Raible Designs

Web-based WYSIWYG HTML Editors.

I think that WYSIWYG are great. However, when I switched to writing standards-compliant XHTML - I found that it became more difficult to rely on an editor. Both Dreamweaver and Homesite are pretty slick in that they give you "standards-compliant" markup when you have an XHTML DOCENGINE at the top of your document.

The reason I bring this up is because I have been advocating a WYSIWYG HTML editor for Roller - and now there is one! However, after looking at the code generated, I noticed <font color="#ac5454"> - yikes font tags! I pray that this editor has a "smart HTML" feature - but I doubt it will. Nor do I care - I love the feature and will use it often - I just have to remember to edit the HTML or this site will fail validation.

Mozilla Fix from Porter.

I received the following message from Porter just a few minutes ago:

Hey Matt,

Just a quick FYI: your latest style switcher worked fine for me in
WinMoz 1.2a. I get the full sunset style after clicking the link.

- Porter


I downloaded the latest Mozilla (1.2a) and whalla - now it works great. Quite a delimna now though - especially since I'm using similar code on a client's app I'm building write now. So I guess this validates that my code is correct and now I have to find a workaround for Mozilla 1.1.

Roller Polling.

I thought of a new feature I'd like to see in Roller. It'd be cool to post a poll for my readers. I'd love to ask you guys/gals your opinion of a few footer I'm creating. With the roller-poller ;), I could do something like the following:

Roller Bug Tracking

has moved from SourceForge to JIRA . I used JIRA a couple of times today and it's a way cool interface and very easy to use. Nice job Atlassian and Mike! I've used Bugzilla a lot in the past, and briefly looked at Scarab, both of which are free. I like Bugzilla a lot, but it can be a little intimidating to setup and use for the first time. As soon as you get that first 1/2 hour over with, you're good to go. It's always nice to learn new products, but with JIRA's price tag of $800, I doubt I'll ever get to use this beyond Roller. However, if it's good - I'll recommend it to my clients and maybe I can get some kickbacks ;-)

Roller Single Entry Links.

Lance solved one of my Roller enhancement requests. Boy was that fast!

The Future of Roller.

To answer Dave's questions:

1) What do you want Roller to be?

I want it to be my personal portal, my weblogger, and my corporate website. I'm also interested in adding a wiki to my website for new projects. But I don't expect or need wiki functionality in roller. I'm planning on adding a new roller page with an iframe to a wiki such as Very Quick Wiki. The iframe gives me the ability to view another site/app with the current skin being used.

2) What are you interested in working on?

• Converting the editor UI to use Tiles instead of including header/footer JSP pages.
• Making the editor UI XHTML-compliant, while maintaining some backwards compatibility with Netscape 4.x.
• Adding the ability to collapse/expand folders for bookmarks.
• Adding search capability to weblog entries and entire site pages, either using Lucene or just 'like' SQL statements.
• Investigating XDoclet and Castor and how it's being used so I can use them on my next project.
• Adding an option for drop-down menus for editor UI (alternative to tabbed menu). I know there is a "Struts Menu" that has been converted to use CoolMenus, so maybe use this.

3) What features would you like to see added to Roller?

• The ability to search weblog entries.
• Ability to include an anchor name for each weblog entry, i.e. <a name="entryId..." id="entryId..."></a>. This would be convenient for other webloggers who are referencing your posts.
• Ability to use other blogging client-side software to post to roller, besides just w:blogger.
• Ability to edit (x)HTML via a web interface - in both Mozilla and IE.

I keep myself motivated by using Roller everyday as the engine behind this site. Thanks Dave, Roller has made the re-design of my website much easier, and it's opened my eyes to the world of weblogging. Good Stuff!

Upgrade Successfull!

You're lookin' at it...

Roller 0.9.5 is Released!

From the Roller Development mailing list:

This new Roller release includes some enhancements to XHTML support, bookmark management, database support for PostgreSQL and HSQL-DB, and some bug fixes. Thanks to new Roller contributors Lance Lavandowska, Matt Raible, Simon Stewart for their work on this release. New features:

* Support for XHTML and CSS in generated weblog pages (Matt)
* Better Page URLs in the Navigation Bar Tag and PageServlet (Lance)
* Support for HSQL and PostgreSQL databases (Lance and Simon)
* Export feature for backing up website (Dave)
* Bookmark import by file-upload of OPML file (Dave)
* Multiple bookmark move and delete on edit-bookmark page (Dave)
* Some bug fixes

Download it here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=47722&release_id=108217. Thanks to Dave and everyone else for getting this release out. I'll attempt an upgrade on this site this weekend. Maybe I'll even add a little footer with the version number so you'll know if I succeeded.

Private Weblogs in Roller

I've used a "quick and dirty" technique for making a private roller weblog for family members only. Maybe Lance can use this to create a private weblog for his mom ;-)

1. Create a new roller user: i.e. "mom"
2. Create a user for user's to login with (I just created another roller user): i.e. "kids"
3. Add a new role (i.e. "family") to the "role" table in your database
4. Add two new records to the role table so the "mom" and "kids" roles have the "family" role
5. Add the following to web.xml:
   
   

   <security-constraint> 
       <web-resource-collection>
           <web-resource-name>My Family</web-resource-name>
           <description>Restricted to Family Members Only</description>
           <url-pattern>/page/mom/*</url-pattern>
           <url-pattern>/rss/mom</url-pattern>
           <http-method>POST</http-method>
           <http-method>GET</http-method>
       </web-resource-collection>
   
       <auth-constraint>
           <role-name>editor</role-name>
           <role-name>family</role-name>
       </auth-constraint>
   </security-constraint>
   

6. Distribute the "kids" username/password to the appropriate parties.

Hope this helps!

Radio-based theme switcher spotted.

Sam Ruby explains how he creates a theme switcher for his site. For some reason, my little bit of DHTML (javascript and CSS) seems much simpler than a perl script.