Raible Designs

Wanna Try Roller?

This site seems to have stabilized pretty well - I haven't crashed in 2 days, so here goes. If anyone of you want to try out Roller and see what it's editor interface looks like, I'm inviting you to do so. Follow these steps to check it out:

• Go to http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/test
• Scroll to the bottom and click the "Login" link.
• Type username "test" password "roller" to login.
• You will see a list of Editor links on the bottom right after logging in. Use these to edit and change stuff for the test user.
• Please annotate your entries with a URL to your site, and your impression/suggestions.
• Have Fun!

Any body else willing to give us similar access with their blogging software? I'd love to see what the editor looks like for MiniBlog or PersonalBlog.

kdub's log

There's a blog over at freeroller.net that is using a slightly altered x2 theme. X stands for XHTML and 2 stands for 2 columns (I contributed this theme to Roller, so that's how I know). Anyway, the writer, kdub, seems to like what I'm serving.

Great stuff from Raible Matt Raible is a great guy. I have been reading his weblog for a few months and he has been covering OS X, Roller, Struts, HTML/CSS, and Java which works well with my tastes. I need to congradulate him on his new daughter!

Thanks for the Abbie love - now it's your turn kdub - tell us about yourself. We want to hear about you, the person, not just your interests.

Make Roller Better

Like Dave said:

There are lots of little problems with Roller's UI, lots of room for improvements, and lots of missing weblogging features. Make sure the issues that are bugging you get into Roller's JIRA issue tracker. Look at the list of issues that are not yet assigned to a release and vote on the ones that are most important to you. You can also view the currently most popular issues.

So help us improve Roller and the world will be a better place - or at least our part of the world will be...

I'm loving the comments feature.

I really like the comments feature because it's as if I have hidden treasures waiting for me on my site. Like the demanding, never-satisfied client, I now ask - can we add the last 20 comments feature like MiniBlog has?

Comments by Lance

Lance did some nice work on Roller this weekend and implemented the much-desired Comments feature. Nice job Lance!

It also seems that Eclipse 2.0.2 was quietly released on Friday (it says Thursday on the downloads page, Friday on the dev mailing list). This update does not appear to be available from Help > Software > Update Manager. Hopefully it will be soon. Does IDEA have an upgrade within the IDE feature?

Add a Google Search to your Site

I got the idea from Dave and now I've implemented it on this site. To add one to your site, copy and paste the following code and adjust the site URL accordingly. NOTE: This is the XHTML Strict version, if you want a Transitional version, view source on Dave's site.

<form id="searchForm" method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search"
 style="margin: 0; padding: 0" onsubmit="search()">  
   <input type="text" name="q" size="20" maxlength="255" 
       value="search this site" style="font-size: 11px"
       onfocus="this.value=''"  /> 
   <input type="submit" name="sa" value="go" 
       style="font-size: 11px; padding: 2px; line-height: 1" />
</form>

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function search() {
    form = document.getElementById('searchForm');
    form.q.value = form.q.value + " site:www.raibledesigns.com";
    form.submit();
}
//-->
</script>

Rick Salsa has a new look!

Rick - I dig your new theme. I'm guessing you got your ideas from Blue Robot's Layout Reservoir. I've gotten many ideas and stylesheets from Rob's site - very helpful it is. Your theme is really nice on the eyes - nice job!

RSS Validator doesn't accept relative links?!

I discovered that the RSS Validator does not accept relative links in weblog entries. Hmmm, I guess we have to work on our URL-expander in Roller for RSS Feeds. A while back, I found that relative links where a problem in NetNewsWire as well. In my opinion, aggregators should be able to handle some type of base element, like <base href="..." /> in HTML and resolve links from that.

Updated Roller and Tomcat

I upgraded Roller to 0.9.7-dev and Tomcat to 4.0.6 (from 4.0.4). Everything appears to have gone smoothly - let me know if I missed something. Also, Roller appears to be incredibly stable since I changed my <session-timeout> (in web.xml) setting from 3600 to 30 minutes. I guess Tomcat can't handle a session timeout of 2.5 days very well!

Weblog Validator

For anyone who attempts to maintain a valid XHTML site, you know that it's a fair amount of work to make sure your site is valid all the time - especially if you're linking to other sites. You learn to hate ampersands (&). To solve this problem in Roller, I think we need a validator built into the posting of new content. It'd be a sweet feature, maybe we can start with a dirty URL cleaner such as the Hivelogic URL Cleaner. Further comments on this topic can be found at web-graphics.com. Interesting tidbit from Dave:

If you are using XHTML (and you should be!) you could try to incorporate my JavaScript XML parser. You’d have to tweak it to wrap the post in a fake "root" element, but then it could tell whether or not the particular post is well-formed XML. It could not, however, tell you whether or not your post is valid (i.e. conforms to a particular DOCENGINE), but it would catch things like misplaced ampersands, unknown entities, tags that aren’t closed, etc.

Better yet, if you use IE for your posts, you could do the same thing using its built-in XML parser.