Tuesday May 18, 2004

Re: More Roller-ing

Outside of the fun name, Henri has more issues with Roller. I think his troubles point out a fundamental problem we're having trying to provide as much power to "knowledgeable" users but still keep it simple for those with little-to-no HTML experience (such as my wife Jen).

I think it also illustrates that Roller needs more "community" to get where it is going. For most of Roller's life it has been Dave Johnson, Matt Raible, and myself. A couple other people have contributed here and there, but the relationship didn't hold up. Maybe this is our fault, maybe it is a fault of Roller, or maybe it is just a symptom of the myriad competing weblog tools.

Just a note, any links that don't point to a specific entry were generated by the nifty "Bookmark Linker" plugin. It uses your Bookmarks to automatically generate links for you.
( May 18 2004, 08:50:30 AM ) Roller Permalink Comments [4] [Trackback]

Monday May 17, 2004

Evaluating Roller

Henri is evaluating Java blogging servers, and somehow Roller has risen to the top. I say "somehow" because Henri does have problems and concerns. All-in-all it's nice to have these sort of writeups, pointing to where we need to work harder:

• Errors after deleting Bookmarks and Newsfeeds: can you elaborate? Exceptions or little red text saying there was a problem? The latter results from your template specifying Bookmarks by default, you'd need to remove references to them.
• Flush cache: understood, we fell down on consistency and user expectations.
• Customizing: you do not actually customize the Theme, but rather edit your Pages. The "Theme Switcher" is only for choosing a different theme ("Custom" reflects that you may have already edited your Pages). Warning: using the Theme Switcher will overwrite any customization you have done. These are points that we have been brainstorming, but haven't come to satisfactory solutions.
• RollerException on saveThemePages: darn it, I thought I'd fixed that!
• Hog: Roller, as many a Java db-intensive app, can be a resource hog. Performance wise it does fairly well, caching pages to minimize the effects of repeated hits.
• Admin Add User: new feature, don't know that it ever occurred to us. We'll need to add this to the feature matrix.
• On the 'Pages' option, would be nice if the entries actually had descriptions. I'm not clear on what you mean by this. You are correct though, in that contextual Help would be a boon. That's another one of those points I've been kicking around and haven't found a solution that feels right to me.
• Calendar: you can remove the reference to it in your Weblog Page/template. The "previous" and "next" links on the display page should go backward/forward a month. I myself am a bit less than satisfied with "archive navigating" but again haven't a satisfactory solution.
• Migration: in the latest version (CVS - coming soon hopefully) there are options to import entries via RSS or Atom. The RSS format works well but there is no way to retain comments; the Atom format can manage comments but there are "valid XML" issues I'm still working on.

Thanks for the thoughtful evaluation and all the commentary. This is exactly the type of feedback I like to see for Roller, and exactly what it needs.
( May 17 2004, 08:14:24 AM ) Roller Permalink Comments [5] [Trackback]

For further reading on today's posts:

Koz Speaks : MovableType has an export Format, WordPress supports this, but roller doesn’t seem to, maybe this is the first thing I should whip up. While importing

Saturday May 15, 2004

3 Die in Denver

Freak accident kills three in Denver: a man, wife, and daughter. I'm pretty sure Matt doesn't drive an SUV, but his recent quietness disturbs me.

I toyed with ripping off the Beatles by announcing "Matt is dead", but I couldn't find any pictures of the back of his head.
( May 15 2004, 03:45:32 PM ) News Permalink Comments [1] [Trackback]

For further reading on today's posts:

Raible Designs ~ We Build Web Apps : Bleeehhhh Category: General It's been a week and a half now since I started feeling sick. Don't worry, I'm not dead . We used to live out by the intersection where the accident happened and one of our old neighbors drove a blue Dodge Durango. Hopefully they're OK. Regardless, this is a tragedy that my words surely cannot help.

Wednesday May 12, 2004

Learning AppFuse

I've started a new project (yes, I'm moonlighting) and decided to use AppFuse to kickstart the development (that is what it's for!). Matt's tutorials are great, but he hasn't had time (nor health) to get the new Spring Controller Tutorial written. I don't want to use Struts on this project, mostly just so I get to play with a new toy, but now I don't have Matt holding my hand. I've read a bunch of docs on Spring, and the MVC tutorial, but now I'll have to go study them again and try to figure out this crap for myself ;-)

Matt, how could you do this to me?!

Oh yes, I've had some hiccups along the way, largely to do with my text editor not doing a good enough job of replacing "org.appfuse" with the project's package.
( May 12 2004, 09:43:45 PM ) Technology Permalink [Trackback]

A cure for my ills

I don't like running my own mail server, even one as "simple" as JAMES. So it was nice to find aspirin on Java.Net today. I'd like to integrate this into Roller.

Currently the only email Roller sends is Comments, but there are a few other ideas I've had - it's just that my mail server has never been reliable enough for me to want to count on it. I know one popular feature is "subscribe to this blog", which emails subscribers whenever a new entry is posted (seems frivolous to us users of RSS/Atom, but, whatever). Another is the ability to email "password reminders". Hmm, another idea: export entries and email them to owner as a zip file. Post any others you'd like in the comments, please.
( May 12 2004, 08:59:35 AM ) Technology Permalink [Trackback]

Tuesday May 11, 2004

The Infinite Cat Project I don't often post just a link, so I have to say "Contribute to this worthy *ahem* cause!"
( May 11 2004, 10:00:27 PM ) Cats Permalink [Trackback]

Monday May 10, 2004

Hibernate: SessionFactory.close()

I want to explicitly add shutdown behaviour in my ServletContextListener to release all database resources when contextDestroyed() is called. Fortunately, Hibernate's SessionFactory implements a close() method specifically for this purpose. However, in it's JavaDoc it says

It is the responsibility of the application to ensure that there are no open Sessions before calling close().

But there is no means by which to determine if there are any open Sessions. I would have to create my own SessionCache, adding the Session when it is opened and removing the Session when it is closed. This sounds like something the SessionFactory (or someone else in the library) should handle since it is the one handing out Sessions.

At least Hibernate is a step ahead of Castor here (sorry Bruce), in that Castor provides no mechanism to release resources.
( May 10 2004, 11:56:49 AM ) Technology Permalink Comments [1] [Trackback]

Monday May 03, 2004

The Ideal Gasbag Law : for your entertainment

We can make some predictions about how committees will behave so long as we can isolate the values of each variable. This will, I put it to you, help management, government and industry no end. And as originator of this law, which I dub the Ideal Gasbag Law, I get a 2% royalty of the profit each time it is used in the social engineering of modern society.

( May 03 2004, 03:00:36 PM ) Humor? Permalink [Trackback]