Tuesday April 13, 2004

More Roller Hacking Hard on the heels of other Roller hacks, comes this good one from Jeff Mattfield for Preventing Comments for an Entry.

I've created a page on the Roller Wiki where these and futures hacks can be documented.
( Apr 13 2004, 03:06:22 PM ) Roller Permalink
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Monday April 12, 2004

Re: Comment permalinks

I like Sam's idea, so I'll be working on implementing this for Roller. It should only mean some macro/template changes....
( Apr 12 2004, 03:08:44 PM ) Roller Permalink
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Thursday April 01, 2004

Building A Better Brain

Several people have posted links to this article, but I waited until last weekend to read it, so I'd have both halves. Neat ideas, good read. I've got it in mind to take this idea and run, but using/extending the Atom format rather than using the format invented for the article (which does have the virtue of being nice and trim). Yeah, like I've got the time; we're selling our house, looking for another to buy, I still have work to do on Atom4J (though it's mostly there), and of course I keep working on Roller. I guess this post will serve mostly as a bookmark to an interesting idea.
( Apr 01 2004, 08:32:57 AM ) Technology Permalink
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Expert Shilling

Is it just me, or does Jack's article seem like a clever way to direct (ever) more traffic to his website? This "first installment" doesn't really say anything on the topic matter, then ends with a bunch of links to his site. Clever!
( Apr 01 2004, 08:22:20 AM ) Humor? Permalink [Link]
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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]
Trackback: http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/trackback/lance/Weblog/update_on_roller_and_the

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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