ecmarchitect.com » Blogging

ScribeFire’s blogging client is sweet

jpotts — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:07:24 +0000

I am totally digging ScribeFire. It’s a Firefox extension that lets me write blog posts without leaving the web page I’m on. It can post to any blog server that can speak XML-RPC. For me the benefits are:

I don’t have to leave the page or open a new tab to log in to my blog or write a post.
I don’t have to give up any functionality like tagging or categorizing my posts.
The editor seems more reliable than the one built in to WordPress and Drupal.
I can easily write one post and publish it to both ecmarchitect.com and optaros.com.

Regarding this last point, I try not to have much duplication between the two blogs. There is some overlap, but the purpose and audience of the two blogs are generally separate. Still, when I need to post in both places, ScribeFire saves me a lot of time. I can write the post once, categorize it for ecmarchitect.com, post it, then tweak it if needed, categorize it for optaros.com, then post it there, all in a single UI.

Roller leaves the nest

jpotts — Fri, 04 May 2007 22:23:01 +0000

According to CMS Wire, Java-based blog server Roller has graduated from the Apache incubator. At Optaros, we’re doing some work for a client right now that involves implementing Roller as one component of the company’s Enterprise 2.0 initiative. Their Enterprise 2.0 stack includes Liferay for portal/presentation services, Alfresco for portal content, documement, and web content management, Roller for internal and public-facing blogs, and Confluence for internal wiki.

So far, Roller has been relatively straightforward to integrate with Liferay, but in the initial phase we’re doing very light integration. It essentially involves skinning the Roller UI so that the experience will be fairly seamless as portal users move from the RSS portlet to Roller (for example, when they comment on a blog post). In a later phase we hope to implement a much tighter integration, perhaps through Roller-specific Liferay portlets.

Major blog cleanup

jpotts — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 23:58:23 +0000

I spent some time doing the big tidy-up on ecmarchitect.com today. If you subscribe to my feed, you may be getting a bunch of old posts in your aggregator because I updated several old posts where titles were missing or where categories were set to “Uncategorized”. (I’m not sure I made the situation much better–I categorized most of those under “General”).

I also installed a new WordPress Theme–Ed Merritt‘s Ocean Mist. Most people get by on the feeds in their aggregator but for those who happen to drop by the site itself, Ed’s theme is obviously a huge improvement over the default.

I tried to fix missing titles where I could (posts from my Radio UserLand days are often missing titles), but it’s a daunting task to undertake manually. I might have to see if someone’s already written a script to take care of it.

Last, I implemented some anti-spam counter-measures. I may start turning comments on for selected posts. Posts in which I had accidentally left comments turned on had attracted several hundred spam comments so hopefully the new plug-in will keep it to a minimum.

Radio scripting resources

jpotts — Tue, 22 Apr 2003 02:56:52 +0000

Skip’s Guide to Radio and Manila. Lots of links to Radio scripting resources. [Tom's Blog]

Mark Pilgrim’s RSS article

jpotts — Tue, 21 Jan 2003 15:52:12 +0000

Here’s a nice article on RSS and its different formats from Mark Pilgrim. It gives an example of how to parse and work with RSS in Python. [Tom's Blog]

Blogging as the next big thing

jpotts — Wed, 15 Jan 2003 16:19:35 +0000

Blogging – The Next Big Thing?.

Micah Alpern…said he was happy to see Blogging on my list of “the next big things” but he was disappointed in the page I had linked to. The page he refers to was a very basic page I had created to define some of the basics of blogging — primarily for newbies. Micah correctly points out that it didn’t do much to explain the significance of blogging…Micah has done a good job explaining how blogging has been significant for him personally and it is a worthwhile read. [John Patrick's weblog]