Juha Haataja asked how easy applying the new theme was.  Here’s what I had to say:

The transition went pretty well.  I had also tweaked my old theme, adding links and blogrolls down the side.  I saved my home page template so that I could keep these tweaks.

The next step was to turn upstreaming off in Radio.  I didn’t want things to go live until they were ready.  I had to remove every reference of Veranda and Garamond from the movable type CSS file after applying the theme.  I’m an Airal guy.  It’s clean.

After removing a few things like smaller fonts on links and adding a new section on the sidebar with my blogroll, I turned on upstreaming.

I opened Radio, and ran Tools -> Publish -> Entire website.  A good backup of your www folder should be done beforehand.

Overall I’m pleased with the result.  It didn’t take a whole lot of time and was definately worth it.

Weblog Redesign

I’ve been sick and tired of the radio theme that I had been using for quite some time.  It had too many graphics and did not focus on the important part: the content.  I’ve switched over to one of Radio’s movable type themes.  It’s CSS (not tables like before), much lighter weight, and will be easy to customize.  Right now font sizes are a little hardcoded, but I’ll hopefully get things relative pretty soon.  Drop me an email and let me know if you find any bugs or if you have any comments.

Another reason that I was not happy with the old design is that my blogroll went down the left side.  With this design, it goes down the right with more room and less clutter.  Google was also choking on the blogroll sometimes, which doesn’t make things good for indexing.  At this point, Google should get through all the content before it starts digesting the (massive) blogroll.

Like I said, there are a few things that still need to be ironed out, but this way users can focus on content and not get distracted by pictures and stuff.  A good quarter of my hits come from RSS anyway, so many of you might not notice.

I eventually would like to get a homebrew CSS template together, but for now, this makes me much happier than with my previous theme.

Andres Aguiar open-sources his WSDL2Java wrapper/plugin for eclipse.  His demo at the Web Services DevCon (East) was awesome.  That’s one more thing you can do easily in Eclipse:

This plugin was developed to provide a quick way to import Axis Java SOAP stubs into a Eclipse project. I just needed it for the DeKlarit demo I did in WebServices DevCon East, so don’t expect new improvements for this tool. I submitted it to axis-dev@xml.apache.org, so perhaps it’s included in the Axis codebase sometime.

Way to go, Andres.

Access Radio’s Aggregator via XML-RPC

There it is, unleashed on the world.  There are some really useful functions in there, I love it.  I’ll have to play with it a little later, right now I have to coax my win2k server with a crippled registry (I think) into behaving.

Unfortunately, I could probably whip up a test app in VB.NET in about a minute and a half if it were a SOAP+WSDL interface.  I should probably be able to do the same with XML-RPC, but I can’t.

*sigh*

Blogback Loop

Diego Doval responds:

Matt wants to see Weblog Sync enabled in spaces. All I can say is… Soon! 🙂

Sweet.

And yes, I did read the EULA to make sure that I could post a screenshot.  I think that’s the first EULA in a long time that was readable (length, language).  I know it’ll change, but…

Spaces

I can’t wait until that shaded XML-RPC Weblog Sync option turns black.

<evil villan laugh/>

I’m not allowed to tell, but I’m running something that Russ mentioned earlier right now.

Radio and Lynx

Hmm, it looks like I lack a rich text editing box while posting to my weblog from lynx. Funny that.

Looks like Dave is on the verge of releasing an XML-RPC interface to Radio’s aggregator.  Sounds like I’ve got an excuse to actually follow through on a project now…

Apache::ASP 2.47:

Apache::ASP provides an Active Server Pages port to the Apache Web Server with Perl as the host scripting language. Apache::ASP allows a developer to create dynamic Web applications with session management and embedded Perl code. There are also many powerful extensions, including XML taglibs, XSLT rendering, and new events not originally part of the ASP API.

Major speed improvements of 15-20% were made. Memory utilization was slightly reduced. Bugfixes were made, and the code was cleaned up.

Cool project, thought it will probably loose relevance over time unless it supports ASP.NET, which is quite a task.

Greg Klebus:

Ana bought one of woman’s magazines, and guess what – it had a “Notting Hill” DVD as a bonus. The magazine was less than $2. Sure, the title is not new, but anyway. We watched it yesterday with great pleasure.

Boy, could they do it regularly. Better still, could DVDs cost less?

I bought a few boxes of Cheerioes recently.  One had two episodes of Bear in the Big Blue House (a personal favorite of mine), another was Muppets Take Manhattan.  I think this is one of the signs of the Apocalypse.

Where oh where oh where is Shadow?

Dave Winer:

Today’s innovation in AggregatorLand will allow people to create user interfaces for UserLand’s engine in any language or environment. In Flash, .NET, Java, DHTML, Cocoa, Python, Tcl, Perl, you name it. People want every kind of user interface imaginable. We want to leverage the work we’ve done in aggregation engines across all possible environments.

Bring it on!

John Udell on putting the Web back into Web services

Occurrences of the term “web-friendly” in the SOAP 1.1 spec: 0
In the SOAP 1.2 primer: 9

CNet/Margaret Kane: Portal software maker Epicentric has changed its stance regarding a patent on a key Web services standard, paving the way for its approval.

An Epicentric representative said the company will be amending its stance, saying that it no longer believes it has related patents and that, regardless, it believes the technologies should be available on a royalty-free basis.

“Epicentric as a whole believes that for standards to succeed, all participants should offer any patented technology in the standard on a royalty-free basis. And at this time, Epicentric is amending our statement via W3C to be royalty free,” the representative said.

Exult:

After four years of work by more than a dozen developers, and with help from hundreds of users, Exult, the engine that lets you play the classic game Ultima 7 on almost any modern computer, is having its official 1.00 release.

The Washington Post this morning has an article in the sports section about Morgan Wootten, basketball coach at local high school DeMatha.  He’s retiring.  He coached 46 seasons and has an amazing record of 1,274 wins to 192 losses.  Wow.

Wootten’s most famous victory, which established the school’s national reputation and brought wide attention to high school sports in general, came in 1965, when DeMatha broke the 71-game winning streak of New York’s Power Memorial, led by the young sensation Lew Alcindor, later Abdul-Jabbar.

What has Reverend Jim been up to lately?

GoFoR the Aggregator. My RSS Aggregator, GoFoR (thanks to Rockbugg for the name), is nearing completion. You can see it in action if you’d like. There is still lots of debugging information there and the admin interface hasn’t even been started so changing subscriptions requires editing files by hand, but it’s getting there. If you notice any problems, see anything that is horribly wrong, or if you just like what you see, please let me know.

I’m all about the homebrew aggregator.  It looks like he’s consuming my feed just fine.  I really do need to start adding titles to each entry.  On that front, I also need to redo the templates for this site.  I really want to do something from scratch, but finding the time for it is always hard.

Havoc Pennington on how to get your feature/patch/submission added to an open source project. [via pclinuxonline]

Ingo has some issues with Rotor running on other platforms:

So, I basically have two issues with Rotor right now:

• One can’t use it apart from looking at it (which is fine by me …)
• One can’t extend it without in turn limiting others to only look at the extensions but not use them

Paul Berry at Linux Journal has some scary backup stories. [via NewsForge]