Just Journal Developer Blog

While doing some database maintinence, I accidently disabled the stored procedures in use on the site.  This has been corrected.  I also restarted the database and servlet container servers. 

I've also made progress with some bugs in the RSS Subscription system.

I fixed a long standing bug with the RecentBlogs feature.  The month in the individual entries were wrong.  I've fixed the problem.  I'll commit the patch to cvs later today.

Also, I've fixed some links on the older pages of the site to aid in navigation. 

I've added a snapshot of the current java source code (minus jsp/templates) to source forge.  The snapshot was directly from the latest cvs version and features the avatar, weblogs.com pings and other code. 

It might be useful to others working on java based blogging software, but its not ready to use on your own server just yet.

Initial experiments show there are still bugs in the feature.  I'll continue to work on it and post when its fixed. 

Hopefully i've got it now. I got a ping ok message. I still need to limit it to 30 minutes somehow. That's the next problem. :)

I've finally managed to get intellij and sourceforge cooperating again.  The changes over the last two months have been commited.  (well most of them) 

Yes, its been awhile.  I've just written some code to ping weblogs.com when new journal entries are created.  It will only work with public entries.  The code needs improvements and I'll start testing sometime today. 

The point of this is to make your blog more visible.  I'll add an option to disable it as well.

I performed a server upgrade last night and forgot to restart tomcat.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

I've moved just journal to a new server with a new internet connection.  The new setup should save me quite a bit of money at a slight speed decrease. 

There have been a few issues during the move.  I'm still working on them.  If you have any problems, email luke@foolishgames.com with a description of the problem.

During the last code roleout I severely screwed up the user class. As a result, you could login but some pages (including the initial login page) didn't display properly. This bug has been fixed. The actual issue stemed from using Null in the database but not checking for it with the style classes. Several pages now import the user's style. Since I have values in my account and most of my test accounts, I did not trigger it during testing.

I cleaned up a few problems with the journal css themes.  Many of them did not display the background color properly in firefox. 

A new version of JJ should be loaded on the server by this weekend.  I'm reworking the preferences code and want to make sure it works ok.  The new version should be a bit faster.

I noticed the new login page code displays "JJ: Add comment" or something of that nature.  That will be fixed with the update as well.  The reason that happened is that i've moved to a simple template system for all servlets and used copy and paste. :)

Sourceforge recently changed their cvs policies.  I've got two weeks worth of code changes that i can't commit to the repository.  I'm considering moving the cvs to my own server.  Sourceforge can't seem to keep things up over there.

On the new feature front, I'm about half way done with adding links and photo gallery code.  The database schema is done for both and links just need management pages.

My hosting company had a network outage which lasted over an hour today.  I appologize for any downtime.  The server remained up during the outage.

If you don't have the .NET 2.0 framework needed to run the JJ windows client, you may acquire it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=0856eacb-4362-4b0d-8edd-aab15c5e04f5&displaylang=en

I just added the source to the repository.  It should be visible on source forge in the next few days.

I just uploaded the new windows client.  Its a bugfix release. I changed the toolbars a bit so that the are no longer movable, fixed some problems with the Music Detect options and a few other minor things.  I also changed the popup window background.

The new version is about 100KB smaller on disk and 500KB less in memory upon startup on my system. 

I uploaded screenshots earlier to source forge of the 1.41 client and more recent website shots. 

The source and binaries will be uploaded to sourceforge later.

I've almost completed a new feature where URIs would be automatically converted to hyperlinks when journals are posted.  Unfortunetely, SF CVS has been down most of the weekend.  I can't commit the code and I've done so much now that I feel like I need to before I continue.

Many people mistakenly use URL instead of URI for a full address like http://www.justjournal.com/ 

URI = URN + URL

Aside from the server issues/upgrades, I've installed a new version of the just journal server software. 

The website now validates usernames and passwords against regular expressions.  If you have ANY login problems, please email luke@foolishgames.com and let me know whats happening along with your username. 

I'm testing new add comment code as well.  The output screen reads a tempate file.  Part of the roadmap was to get all servlets to use templates instead of silly sb.append or printwriter.out type statements.  So far so good, although i need to extend the template a bit.

I had hoped to get more done, but its a great start.

It appears there are some problems with the apache server running this site.  The java end was up, but for some reason i'm getting internal server errors.  I suspect I'll need to update some software soon to fix it.

I'm in the process of chaning over to the new site template on all jsp pages.  I've got the bugs worked out on most pages now.  I'll need to go to bed for class in the morning.

I've also switched to a simple entry form for IE/Firefox users.  I had complaints about the other one since several features were never implemented, etc.  I still need to test things like spell check with it. 

Many open source projects post roadmaps to let users and developers know the goals of the project over the next few releases.  Up to this point, Just Journal has been considered at best alpha quality software.  The site was not designed from the begging with open source or even serious code reuse in mind. There are many longstanding bugs and several design decisions I made that negatively effect the site's functionality.

My focus has been to compete with LiveJournal since this site's inception.  I thought that I wanted to duplicate LiveJournal but without many of the annoying problems that LJ had.  In some ways I've been successful.  Overal, this site does not have the community feel I always wanted it to have.

I've decided to take a different path.  I want the software to run on any site, and provide features people want.  I want the software to be customizable which means a change in template design and other features.  I'll outline the release targets for the next few versions of the webserver software.  This roadmap does not cover client development aside from possible impact changes from the server code changing.

1.0 Alpha 2: Many of the site templates (xml/xslt) content will be converted back to jsp pages.  The reason behind this move is that more people are familar with jsp than xslt and many of the outstanding bugs are the result of limitations or complexity in fixing them.  Someday I may solve these problems, but for now I want everyone to be able to use the code.  I'm also going to specifically look at the bug list and try to knock out as many as I can.  The new Settings class needs to be integrated and a later version will use it for URL mappings which will solve the massive URL dependancies on the justjournal.com domain and / path.

1.0 Alpha 3: Fix any new bugs introduced by alpha 2, continue to generalize the templates and servlet output for general use.  Clean up the remaining CSS documents and formally define the file system structure for just journal. 

1.0 Beta 1:  Setup an ant build instead of my custom shell scripts and try to get just journal to deploy as a war file in Tomcat.  Possibly test in Sun's application server or webserver software. 

1.0 Beta 2: Finish up any features that are half done, etc.  Clean up any new bugs introduced and verify sql create scripts are up to date and well documented.  Determine and remove any un-needed dependancies (jar files, etc).

1.0 Beta 3: Verify just journal works on another domain, clean up bug fixes, prepare for release.

1.0 Release: Release a directory structure or war file sutable for deployment with install instructions that  are thorough enough for end users to get it running.  Also do a source release at that point.  Sync the windows client and assist with changes to the java client for this release. 

Beyond 1.0 release:
Add Photo Gallery feature.
Add module customization to many of the journal viewer features (/users servlet) both for individuals and admins to control.
Add file based storage for thumbnails, images, avatars, and other parts of the site as an optional feature. (rss feeds?) 
Design a more complex templating system for journals were admins or users can control the html output?
Add forum/message board feature.  (communities?)
Add chatbox feature
Add private messaging feature.
...

I'm in the process of upgrading the just journal source. There are several bugs present in the new version that i'm trying to fix.  Please be patient during this process.