Apache Roller 4.0 - Beginner's Guide: A comprehensive, step-by-step guide on how to set up, customize, and market your blog using Apache Roller

One of the most popular uses of weblogs is to express people's thoughts and feelings. When you publish a post, it shows up in your weblog's front page. But if you know how to take advantage of websites such as Google, Technorati, Dzone, Digg, and Slashdot, among others, what you write can be read by hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people!

Congratulations! You've just entered into the world of blogs and the blogosphere! Technorati is just one of several popular social bookmarking websites (or aggregators), where you can search for posts, which people like you publish on their websites. In the previous example, we saw that when you enter one or more search words, Technorati shows you a list of all the related posts and their corresponding blogs. There are millions of bloggers who use their own blogs to express their feelings and opinions. These blogs show up on Technorati, Digg, Dzone, del.icio.us, and many more social bookmarking websites, virtually covering every imaginable category or subject. With this book and Apache Roller, you're going to learn how to become one of them, and express your thoughts to the world through the blogosphere!

Blogs let you express your feelings and thoughts, but that's not the only thing they can do. The real power invested in them is that, people can not only read your posts but can also interact with you, by means of the comments they leave! Your blog can help you start a two-way conversation; for example, let's say you write something about your favorite Italian dish. A couple of hours later, your post shows up on Technorati and someone reads it. As a result, the reader leaves a comment saying that it's his/her favorite dish, too. Now you can respond to that comment and maybe post something else about other Italian dishes. Suddenly, you realize there are several readers commenting about your posts and you decide to use your blog as an Italian food community! As you can see, a blog is not only static text; it's a dynamic tool that people can use every day to get in touch with other people who share their same interests.

In the previous exercise, we saw how to leave a comment on a weblog. This is one of the most powerful uses of blogs—someone posts about a subject you're interested in, then you leave a comment on that post, and later the owner of that post answers you back with another comment. If you leave your e-mail, both can establish a two-way communication! With Apache Roller and this book, you'll learn how to make blogs and interact with other blog owners in the ever-expanding blogosphere universe.

At the time of writing this book, a lot of companies are already using blogs to promote their products and services. There are employees from several companies who use internal blogs to communicate with other employees, and external blogs to communicate with clients, potential clients, and anyone who's interested in their professional activities, or even their hobbies. The beauty of it is that you can mix posts of your activities at work, along with posts of your hobbies and personal interests. Moreover, if someone has the same hobby as yours, he/she will be attracted to your blog. He/She will also see the other posts you have, including any promotional message about your professional activities, the company you work in, or your small business. The possibilities with this type of "free advertising" are endless.

In this last exercise, you saw how Microsoft is making use of blogs so that its employees can communicate the latest news about Microsoft's posture on open source to the world. Port 25 is a weblog dedicated to the open source community at Microsoft. Here you'll find discussions and posts on open source projects that Microsoft is collaborating with, or intends to collaborate with. However, Port 25 is just one little piece of the vast universe of employee blogs floating around. Some blogs are hosted on Microsoft websites, and others are hosted on employees' personal sites. All in all, you'll find a lot of interesting things about Microsoft and also about its employees' hobbies, personal experiences, and thoughts in general. This is a trend that's expanding through a lot of big companies nowadays.

As we saw in previous exercises, blogs are a very powerful way to communicate with other people. That's the reason why big companies such as Microsoft let their employees use blogs to communicate within the company's premises (internal blogs) or with the rest of the world (external or personal blogs). For the open source community, blogs are the best tool to share their experiences and expertise on using open source software such as Linux, Apache Roller, WordPress, the Apache Web server, Tomcat, MySQL, PHP, and Java Web applications, and much more. For example, if you are working on an open source application, you can invite other fellow programmers and web designers through your blog to collaborate with you. With Apache Roller, you can create a multiuser weblog where several users can post messages (including yourself), and keep up-to-date on every aspect of the software you are developing. Then, you can release downloads so that other people can test your software and post comments on your blog about it. And all of this without even having to move away from your PC!

This site hosts the Roller project announcements blog; it also hosts Dave Johnson's personal weblog. Dave is the original creator of Roller. If you go to http://www.rollerweblogger.org, you will see the latest news about Apache Roller development:

From here, you can follow the links to the http://apache.roller.org website, where you can download Apache Roller. There's also a link to Dave Johnson's personal weblog, and several links to the downloads, the Roller Wiki, the mailing lists, and an issue tracker for developers.

The http://blogs.sun.com site hosts several thousand blogs for Sun employees. In this site, you'll find everything about Sun and its employees, what projects are they working on, a video blog from Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, Inc., and a lot of Java talk. You can even leave comments on some of the blogs. Imagine talking directly to the CEO of one of the most important companies in the computing industry! Who knows, maybe he could get you an exciting job!

This is the U.S. government blog site (http://blog.usa.gov). The bloggers are federal employees who work in the Office of Citizen Services and Communications at the U.S. General Services Administration. Here, you'll find useful information about services provided by the government of the United States.

In this site (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/), you'll find a lot of resources for software developers and IT professionals. You can also create an account and get involved in the community, sharing your IT knowledge. This would be a perfect place to create the next killer application, don't you think?

JRoller (http://www.jroller.com) is a community of webloggers who share their knowledge and expertise about Java-related technologies. If you're into Java programming, this is a good resource to learn all you can!

In most cases, a blog is considered a CMS because it's used to manage content in a website. However, in my humble opinion, a blog definitely is not a CMS. With a CMS, you can do a lot more than post messages in a chronological order and receive comments. That beats one of the main purposes of a blog—to express yourself in a friendly environment, like a personal diary. Sure, you can use a CMS as a blog, but you'll have to learn how to manage its user interface and maybe add a few extra modules or plugins. With a weblog server like Apache Roller, you're ready to go! In later chapters, we'll talk about templates and how to modify the appearance of your blog's pages by adding video, audio, and images. You'll see how easy it is to manage your Apache Roller server.

In short, a newsfeed (or feed) is a summary of the latest posts and comments of your blog in XML. The two formats used by Roller, and by almost every other weblog application and aggregator, are RSS and Atom. The following table shows these two formats—a brief description and an URL example of each one.

At the time of this writing, both formats are widely used. Atom can be considered as the future of newsfeeds, but only time will prove it. In the meantime, we can use both of them.

When you subscribe to Technorati and Digg, every time you publish a post, your blog sends a ping, telling Technorati and Digg to check your most recent posts and to include them in their lists by means of an RSS or Atom feed. Then, visitors from Technorati and Digg go to your blog and, if they find it interesting, can subscribe to your RSS or Atom feeds. The following exercise will show you the process of subscribing to a newsfeed.

In the previous exercise, you learned how anyone can subscribe to a newsfeed, including newsfeeds from your blog. The process is the same for RSS and Atom newsfeeds. Mozilla Firefox is just one of the many available newsfeed readers. In fact, if you didn't notice in step 2 of the previous exercise, there are five options to choose from when subscribing to a newsfeed in Mozilla Firefox:

If you click on the Live Bookmarks pop-up listbox, you can select another newsfeed reader from the list such as Bloglines, My Yahoo, or Google, or even choose a different desktop application such as Ecto, MarsEdit, or Windows Live Writer depending on which operating system you are working on.

Thanks to newsfeeds and services such as Technorati, Digg, DZone, and del.icio.us, your blog can be followed by thousands, even millions of people!

In the previous exercise, you saw how anyone can subscribe to a newsfeed through the Mozilla Firefox newsfeed reader. Now, we'll see an example of a popular newsfeed reader that can be used both in Linux and Windows environments.

That pretty much covers the basic procedure for using a newsfeed reader. In Mozilla Firefox, you can select three web-based newsreaders—Bloglines, My Yahoo, and Google Reader. You need to register for a free account with any of these readers before you can start adding feeds from different sources. However, once you start using them, you'll see all the power that newsfeeds can bring to bloggers. The best of all is that, when you finish reading this book, your blog will be ready to take advantage of newsfeeds and feed readers, so that people from all over the world can see your posts!

Now that you have an account in Bloglines, use it to start your own newsfeeds collection. You can begin with a Google search for your favorite hobbies, local news, and so on. Try subscribing to several newsfeeds from different blogs or social bookmarking sites such as Digg, DZone, or anything of your interest. Explore all of the settings available in Bloglines (that is, open posts in the same window or in a new one, display entire posts or just a summary, and so on) until you feel comfortable using it.

Try to create accounts on the other two web-based feed readers (Google Reader and My Yahoo), and compare features between them and Bloglines.