Blogging Roller

Jeffrey Blattman has put together a new Portlet that makes it possible to blog via Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) from a portal page. He's added it to the Open Source Portlet Repository on Java.net so you can try it out against your favorite APP server.

James Snell brings news of an Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) interop event to occur in March at the O'Reilly E-Tech conference. I'd love to use that as an excuse to go to to E-Tech, since my current work involves APP in ROME and Roller, but it sounds like I can participate remotely.

Placeblogger is a new blog and aggregation site that's all about local blogging from Lisa Williams and friends. It's powered by Bryte, which is based on the Drupal content management system and offers blogs, feed aggregations, photo galleries and polls.

You can help build the database by submitting your favorite place blogs. The database supports a number of different "blog types." You can add aggregations, so Joe's local planets would be suitable, and you can add community sites so Orange Politics would fit right in too. I submitted Raleighing.

Here's some more reading on the topic:

• Wired: Get Your Local Fix
• Jay Rosen: Check out Placeblogger.com

Rich has put together a interesting blogapp that pulls all entries from a blog and turns them into a book, using either cups2pdf or OpenOffice.org Writer. I had the same idea when I was writing RSS and Atom in Action, but I was going to go the DocBook route and eventually dropped the idea because DocBook seemed a bit too complex.

I don't think Rich's work is Roller-specific. Rich used Grabber to get the entries out of Roller and into simple HTML files, so the approach should work with other blog servers that support the MetaWeblog API.

I've been too busy with year-end projects to blog over the past couple of days and now suddenly, it's time to say farewell to 2006. So I'll do that with a quick summary of the year.

2006 was a pretty good year for me. I published my first book: RSS and Atom in Action. Roller is still growing, reached 3.0 status and is now very close to becoming a top level Apache project. IBM started contributing to and announced a Web 2.0 product suite that will include Roller. I did my first solo JavaOne presentation and spoke at both ApacheCon EU and ApacheCon US. And, I haven't mentioned it yet, but I also landed a new job inside Sun, which starts on January 8th (more about that later).

On the home-front: the boys (now 4, 8 and 10) are all healthy, happy and doing well in school. We celebrated my dad's 70th birthday and Alex's 10th birthday. We took family trips to Ocracoke, Atlanta, Austin, Northern Virginia and made numerous visits to the in-laws beach house near Topsail Island. Plus, Andi and I escaped from the kids for a week in Ireland to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary -- our first kidless vacation in about ten years.

I hope you had a good year too and will have an even better 2007. Happy new years!

Joe Gregorio announces a new Atom Publishing Protocol Spec (draft #12) and he says it might end up being the final. I guess it's time for a new Blogapps release with APP draft #12 and ROME 0.9 support.

Plus, Joe has put together a set of new planet sites for towns in the Charlotte, NC area; all based on feeds from Google Base, Google Blogs, Google News, Craigs List, Flickr and the Weather Service. The sites look useful, but the ads combined with the minimalist design make them look a little spammy on first glance. Perhaps a short "about this site" paragraph is in order.

I'm glad I was able to help Simon get his personal planet back online yesterday. And I'm glad the task was fairly easy. All Simon needed as a new version of Blogapps PlanetTool updated to use ROME 0.9 and I was planning on doing that anyway.

What's PlanetTool you wonder? PlanetTool is a command-line program which reads a set of RSS/Atom newsfeeds and then uses a set of templates to generate a planet site with HTML, RSS, Atom, OPML and other representations. Simon uses it to bring together his personal blog, Sun blog, del.icio.us links and Flickr.com photos into a single webpage and a single feed. If you subscribe to that feed, you'll get just about everything that Simon publishes to the web.

If you're interested in learning more about PlanetTool, here are some of my previous posts on the topic:

• Try PlanetTool, it's easy!
  
• ROME + Texen = PlanetTool 
• PlanetTool internals
• It's also covered in Chapter 11 of RSS and Atom in Action.
  

The above title Try PlanetTool, it's easy! is a little misleading, but it brings me to my point. PlanetTool is only easy if you're a developer or a power-user; somebody who can handle running Java on a server, editing an XML config file and setting up a cron job. Simon could handle it, but I'd like to make planets easier.

In fact, I'd like to make it as easy to create a planet as it is to create a blog. This past week, I've been thinking about how to do that by taking the simple ROME powered Roller-Planet code, which is found in both Roller and PlanetTool, and build it into a multi-user planet server -- kinda like Roller, but for planets instead of blogs. To get my thoughts into digital form I worked up a little FreeMind mind-map on the topic, dumped it to text, added some wiki syntax and some screen-shots. The result is this: a RollerPlanetMindMap that outlines ideas for the future development of Roller-Planet.

There's still time to get those proposals in. I ended up submitting three proposals for technical sessions related to RSS/Atom and one for a Roller birds-of-a-feather (BOF) session.

Here's the link to submit proposals: http://www.cplan.com/sun/javaone07/cfp.

A new release of the RSS and Atom Utilities (ROME) project ROME 0.9 (beta) is now available on the project's Java.net website. This new release includes fixes to Atom relative URI resolution, easier parsing for RSS feeds that use <content:encoded>, better support for mapping of RSS to and from Atom and numerous small fixes. [Read More]

Abdera is an open source Atom parser, generator, client and server tool-kit for Java. James Snell announced a new version of Apache Abdera (incubating) the other day and the feature list is impressive, especially for a "0.2.0" release. Here's an excerpt:

The goal of the Apache Abdera project is to build a functionally-complete, high-performance implementation of the IETF Atom Syndication Format (RFC 4287) and Atom Publishing Protocol (in-progress) specifications. [... incubator blah blah blah ...]

• A reworked API that improves usability
• Decoupled extensions from the underlying parser implementation
• An Atom Publishing Protocol client implementation
• Updated support for the current Atom Publishing Protocol draft specification
• Added support for Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs)
• Improved Thread Safety
• Fixed a number of Classloader issues that kept Abdera from working properly in application server environments.
• Improved Javadocs
• Added test cases and sample code
• Added experimental Bidirectional Text support
• Improved implementation of OpenSearch v1.0 and v1.1 extensions
• Implementation of MediaRSS extensions
• Implementation of Feed Paging and Archiving extensions
• GoogleLogin Authentication Support

We might have to steal that IRI support for ROME. Actually, that's something that should be built right into the Java platform. Apparently IRI support was considered for Java SE 6 and something was implemented, but then rolled back.

• Sam Ruby: Atom AutoDiscovery
  Comments seem to indicate we may see a shared RSS and Atom spec, which would be good
  
• Atom Autodiscovery spec
  M. Pilgrim and J.Snell, Ed.
• RSS Autodiscovery spec 1.0
  Rogers Cadenhead, James Holderness and Randy Charles Morin
• The Cafes: RELAX Wins
  "Among the XML cognoscenti, the debate is effectively over"
• Time for ROME 0.9?
  New release coming soon with fixes to content/summary handing, relative URI resolving and date parsing

The ROME mailing list has been a little quiet lately. I'm hoping to change that. Roller's built-in planet aggregator uses ROME, Roller's Atom protocol implementation does too and I recommended ROME in my book, so I'd really like to see ROME continue to improve and grow. Now that I'm focusing on a standalone version of Roller-Planet, I've got some time to devote to those goals. Last week I cleared the bug list, this week I committed some improvements to ROME's summary/content handling and next I'd like to start pushing for a ROME 1.0 release. If you'd like to see ROME thrive, please join the fun.

In my off-hours, I've started work on Blogapps 2. Blogapps is a collection of RSS/Atom utilities and applications based on the code from RSS and Atom in Action. You can read more about the project in my recent Blogapps article on on Java.net. Up until now, I've been working alone, but now the project now has a couple of committers. Ramesh Mandava (of the Java WSDP team) joined to help with the Blogapps 2 effort.

We're starting with some renaming. Instead of using chapters-oriented directories and package names, we're more logical and intuitive application names. We're also switching from package name com.manning.blogapps to org.blogapps. Later, I hope to update some dependencies (e.g. Apache XML-RPC 3.0), consolidate/streamline some of the utilities and explore alternatives to Tomcat/HSQLDB for the Blogapps server.

The Server Side posted an excerpt from RSS and Atom in Action last week. Chapter 2: Development kick-start explains how to setup the Blogapps Server and how to post to just about any blog server via MetaWeblog API from Java and C#. And if you're interested in that, then you'll also be interested in The Blogapps Project, which was published on Java.net last month.

On the O'Reilly site, Mark Woodman's How to Build an RSS 2.0 Feed is now available as an O'Reilly Short Cut, a 56-page PDF for $7.99. Marks says that he covered RSS 2.0 from the perspective of the RSS Advisory Board Profile (aka RSS 2.0.8), which seems like a good idea. And he covered ROME too.

The second installment of James Snell's developerWorks article on Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) is online. In part 2 he shows how to post to an Atom server and one of his examples is Roller. If you want to try Snell's example code with Roller, but you don't want to go through the trouble of installing full-on Roller/Tomcat/MySQL, try the super easy-to-install Blogapps Server bundle.

Here are links to parts 1 and 2 of Snell's article:

• Getting to know the Atom Publishing Protocol, Part 1
  Create and edit Web resources with the Atom Publishing Protocol
• Getting to know the Atom Publishing Protocol, Part 2
  Put the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) to work

And now, both parts of RSS and Atom in Action Chapter 4: Newsfeed Formats are online at WebReference.com. The chapter includes a history of RSS and Atom newsfeed formats and diagrams that illustrate the elements each format.

• Newsfeed Formats, Part 1
  From the Birth of RSS to the Nine incompatible versions of RSS
• Newsfeed Formats, Part 2
  the new standard: Atom

Looks like Elias had a fun weekend creating Pundit's Monitor, a political blog monitoring tool using a heap of Java tech: the Nutch search engine/web crawler, Burton's TailRank FeedParser for auto-discovery and ROME for feed parsing (though he doesn't mention that in the post). 

Nick Lothian wrote to tell me about the Education.au blog, an aggregated site that uses the PlanetTool example from Chapter 11 of RSS and Atom in Action.

My Java.net article on the Blogapps Project just went live today.

The Blogapps project provides what is essentially a complete RSS and Atom development kit, which includes feed parsers, generators, blog client libraries, an Atom protocol implementation, a set of ten useful blogapps, and an easy-to-install blog and wiki server. This article explains the project's purpose and how to install and use the project's products, the Blogapps Examples and Blogapps Server, to jump-start your RSS and Atom development.

Simon P. Chappell writes "We've all seen them, those icons that decorate blogs and websites; sometimes they're just little orange squares with white stripes, while others say RSS or Atom. Many of us have heard of feeds and podcasts and aggregators. What are these things and where did they come from? Well, Dave Johnson, the author of the open source Roller blogging software, is glad you asked and by way of an answer, he's written RSS and Atom in Action." Read the rest of Simon's review.

Woohoo! Simon likes the book and gives it an 8/10 rating.

I'm doing a RSS and Atom in Action book promotion at JavaRanch this week in the XML and Related Technologies forum. That means that I'll be checking the forum several times a day and answering all of your questions about the book's topics. At the end of the week, we'll be giving away copies of the book to four randomly selected posters.

So far, I've been answering basic questions like what is RSS, what's the difference between RSS and Atom and what's the book about?

Tags: topic:[RSS], topic:[Atom], topic:[feeds], topic:[Java], topic:[Web 2.0]