Anil Gangolli

Including the rssUrl in outbound pings

With my head down in work, I missed this blog entry by Dave Winer.

Based on it and the followups, I suggest we add the rssUrl attribute into the outbound pings in Roller 1.2. Am I correct in my understanding that the extra attribute would be safe to inject into all outbound pings (and would be ignored by older sites not implementing the extended pings)?

Posted at 08:46AM Jun 03, 2005 in dev  |  Permalink

Running development version of Roller 1.2

I‘m now running a development version of Roller 1.2 on this site to help me get the kinks out of the new configurable ping functionality. You may see downtime. If you see any unusual behavior on the site, please let me know by e-mail or IM.

KNOWN ISSUES:

No known issues.

Posted at 10:41AM May 21, 2005 in dev  |  Permalink

Groups and aggregation

Joe Reger sent the Roller dev list an e-mail asking for feedback on this Group Blog API proposal. I started to post a comment, but I just hate typing anything significant into a 3 line textarea. So here‘s a trackback post instead.

Squinting hard, I see basically two separate ideas in the proposal:

1. Group aggregation. The group aggregation idea is hot, and deservedly so. We all have groups in which we work, play, or share ideas, and despite the fact that it supports the tendency to form cliques, I think group aggregation is an important feature for blogging. However, the proposal specifies a “push“ model. I prefer the “pull” model effectively demonstrated by Planet Roller, which serves as a group aggregator for the Roller folks (and a few guests of Dave), and I prefer the mechanism of the tool underlying that page. The pull model is more resilient to failures of the aggregation host at the time of posts being collected, and requires no new infrastructure in most blog tools. The push model puts a lot of burden on the aggregation site to be up, or on the posting sites to queue in case of failure. In the pull model selection of specific posts is readily handled either by pulling RSS feeds by category or adding filtering functionality based on topic tags.
   
   
2. Group administration API. This is potentially interesting if rights are properly distributed and managed. I confess I haven‘t yet critically analyzed the proposal to make such a determination. One can imagine a group blog feature in a blog engine (or simply a blog aggregation engine) with an administrative UI that provided for setting up new group blogs, essentially by setting up RSS subscriptions. Exposing that same functionality as an API would probably be valuable.

Technorati tags: Roller blogging blogware

Posted at 07:18AM Feb 23, 2005 in dev  |  Permalink

TagSurf and Roller Topic Tag plugin

The topic tag experiment continues with TagSurf, another aggregator featuring indexing based on topic tags.

You can use the experimental Roller topic tag plugin with TagSurf as well as Technorati.

You can change your default topic URL base to be http://www.tagsurf.com/tag by defining a bookmark called “Default Topic Site” with this URL in any bookmark folder; it need not be visible on your page. You can also use bookmarks to designate specific topic sites on a tag by tag basis.

More info is on the doc page.

Note that topic tags are expanded at rendering time, so all of your existing tags that don‘t specify a topic tag site bookmark will switch over to any new default you set.

By the way, please contact me with feedback on the experimental plugins, particularly if you would like to see them distributed as part of Roller 1.1.

Technorati tags: tagsurf Roller technorati tagging

Posted at 08:26AM Feb 14, 2005 in dev  |  Permalink  |  Comments[3]

Stanford's Undergrad Java Certification Curriculum

Most of the recent interview of Alan Kay by Stuart Feldman in the ACM Queue (this one also suggested by a friend) is really good stuff.

On page 4 , however, after soundly beating Java down and glorifying Lisp and Smalltalk, he says:

AK: ... I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.

SF: Well, I must admit I was surprised recently when I discovered in a group of very good developers I managed, almost none of them knew C well enough to write expert low-level stuff. All of them were really good Java jocks.

So I bothered to look up the current undergrad CS requirements. It's been over 20 years since I was an undergrad there. My undergrad degree was in Mathematical Sciences, by the way, before the advent of the undergrad CS degree at Stanford; but I helped to define the early versions of the undergrad curriculum as a grad student. To my untrained eye, it doesn‘t look like a Java certification course at all. It looks pretty sound; it may be a little short on depth, but as an undergraduate there, you‘re expected to be getting a liberal education spanning a lot of other material outside of the major.

Feldman‘s subsequent statement doesn‘t surprise me at all, but I‘m not sure he was talking about Stanford folks. It might even be seen as a backhanded compliment to the state of Java. Besides, from the way Kay‘s talking, who needs C anyway? C‘s even further from the Nirvana that Smalltalk offers. What would really bug Kay I suspect is that the developers Feldman mentions have probably never even written “Hello world!” in Smalltalk.

Technorati tags: education Stanford Computer Science java programming programming languages

Posted at 12:33AM Feb 10, 2005 in dev  |  Permalink

rel attribute on links is multivalued

I hope the various pieces of software now dealing with the rel attribute in links (e.g., rel="tag" and rel="nofollow") are cognizant of the fact that the rel attribute is multi-valued in the sense that multiple relationships can be specified within the single value in space-separated form. I could legitimately, for example, have a link with
rel="tag nofollow"

Posted at 11:59PM Feb 09, 2005 in dev  |  Permalink

Wikipedia Link Roller Plugin

I‘ve added a Wikipedia Search Link Plugin to the set of experimental Roller plugins available on the wiki.

Note: If you installed the previous version and decide you want the new Wikipedia plugin as well, please re-read the revised installation instructions. There is a new configuration line in the web.xml for the Wikipedia plugin, and the configuration line for the Google plugin line changed to accomodate a change in the package name. Everything else is the same.

UPDATE 2/10/05: There was a minor bug fixed in the topic tag plugin to allow you to use spaces in the tag text. These get URL-encoded in the url portion of the tag, but remain as spaces in the visible text. I believe that‘s the correct behavior.

Technorati tags: Roller blogware blogging java technorati

Posted at 10:39PM Feb 09, 2005 in dev  |  Permalink

Why Java?

A friend of mine, (one who knew me in my days as a C/Unix hacker and then later as a C++ hacker), seems to have been surprised to hear me say that I prefer to develop as much as possible in Java these days. He pointed me to this recent ACM article on writing good code in any language.

After all, what‘s this language favoritism anyway? Language features are overrated. You can write good code in any language.

I agree with most of the points of that article in the abstract, but I still hold a strong conviction that language does matter, and here‘s why I like Java
Technorati tags: java programming

Posted at 11:47AM Feb 04, 2005 in dev  |  Permalink  |  Comments[1]

Roller plugins for Google links and Technorati topic tags

I‘ve written and have started to use some Roller plugins to make it easier to write Google search links and Technorati topic tags.

You can download them from my newly setup wiki if you are interested.

I‘m not at all convinced the Technorati stuff is going to be of any value. But I am giving it a try.

Topic tags: technorati google blogging blogware Roller

Posted at 02:20PM Feb 02, 2005 in dev  |  Permalink  |  Comments[3]

Textile Formatter and quotes

I don‘t know how one gets normal apostrophes and quotation marks to work out right in Textile (using Textile4J 1.20). It tries to do the elegant slanty quotes, but seems very easily confused about parity and nesting.

In the last posting, notice how the initial apostrophe is slanted backward and that some of the slant choices on the remaining quotation marks are just wrong.

UPDATE 1/26/05: It appears this is Textile4j-specific. The online generator at textism doesn‘t exhibit these problems at all. I‘ve filed an issue with textile4j

Technorati tags: textile textile4j blogware

Posted at 10:24PM Jan 25, 2005 in dev  |  Permalink