This weekend I got started on migrating this website to the Roller blogging engine. After getting Roller up and running I spent some time exploring the administrative side. Having a blog in 2007 is much more than basic database CRUD like my current blog (I don't even support comments or RSS!). Modern blogs have so much more under the hood. Here is Roller's high level feature list:

• Multi-user blogging: can support tens of thousands of users and blogs such as those hosted on http://blogs.sun.com
• Group blogging with three permisson levels (editor, author and limited)
• Support for comment moderation and comment spam prevention measures
• Bloggers have complete control over blog layout/style via templates
• Built-in search engine indexes weblog entry content
• Pluggable cache and rendering system
• Support for blog clients that support MetaWeblog API
• All blogs have entry and comment feeds in both RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 formats

Writing your own blogging engine seems like a waste of time when there are many mature ones out there. Especially when they are completely customizable with templates, and let you add as many new pages you want. Other than my current blog, I can't think of many/any blogs that don't use a blog engine such as Roller, WordPress or Movable Type. I chose Roller because it is written in Java and is used by Sun and IBM.

Yesterday I wrote a program that transforms the data from my old blog and imports it into the roller database. It's on the net now, but at a secret location until I finish the template customizations. I've contacted the web designer of the best Roller template and asked if I can pay her to create a custom template for my blog. She does really nice work. I'm hoping that she'll get back to me soon and we can come to an agreement. The template is really the only thing holding me back from going live.

I'm also going to set my blog up with some of these "ping services" that updates a bunch of blog aggregaters when I post new content, and drives traffic. The theme of my new blog is Java, Solaris, Linux and Open Source. I'm going to try to come up with more useful things to write about instead of the usual moaning about how I failed to set up my server again last weekend because of reason X, or feeling lonely because I don't use Eclipse, Spring and Hibernate in my Java development. Hopefully people who read my blog will be able to learn something useful and will want to come back frequently. We'll see how that goes :)