard from anybody who has tried the service and I'm still trying to figure out exactly what they offer.

Photography: Appreciation through Understanding

2007-02-13T19:49:40+00:00

I mentioned before that I convinced my Dad to start a blog. Well, now after a week or so of back-and-forth with Kattare.com getting the domain handling setup properly and modifying Roller to support multiple domains, his blog is live running on the same Roller instance that I use for this blog (but with the domain photophys.com).

Dad's blog is titled Photography: Appreciation through Understanding. He's publishing draft chapters from his new book there, hoping to get feedback and attract some new readers.

Hmm... RSS and Atom feeds don't seem to be working correctly. Apparently, I've still got some multi-domain work to do...