What makes a planet worth reading
Sandro
and I had a small discussion today regarding Planet Mindquarry: I manage the subscriptions that will be aggregated in Planet Mindquarry and Sandro proposed to remove two bloggers who are Mindquarry developers but do not blog about Mindquarry as such. For me this is no big thing, as honesty and diversity is what makes a planet living and worth reading. This is why Planet Apache is one of my favorite reads: It allows me to see what people of a community I respect and value think. This means everything, not only Apache specific stuff. I see who moved recently, who makes great holidays and of course who codes interesting stuff. On the other side planets like Planet PHP or Planet Gentoo have a different policy: If you want your post to be on this planet, make sure it is relevant to the topic 'Gentoo' or 'PHP'. After having been subscribed to Planet Gentoo for a while (as a Gentoo user I thought it might be interesting to follow this planet), I quickly unsubscribed because the posts where too one-topic focused to keep me interested. Sure, the posts are relevant to the topic, but are they relevant to the people?
and I had a small discussion today regarding Planet Mindquarry: I manage the subscriptions that will be aggregated in Planet Mindquarry and Sandro proposed to remove two bloggers who are Mindquarry developers but do not blog about Mindquarry as such. For me this is no big thing, as honesty and diversity is what makes a planet living and worth reading. This is why Planet Apache is one of my favorite reads: It allows me to see what people of a community I respect and value think. This means everything, not only Apache specific stuff. I see who moved recently, who makes great holidays and of course who codes interesting stuff. On the other side planets like Planet PHP or Planet Gentoo have a different policy: If you want your post to be on this planet, make sure it is relevant to the topic 'Gentoo' or 'PHP'. After having been subscribed to Planet Gentoo for a while (as a Gentoo user I thought it might be interesting to follow this planet), I quickly unsubscribed because the posts where too one-topic focused to keep me interested. Sure, the posts are relevant to the topic, but are they relevant to the people?
I see planet software as a community tool. I read blogs to learn about people, so I read planets to learn about communities. This is why I am looking forward to Planet JBoss: I am not a JBoss user, I am not that interested in the JBoss software, but I am interested in the JBoss community, as there are some clever guys behind this software.
Coming soon: BlogBridge Pub Service for micro publishers
Check out this post from BlogBridge:
If you write or contribute to a blog or publish your work and commentary somewhere then we you will be interested to hear about the BlogBridge Pub Service. Ed: Yes, we did change the name from Pro to Pub after some feedback]We’ve found that many of our users like BlogBridge for the same reason that we like it: you read (or follow) lots and lots of blogs and want to be as efficient as possible doing this. And why do you read so many blogs?
(from: Coming soon: BlogBridge Pub Service for micro publishers)
This post was written using the new publishing feature in BlogBridge 4.4 (you need to use the weekly release, available for Java WebStart). And thanks to the stellar work of Aleksey Gureev and the BlogBridge team the latest 4.5 Snapshot of BlogBridge supports Roller, which allows you to publish to Goshaky Weblogs, JRoller.com, blogs.sun.com and many more.
How to get Your Roller 3.0 Blogroll in OPML format
Roller always had the feature to output your blogroll as OPML. This list of bookmarks was helpful for migrating from Roller to another weblog service or to feed a feedreader that support OPML Reading Lists like Blogbridge or Straw. With these Reading Lists, the feed reader will automatically subscribe to all feeds listed in your blogroll.
Unfortunately, this fetaure is gone in Roller 3.0
- Personally, I don't think we need OPML feeds in the URL structure. If somebody wants an OPML feed, he/she can add a page and generate OPML using models/macros.
Fortunately creating these macros is quite easy: In your Roller backend, go to Preferences >Templates, add a new page, called OPML and copy and paste following template code.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<opml version="1.0">
<head>
<title>Lars Trieloff's Bookmarks</title>
</head>
<body>
#set($rootFolder = $model.weblog.getBookmarkFolder("/"))
#foreach ($bookmark in $rootFolder.bookmarks)
<outline
text="$bookmark.name"
type="rss" xmlUrl="$utils.escapeXML($bookmark.feedUrl)"
htmlUrl="$utils.escapeXML($bookmark.url)" />
#end
</body>
</opml>
After saving the template, the OPML file will be made available at the URL WeblogBaseURL/page/OPML.
New Theme
Thanks to the optional themes in Roller 3.0 this weblog features now a new theme: It is called almostspring, was originally developed for Wordpress by Beccary and ported to Roller by Dave Johnson. How do you like this new theme?
this weblog features now a new theme: It is called almostspring, was originally developed for Wordpress by Beccary and ported to Roller by Dave Johnson. How do you like this new theme?
Roller 3.0
I've just updated weblogs.goshaky.com to Roller 3.0. Thanks to the new template system I had to revert to a more default stylesheet. Furthermore, the URLs have changed to a more convenient format, but this change should not be user-visible as everything is redirected.
Kann man schon was sehen?
Kann man schon was sehen? (German for "is there already something to see?"). Answer: Yes, the first screenshot of Mindquarry is available at the Mindquarry Blog.
.
It is remarkable what can be built using Cocoon in very short time without leading to hackish or unmaintainable solutions.
The secret of optimzing your JRoller weblog for Google, del.icio.us and Firefox
Roller is a great weblog software. This is the reason why JRoller and Goshaky Weblogs use this software and this is the reason why so many great bloggers are on JRoller. But the standard Roller templates get one thing wrong: They fail to set the correct title for individual weblog permalink pages.
and Goshaky Weblogs use this software and this is the reason why so many great bloggers are on JRoller. But the standard Roller templates get one thing wrong: They fail to set the correct title for individual weblog permalink pages.
Take for example the Bile Blog, which is one of the most popular blogs on JRoller. The title of the start page is "The Bile Blog", but if you turn to an individual entry's permalink page, you will see the title of this page, e.g. of Another googleturd is again "The Bile Blog". Why is this bad? The top-5 reasons are:
- Google cannot see the difference. The title of the page is important for Google's rankings and without a proper title, Google will not find out it is being bashed in Another googleturd, which means less visitors for the Bile Blog.
- Firefox cannot see the difference. Imagine you are opening three stories of the Bile Blog in tabs in your Firefox webbrowser. The title of all three tabs will be "The Bile Blog" and you have no chance to see the difference, e.g. if you would like to show your colleagues the latest Google-bashing
- del.icio.us bookmarks cannot see the difference: Many people are using the del.icio.us bookmarket to manage their bookmarklets. After clicking the bookmarklet and tagging the entry they are not reviewing the title, so their bookmark will be entitled "The Bile Blog", even if they are not bookmarking the whole blog, but a particular story. Take a search at del.icio.us for "The Bile Blog" and find out whether a link is pointing to the start page or an entry,
- It is not accessible. Most people do not care about making their site accessible, but most people with disabilities are actually using the internet. Setting the correct title helps them visting your weblog.
- You look like someone who is not able to customize the templates of his weblog system correctly, but with these instructions, it is no problem for nobody.
All you have to do is to login to your JRoller weblog. Click on Preferences, click on Theme, click on Customize (if you are not already using a customized theme), click on Templates and edit the Weblog or _decorator template. You need to find the text between <title> and </title> and paste following code:
#macro( showEntryTitle $entries)
#foreach( $entry in $entries )
#if ( $velocityCount == 1)
$entry.title
#end
#if ( $velocityCount == 2)
and more
#end
#end
#end
#if ($pageModel.weblogEntry)
#set($entries = [$pageModel.weblogEntry])
#showWebsiteTitle():
#showEntryTitle( $entries )
#else
#showWebsiteTitle()
#end
This will show the title of your current post on permalink pages and leave the start page unchanged. And, most important it will make Google, del.icio.us and Firefox users happy.
Webmontag in Berlin (05-22-06)
I've attended yesterday's Webmontag in Berlin. It was quite interesting, but the interesting parts were not the ones I expected:
. A ting is a collaborative editing session that is supported by three tools: A collaborative editor like Gobby, a Voice-over-IP client like Skype or Teamspeak (Mattis said Teamspeak's push-to-talk-feature makes it the best program for tings because it does not distract from writing and disciplines the users) and an extension of MediaWiki that will save the exported document (The extension seems to be Mutante/MoonEdit and was originally designed for the proprietary MoonEdit).
, which I head about before, but have seen it as just another way to make blogging even more complicated. After hearing Baju's talk, I've changed my opinion. The basic idea of structured blogging is to define data types for blog entries. For example an weblog entry can be a review of a book or a movie, it can be the announcement of an event and many more. The structured blogging initiative provides a definition of blog entry types and relies on the popular microformats concept which embeds machine-readable data into HTML by using CSS class definitions. Furthermore it provides plugins for two weblog tools that make creating structured weblog entries easier by providing editors that are suited at certain blog entry data types.
showcased a new Cititzen's Journalism project: Readers Edition which will go live soon. Nothing new, but nice webdesign.
. It was quite interesting, but the interesting parts were not the ones I expected:
Ting and Gobby
Mattis Manzel talked about Ting. A ting is a collaborative editing session that is supported by three tools: A collaborative editor like Gobby, a Voice-over-IP client like Skype or Teamspeak (Mattis said Teamspeak's push-to-talk-feature makes it the best program for tings because it does not distract from writing and disciplines the users) and an extension of MediaWiki that will save the exported document (The extension seems to be Mutante/MoonEdit and was originally designed for the proprietary MoonEdit).
The main idea is that a bunch of people meets at a specified time at a certain server and launces their collaborative editors. The appointment for time and server will be made using a wiki page. People start writing and discussing what they are writing by embedding comments into the document and using the VoIP tool. After completion of the ting, which might take from 30 minutes to five hours, the created document is copied into the talk page of the wiki.
From my point of view, collaborative editing is an extremely intesting topic and I see many connections to Wiki software, but I am not sure how the Ting concept could be used for more than geek entertainment.
Structured Blogging
The part was the unexpectedly interesting part. Baju Bitter introduced Structured Blogging, which I head about before, but have seen it as just another way to make blogging even more complicated. After hearing Baju's talk, I've changed my opinion. The basic idea of structured blogging is to define data types for blog entries. For example an weblog entry can be a review of a book or a movie, it can be the announcement of an event and many more. The structured blogging initiative provides a definition of blog entry types and relies on the popular microformats concept which embeds machine-readable data into HTML by using CSS class definitions. Furthermore it provides plugins for two weblog tools that make creating structured weblog entries easier by providing editors that are suited at certain blog entry data types.
Most interesting part of this concept is that there are already aggregators that are utilizing these structured blogging contents.
- edgeio finds listings of things you would like to sell in blog entries, think of it as a decentralized ebay (which would need Rapleaf integration, of course)
- incredibooks is a list of book reviews by children and teenagers.
If you are capable of reading german, you should further check out Baju's collection of links, his weblog entry on this Webmontag and the german structured blogging website and forum he maintains.
Readers Edition
Finally Peter Schink of Die Netzzeitung showcased a new Cititzen's Journalism project: Readers Edition which will go live soon. Nothing new, but nice webdesign.
Posting from del.icio.us to Roller
I finally figured out how to configure del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service to post a daily batch of bookmarks to my Roller weblog:
- Create an account at del.icio.us
- Login to your account
- Click on 'settings'
- Click on 'Experimental'->'daily blog posting'
- Create a new job with any job name, use your Roller login name as 'out_name', your Roller password as 'out_pass', the XML-PRC-URL of your Roller installation as 'out_url', in case of weblogs.goshaky.com, the correct URL is http://weblogs.goshaky.com/weblogs/xmlrpc, enter the value '0' for 'out_cat_id' and 'out_time' (I've found no other values to work) and the ID of your weblog, e.g. 'lars' as 'out_blog_id'.
Update, the URL has been changed from /xmlrpc to /roller-services/xmlrpc
I am Product Manager for Collaboration and Digital Asset Management at 