Thursday March 25, 2004

Update on Roller and "The Ultimate Weblogging System"

The advent of UrlRewriteFilter (well, my finding a link to it) led me to review my comparison of Roller against The Ultimate Weblogging System. The following is an update on where Roller stands against some of these "requirements".

#4, Non-crufty URLs: Roller has supported this for some time now, you can get to a specific entry at . Roller still doesn't have "archives", and cannot show you a specific day/month/year's worth of posts (though you can go straight to a day with yyyyMMdd). Roller does provide a Category view, but it is currently crufty: ?catname=blogerati. I'm thinking that we should be able to address this last issue with the UrlRewriteFilter. Question: if you request a certain date, do you want to see entries ONLY for that date? What if there are no entries for that date? Currently Roller shows N posts, backwards from midnight of the requested date.

#5, Metadata: Roller still has a long way to go to become Ultimate, but as of the current version (in CVS) Hierarchical Categories is now a reality.

#6, Syndication: Roller now pings Weblogs.com, and plans are in the works to make Roller configurable so that the administrator and users can choose which "aggregators" to ping.

#8 Backward compatibility: Two items high on my ToDo list are export/import of RSS/Atom and, now, using the UrlRewriteFilter to support "foreign" URL patterns. To that end, anyone care to supply the URL patterns for popular (and not so popular) blogging tools?
( Mar 25 2004, 10:06:07 AM ) Technology Permalink Comments [4]
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Two great tastes that taste great together!

Eh, no.

But I did come across two great links today. The first is Graham Glass's post on electoral delegation and the second is tuckey's UrlRewriteFilter.

I love Graham's idea, though it has the usual "internet elections" holes; that I could delegate my vote to a respected individual is fantastic: I *don't* have time to research every topic, even if I feel it is important. And that I could change my delegation if I feel that individual has made a mistake (what if I don't like who she delegated to). I doubt this will ever happen in real life, but the concept could have some real applications in "social software" and even the age-old comment spam problem: what if I delegated my comment-spam rules/moderation to you instead of doing it myself (provided you wanted to accept that responsibility).

Secondly, the UrlRewriteFilter provides an immediate benefit to Roller: help meet requirement 8 in Matthew Thomas's "Ultimate Weblogging System" by allowing Roller to use "foreign" blogging URL styles. Neat!
( Mar 25 2004, 09:00:52 AM ) Technology Permalink [Link]
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Tuesday March 23, 2004

Authentication, Commenting, FOAF, and Trackback

Okay, that's a lot of feature to cram into one title. This is mostly just one of those "reminder posts": I thought I'd blogged about SharedID before, but couldn't find it in my archive. Anyhoo, while reading Burningbird's indictment of TypeKey I remembered SharedID (but couldn't remember the name). She's absolutely correct, and SharedID has the same problem.

I'm sure somebody has suggested this already, but what if we (weblog server software writers "we") all supported something akin to Trackback but using FOAF identifiers for Comment "authentication". Wait, there's more. By using a FOAF "key" the Comment server could post the comment back to the user's server where the comment could be logged (thus supplying the "where have I commented?" feature that so many people seem to want). Yep, FOAF is as open to spoofing and identity theft as many other suggested "identity solutions"; the suggestion here is less about authentication (though that component is there) than about a new kind of service.

Okay, I *know* something like this has been suggested before but I can't track it down. Dear readers, please provide links. Thanks.

Later: In browsing and reading wider I see there was a roll of chat on this topic last summer. Of course, no resolution was found (perhaps TypeKey is that resolution?).
( Mar 23 2004, 11:04:44 AM ) Technology Permalink [Link]
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I18N, Velocity, and Tools

Recently a user asked for help making his JRoller blog display some template text in Tamil (a language in southern India). My suggestion should work (though he says it isn't working) - but is really just a hack. Matt's suggestion would be a definate improvement, but isn't quite what I had in mind. And so I finally discovered MultiViewsTool from the Velocity Tools project. Doing it this way is probably more duplication than using a resource bundle (okay, it is duplicating the layout), I've just never been comfortable with how resource bundles work (in regards to rendering web interfaces).

I've been watching the Velocity Tools for a while, but didn't really see many solutions that I hadn't already implemented for myself (and some of mine are better, such as my Locale-ized time formatting). Now today I see several new (to me) tools that I *really* like! Such as the VelocityLayoutServlet which may provide just the solution I've been looking for to implement some improvements to Roller. In fact, I think several of the less publicized tools may be improvements over Roller's roll-your-own implementations. Soon I will look into migrating Roller to Velocity 1.4 and the Tools project.
( Mar 23 2004, 10:54:37 AM ) Technology Permalink Comments [2]
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What exactly is an ETag?

I've been tasked (mainly by myself) with creating ETag support in Roller. It all seems plain enough, works similar to the LastModified headers, blah blah blah. But I can't find any description of what an ETag should look like. Yeah, I can mine other sites for ETags, but that doesn't *describe* it to me. The relevant HTTP spec is speechless on the format.

And on pages such as Roller generates, it is tricky to know when the Etag should change: the user could modify their published bookmarks, the referers list is continually updated, comment counts change.... Should I just generate a hash of the rendered page and stuff it into the Etag header? How do I know when an Etag header sent back to Roller is invalid? Surely you wouldn't want Roller to render the page again, hash it again, then compare the hash to the etag; what would be the point? Should I just regenerate the hash every half-hour, or whenever the user makes a new post (we currently invalidate the cache on certain events such as new posts, as just one example)?

Perhaps I'm entirely the wrong guy for this job, I've certainly got more questions than answers. Over the years I thought I'd built up a pretty good knowledge of web technology, but somehow Etag has me stymied.
( Mar 23 2004, 09:52:09 AM ) Technology Permalink Comments [3] [Link]
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Are your kids fat?

Mine aren't, in fact they are rather scrawny. But that doesn't mean I support our schools eliminating physical education! What's next, recess?! Our kids need a chance to run around and get the energy out of their bodies, to unwind a little bit (are your kids stressed out, like one of mine?). And PE (or phy-ed if you're a Minnesotan) isn't just about dodgeball, it's also actually about physical-education: learning about your body and how to live healthy.

But schools have to cut something, as the state and federal governments continue to trim what they spend ("No Child Left Behind"? More like "No Child Gets Ahead"). School administrators face tough decisions, no doubt, but this is a bad one. Also, next year my oldest enters middle-school and will have to choose between Computer classes and Band. She loves music AND computers, but the school can't afford to offer both to all students.

Meanwhile I heard on the radio that some school district (St. Paul?) spent $80 million on "multicultural art". Pluralism is good, tolerance is good; but where are their priorities?!
( Mar 23 2004, 08:42:26 AM ) Personal Permalink Comments [1]
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Sunday March 14, 2004

Re: Finishing What I Started, Redux. In my quest to tie up the loose ends I've left lying about, I finally completed the Plugin user UI I've been debating (internally). Now the user can choose from a list of Plugins for each Entry. Furthermore, the user can decide which ones are selected by default. One last bit I want to add is some popups or slide-ins to tell the user what each Plugin does. I've got to find some proper Javascript and/or CSS to make this look nice, and write up what the user reads. Then I'll finally have this truly done.
( Mar 14 2004, 08:55:21 PM ) Roller Permalink [Link]
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Friday March 12, 2004

Re: cross-user display problem

I figured out (and fixed) this particular problem, but it isn't quite the same as what has been reported in the past. Separately I've fixed the issue Merrick reported (which really is a 'usability bug' more than anything), which *may* have the side-benefit of fixing the previously reported problem.
( Mar 12 2004, 01:06:15 PM ) Roller Permalink
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