Blogging Roller

I was playing around with the new <a href= "http://earth.google.com/intl/en/userguide/v4/flightsim/index.html">flight simulator in Google Earth and flying over Raleigh when I noticed the extensive and very detailed set of 3D models for the NCSU campus. Here's an overview that shows the brickyard, D.H. Hill library and Harrelson Hall:

The details are pretty amazing, with signage and steps and hand-rails. Here's an example that shows the stairs on the side of Reynolds the old basketball coliseum:

The work was done by <a href= "http://delta.ncsu.edu/news/announcements/item.php?id=40">students competing in Google's Build Your Campus in 3D competition. Follow that link for a (tiny) video and you can also find a <a href= "http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/search?uq=01632339457160731034&start=60">catalog of all the student's work on the Google Earth site.

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.