Raible Designs

Host your blog for free?

One of the folks that contacted me about hosting is Jason Rimmer of Irth Networks. The sweet thing about Jason's company is that they host blogs (movable type, bojsom, and roller), websites, email, etc. for not-for-profit activities and organizations. Free hosting!? What the hell?! It's true:

The operators of RhumbaNet, being completely self-taught and wanting to give something back to the community that enabled and supported their education recognized the perfect opportunity to do so. Hence, the commercial venture was shutdown and transformed into Irth Networks. [more...]

Of course this is a screaming deal - so why didn't I jump at it? For one, I feel that I should pay for hosting this site, as well as my family's site. And now that the new server seems to be humming along nicely, there's no reason to find a new provider (probably just jinxed myself there). However, I might ask Jason to host a few of the demos I have running. We'll see how this server holds up for the next few days.

Comments Fix

I committed a small enhancement to Roller's CVS tonight. Twisty Comments should now be FIFO instead of LIFO. Most commenting features are designed this way, including Roller's other two options (popup and single-page). Thanks to Keith for testing out twisty comments and inspiring me to fix this bug.

iPod Goodies

Erik hooked me up this morning with a link to Haiko's blog this morning - where I found the lovely ephPod software as an alternative to MusicMatch (the Windows software that comes with the iPod). I actually don't mind the MusicMatch software, though I did use ephPod to make and synchronize a playlist this morning. ephPod definitely looks better, but I like the organized-by-artist feature of MusicMatch.

I also found Outpod for quick-and-easy synchronization of Outlook contacts. This software worked very well - though I have no clue why I need my contacts on my iPod. They're already on my phone thanks to iSync and Bluetooth. What would be really cool is if my phone (T68i) had the iPod's capabilities and I could just listen to MP3's on my phone.

All in all, it was a great ride in this morning with a fresh batch of hand-picked songs - not to mention that the iPod is very light. I couldn't even feel it in my pocket - where as my old Sony Walkman would flop all over the place.

Snookered at the Apple Store

They got me tonight... those bastards. I walked in and handed over MiniMe. They're sending him off and will call me in a few days to tell me if the damage is covered by my AppleCare Warranty. It damn well better be ;-) If any of you have ever been to the Apple stores, and had them do anything, you'll know it takes forever for them to complete the paperwork. The last time, I went in to get a new powercord, and it took them 20 minutes to type everything in. I have a sneaky suspicion that they're doing this all on a webapp that is slow like molasses.

So while waiting for them to complete the paperwork, I went to buy an iPod. I wanted the cheapest one - $299 for 10 Gigs. 2500 songs is plenty when I only have around 700. But the salesman sneakingly let me know that the $399 model came with over $150 in accessories (Wired remote, Carrying case w/ belt clip, New iPod Dock). I knew the dock was good from reading James's new iPod experience. So I asked, "How much is the dock?" The swindler told me, "60 or 70 bucks, something like that." I fell for it, and now I'm the proud (and poor with a pissed off wife) owner of the 15 GB (3700 song) iPod. I'll be stuffing this sucker in my pocket and riding to work as long as I'm in Colorado this summer - shouldn't take me long to scratch it up real nice.

First impression: it sucks - I was stuck trying to do stuff in German for the first couple of minutes. :-) I had to reset it to get back to English. All my downloaded songs have many different names for the same artist, so I have 3 different "Eminem" and 4 different "Greatful Dead" artists. Only 1 Garth Brooks though. From these artists, you can see I like it all - music is one of my favorite things in this world.

I'm guessing I'll get used to my iPod (reminder to self: name it) after a few days/weeks of using it. As most things Apple makes - it takes me a while to fall in love with their toys.

[Request] Moblogger on Sourceforge

Hey Russ, what do you think about putting Moblogger on SourceForge? If you have something against SourceForge, that's fine, how about putting it on a publicly accessible CVS server so folks can contribute?

I have a few reasons for wanting this:

• I want to see title support - maybe signified by a space in the subject after the password.
• I'd like to see the ability to specify multiple blogs/e-mail boxes in the config file (agentsettings.xml).
• A sample web interface would be awesome. For instance, the ability to edit the config file via a JSP and start/stop the agent through this same interface. Maybe even use Betwixt for writing/reading the config file.
• Use Velocity or XSL for templates - rather than hardcoding it in the Java code.
• This seems like a great project to integrate Jabber-blogging into.

If you give the OK, I can request the project be setup - but I thought you'd like to be the admin on it.

CSS Tabs and Cool Designs

I found some great stuff over at Zeldman's place this evening. First of all, I'm definitely going to bookmark this page at Webgraphics. It has a bunch of tabbed interface experiments using CSS - which will be very handy when integrating Roller's tab-based menu into struts-menu.

The second ultra-cool item of business is the very cool sites Zeldman lists in the following quote. If any of you Roller users are looking to design a new theme - I'd love to see any of these integrated into Roller.

Repeating background patterns, once the shame of web design, have recently made a tasteful comeback. (Background patterns are new grey.) If you can't design your own patterns, Squidfingers offers over 120 lovely background patterns you can use on your site. Go get 'em. If you can design your own backgrounds, K10k has launched a Pixel Pattern Exhibition and invites you to submit your designs.

Jabber and Roller

This would be a much better post if I'd already developed the software, and this was an announcement. But I don't want to develop the software per se, I just want to use it. So I'm putting this idea out there in hopes that someone has already developed the software. My e-mail to the jabber-dev mailing list pretty much sums it all up.

Hello,

My name is Matt Raible and I am a contributor on the Roller Weblogger
project (http://rollerweblogger.org).  I'm looking to add support for 
Jabber as a blogging client.  Currently, we support the BloggerApi and 
MetaWeblogApi.  What I'd like to know is if there is a project already 
that converts Jabber's XML files to XML-RPC calls - or if I could simply 
use an XSL stylesheet to transform and resend to my blog.

Thanks,

Matt

I'd love to add a Jabber Powered logo to my About page. I did some work with Jabber last year, basically just installing and configuring it - both very simple. The project I was on was also planning on adding support for creating new jabber accounts on-the-fly when a new user was created in our database. It's all XML, so it's probably all pretty easy. Anyway, I bought a Programming Jabber book and it's been collecting dust ever since. The cool thing about Jabber is if we setup a Jabber server (i.e. jabber.freeroller.net), then I think it'd be possible to blog via your favorite IM client. Please leave your thoughts and comments - and any links to anything that might already exists.

Tivo and a DVD Burner?

Like James, there's probably a Tivo Series 2 in my future. However, we've also looked at buying a DVD Recorder. So my question is: Is there a DVD Recorder that is Tivo-enabled? It'd be awesome if there were - two birds with one stone.

Why this site had problems yesterday

I got the following e-mail from Keith this morning on why this site had so many stability problems yesterday.

I've not got some more detail on what happened yesterday...

One of my clients took it upon themselves to install a game server on our 
machine, renamed the executable to "java" to hide it, and started hosting 
head to head games on our machine.  They ran up about 7 GB in traffic and 
sucked the life out of the server.  

By our doing a 'kill -s 9 java' and then restart then JVMs, it did kill 
their server until they started it again.

I finally tracked it down by seeing all the bandwidth on a non-standard port 
and finding an executable named 'java' running it, but it wasn't the JRE 
java that one would expect.

Anyway, just in case this happens again I've got some more RAM going in to 
the box tonight starting with the server that is currently the hot backup.  
You may see 15 minutes or so of downtime tonight when we move over to that 
server and bring the current one down for it's memory upgrade.

Keith

Phew! It's good to know it's not Roller that's causing the problem, but some bastard hogging all the memory. Was that you Simon?

Braindump: Roller, Hosting and Wrox

I have a lot of things I want to mention, so let's just get right to it.

Roller should bundle Moblogger
It'd be cool if Roller bundled Russ's Moblogger as part of the application. It'd be pretty easy, all we'd need to do is slap a UI on it's config file - possibly put the config into a database, and maybe even use Roller's "page" feature for the e-mail templates. Then we'd have to figure out a way to start Moblogger's thread in the background and possibly do one thread for each user.

Roller Plugins
Should Roller add a Plugins feature like Blojsom has? Why should we? If we should, maybe we should just re-use an existing plug-in API - i.e. Struts' or Blojsom's. What would make a good plugin? Is this just a fancy name for a feature that can be turned on/off (i.e. comments).

Struts Menu for the Editor
I hope to add the ability to choose different menu types in Roller's Editor UI. First, I'll have to integrate Roller's tabbed menu as a displayer for struts-menu [demo]. The CoolMenu's displayer will work great (and require less mouse clicks). I mention this in hopes of making Lance and Dave aware of any schema changes that need to be made to support a user-selectable menu type. I'll also need to add the ability to specify struts-forwards in the menu-config.xml (not implemented yet in struts-menu).

This site and my provider
This site was down a lot today - probably because of all the hits from javablogs.com (just put Hibernate in your title). I noticed that Simon and Sam's sites were down as well. This leads me to believe that my kgbinternet.com is not up to snuff. Dave and Lance seem to never have issues with Roller crashing - so why am I? Please recommend any hosting providers that offer private Tomcat instances (preferrably with lots of RAM and disk space).

What's up with Wrox and Professional JSP 2.0
Who knows... I haven't heard a thing, from anyone. Think I'd get anyone's attention if I slapped both of my chapters on this site - free of charge? I doubt it. I might just do that if I don't get any feedback in the next week or so. Are they gonna sue me for the pocket change they paid me to write the chapters?

Now I'm going to assign this to my Java category and see if all you java.bloggers can crash this site again. ;-)