John Mercier

Installed 25 Roller Themes 

I installed all 25 themes avaliable for roller from http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javanet/OptionalThemesForRoller.

Using Natural Beauty Theme

With this theme, there are a few problems that I ran into. Comments did not work. To fix this I needed to change

• #showWeblogEntryComments($entry)
• #showWeblogEntryCommentForm($entry)

• #showWeblogEntryComments($model.weblogEntry)
• #showWeblogEntryCommentForm($model.weblogEntry)

I then added my friends and links to the sidebar because it only showed bookmarks from the root folder.

Referers didn't work (and it was spelled wrong). To change this I had to look at code from another theme and add the true in the #showReferrersList($refs 30 20 true) macro.

On of the biggest challenges was changing the main tabs to only show my blog and then the projects category. I also want to add an About Me tab. To get away from the category tabs while still using one category name, and checking for the active link, I had to do some tricky coding.

Using Google Reader Shared Items

Adding items to your blog from google reader is very easy. In google reader you can share any item simply by clicking the share link at the bottom of the post. This will add the post to you shared items page in google reader. You can add a clip of your shared items to any website. To do this click on your shared items, click on sharing settings and go to the bottom of the page. Click add a clip, customize the settings and copy and paste the clip to your webpage. It is very easy.

Another way to do this that I haven't tried yet is to add my shared items to the roller planet aggregator. From what I understand this will pull from any rss feed and create a meta-blog. The advantage of sharing items this way is the ability to format the html in any way I want.

Share Icons For Posts

I started by adding individual buttons for google buzz and facebook. Here are the notes on that. 

• google buzz
  • go to Buzz - stuff to make your button.
  • use $url.entry($entry.anchor) in data-url to add link to post from roller template
• facebook
• go to Share Facebook and build code for template.

And then I found addthis.com, the ultimate site for sharing blog posts. It has buttons for 271 services and is very customizable.

Some of the other things I need to do are:

• Try getting a feed by tag.
• Try making a planet aggregator that will read my google reader shared items instead of using the google reader widget.
• Try installing the plugins and text editors for roller.
• Try to either make this theme the way I want it or attempt to make my own theme again.

Now all of my links to external sites are generated using the bookmarks stored in roller!

Hello everyone! Right now you may notice that everything looks like crap. Well you are going be dealing with this for a while and (depending on your opinion of my design skills) possible forever. That is right folks I'm working on my own theme.

So far, I only have the basic files set up in roller so that I can edit the theme at my own pace. I hope to have the theme work for the entire website (except old pages) using templates for the index and project pages.

As a side note I think I found a bug in roller. The roller-startup.log file cannot be set in the roller-custom.properties file. Let me explain. For some reason I was getting a long error in the Catalina output saying that the log file could not be created. This is probably because of my shared server environment being locked down and not allowing this file to be written wherever it goes by default. Anyways, I tried to change the property in the roller-custom.properties file (because that is where all changes should be, right?) and I still got the error. I believe that this property cannot be set in this file because the file is loaded after the log is used. So, I had to change the path in the file I'm not supposed to edit log4j.properties. Not a big deal, but the file says I should be making this change in roller-custom.properties.

Well that is it for my rant. I will continue working on the theme so things can look nicer.

I've run into a few issues with the blogging software I'm using for this site. Here they are:

• site model is not availiable by default
• comments cannot be switched on
• Tag cloud displays tags from draft posts
• bookmarks are deleted when moved
• themes cannot be completely created from roller

Honestly, I'm glad that roller has become an official apache project, but it has a few problems. I'm a big believer that once a program is installed I should not need go into the installation directory and edit text files just to set something up. I have a feeling that the first two problems are probably configuration issues, but I've been through the entire site and the two manuals and I have not found a thing that helps. Roller just seems like it is made for big blogger communities where administrators have time to figure these things out. For a one person blog though it is not too good. It would be interesting to work on these problems and fix them in the spirit of open source software, but I'm not sure I have the time to do that. The second and third issues would be easy but the last would be much harder. I will continue to look into these problems and see if I can submit a bug report.