Welcome to SolamenteNiel!
I know...I know...in the world of social networking like twitter, blogs just aren't cool anymore, right? Well every once and a while I want to share something that exceeds 144 characters, so I created SolamenteNiel, my blog. While I'm at it, I'm also going old school with a cheesy picture of myself on my blog. In this picture I'm pertending to be an IndyCar driver.
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If you are interested in using SkywayBlog for yourself, I have made the project available for free at Skyway Community Portal. You can download Skyway Builder CE (which went GA today...yeah!!) and download the SkywayBlog from the sample projects. While I'm using Tomcat and MySQL, with Skyway Builder you'll be able to pick other containers and databases for your blog. Drop me a comment if you make any improvements to the project.
Since we (at Skyway Software) started writing our first line of code for new the Eclipse-based and open-source version of Skyway Builder, I've been anticipating upgrading this blog. The current version of this blog was created with the previous version of Skyway Builder (5.0), which produced JEE applications that required a full application server to run. The new version of Skyway Builder generates Spring-based applications that can run in light-weight JEE environments (i.e. Apache Tomcat) to full blown Web/EJB3 application servers. So my runtime infrastructure for hosting this blog will be greatly simplified. Skyway Builder is currently beta 3, and it's definitely ready for doing some real application development. As far as the new blog application is concerned, I'm considering started a Sourceforge project for hosting the project. The Skyway Blog project will be open-source, and anyone using Skyway Builder CE will be able to use the project for their own blog or education. I'm familiar with Sourceforge, but I might also consider Java.net. Anyone interested in volunteering to help with project?
Too bad I'm not eligible for the $25K development contest (Skyway Cup), or perhaps I would submit the blog project as a contest entry.
I made a few minor changes to the weblog. I added a "Misc" tab which will serve as a scratch pad for anything I might want to put there. For example, right now it has my Zune Card. You can tell what I'm listening to.
I alse made it easier for visitors to bookmark a particular blog posting. I'm using a free service called Add This which provides integration with all Bookmarking Services, like your browser favorites, del.icio.us, facebook, digg, and many more. It's pretty cool. Add This provided me with a snippet of code which I need to configure with the post url and title. Add This does the rest. To see it, click on the BOOKMARK graphic below any of the blog posts.
I alse made it easier for visitors to bookmark a particular blog posting. I'm using a free service called Add This which provides integration with all Bookmarking Services, like your browser favorites, del.icio.us, facebook, digg, and many more. It's pretty cool. Add This provided me with a snippet of code which I need to configure with the post url and title. Add This does the rest. To see it, click on the BOOKMARK graphic below any of the blog posts.
Well I think I've finally gotten Skyway Blog to a steady state in regards to it's feature set. The problem is that I'm never completely satisfied. My original design of a particular feature always evolves into more than I originally expected. However I think I'm pretty satisfied (at least for the time being).
Over a series of posts I plan to describe this blog in detail. At least that's the plan....of the course the plan is always subject to change. This first post will describe the features of this blog, and future posts will describe the implementation of blog.
So let me start by answering a question that will undoubtedly come up to anyone reading this post. "Why create another blog application?" This is a very valid question. After all there are a lot of choices for blogging applications, right?
Why do people blog? I'm not looking to get philosophical. I haven't done any research on the topic, however it seems to me that people blog to be heard or to have a voice. That's not really my motivation for having a blog. I like to play with technology and build stuff....and I love to build stuff with cool technology. So my posts will be pretty much focussed on technology and building stuff. Hey...maybe I should change my blog tagline to "I love to build stuff with cool technology".
I have other interests too, including Indy Car racing and photography (new hobby for me). I also really like living in St. Petersburg, FL. So you might find some posts now and again promoting St. Pete or discussing my hobbies.
The bottom line is that I built this blog because I need an excuse for playing and experimenting with new technologies.
In addition to the ability to create posts, here are the features:
As I posted this entry, I deliberated about whether I should create a topic/category called "Skyway" or just tag the post with "Skyway". What is the norm? I dunno...I decided to both.
Over a series of posts I plan to describe this blog in detail. At least that's the plan....of the course the plan is always subject to change. This first post will describe the features of this blog, and future posts will describe the implementation of blog.
So let me start by answering a question that will undoubtedly come up to anyone reading this post. "Why create another blog application?" This is a very valid question. After all there are a lot of choices for blogging applications, right?
Why do people blog? I'm not looking to get philosophical. I haven't done any research on the topic, however it seems to me that people blog to be heard or to have a voice. That's not really my motivation for having a blog. I like to play with technology and build stuff....and I love to build stuff with cool technology. So my posts will be pretty much focussed on technology and building stuff. Hey...maybe I should change my blog tagline to "I love to build stuff with cool technology".
I have other interests too, including Indy Car racing and photography (new hobby for me). I also really like living in St. Petersburg, FL. So you might find some posts now and again promoting St. Pete or discussing my hobbies.
The bottom line is that I built this blog because I need an excuse for playing and experimenting with new technologies.
In addition to the ability to create posts, here are the features:
- Categories - catagories can be added/removed by blog owner; a post can be associated with zero to many categories
- Tagging - each post can have zero to many free-form tags
- Tag Cloud - as a post is tagged, the tag is added to the tag cloud; a visitor can click on a tag in the tag cloud to see all posts associated with the tag (Tag View)
- del.icio.us Tag Integration - as a visitor clicks on a tag, they will also see any of my del.icio.us bookmarks that have the same tag (Tag View)
- flickr Tag Integration - as a visitor clicks on a tag, they will also see any of my flickr photos that have the same tag (Tag View)
- Tag View - one consolidated screen to see all the blog owner's posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, and flickr photos that match the selected tag
- Photo Section - photo slideshows can be administered by the blog owner; visitors can view the slideshows from the Photo Tab
- Reading Section - rss feeds can be administered by the blog owner; visitors can view the rss feeds from the reading Tab
- Comments - a post can support an unlimited number of comments
- Moderated Comments - the blog owner can specify whether the comments for a particular post should be moderated; comments added to a moderated post will only be visible when the blog owner approves the comment; this helps minimize comment spam
- Rich-text Editting - the blog owner adds posts using a richtext editor
- RSS Feeds - this blog can produce rss feeds for all posts, by category and by tag; when adding rss feeds to feed aggregators, the blog owner can control which posts are published to a particular aggregator
- AJAX UI - the entire user interface is implemented with AJAX; you will never get a full screen refresh; as a visitor interacts with the blog, only portions of the uI will change
- Database Support - this blog can be deployed without modification to run using Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL, Sybase or DB2 (I'll explain more in future posts)
- Application Server Support - this blog can be deployed without modification to run on Weblogic, websphere, JBoss or Netweaver (I'll explain more in future posts)
As I posted this entry, I deliberated about whether I should create a topic/category called "Skyway" or just tag the post with "Skyway". What is the norm? I dunno...I decided to both.
So I recently discovered Google Notebook. If you have a Google account, you can maintain multiple notebooks with Google Notebook. There are browser plugins for Firefox and IE that make it very easy to add notes to a notebook at any time. A notebook can be made shared, which enables others to read your notes in the notebook. As would be expected, the contents of the shared notebooks can be published using rss. If you click on the "Reading" tab, you will the contents of one of my notebooks that is inserted into my blog via rss. I still don't know how I will exactly use this, but I'll see.
