Book Image

Apache Roller 4.0 - Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Apache Roller 4.0 - Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Apache Roller enables you to build a fully-featured, multi-user blog server apt for all kinds of blogging sites. It is an ideal tool to create your own blogging network with unlimited users and blogs, forums, photo galleries, and more! While it is exciting to have a list of interesting features it can offer you, it might be a little difficult to get started with it by your self. This book will teach you how to get started with Apache Roller and make the most of all its features using step-by-step, detailed instructions. You will learn how to establish your internet presence with an Apache Roller blog and use the latest web tools to enhance your posts and attract visitors. You will also learn how to promote your blog on popular social bookmarking services and customize it to suit your need. This hands-on and practical book introduces you to Apache Roller. Starting off with the configuration and installation of your own blog, you'll then quickly learn how to add interesting content to your blog with the help of plenty of examples. You'll also learn how to change your blog's visual appearance with the help of Roller themes and templates and how to create a community of blogs for you and your colleagues or friends in your Apache Roller blog server. The book also looks at ways you can manage your community, and keep your site safe and secure, ensuring that it is a spam-free, enjoyable community for your users.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Apache Roller 4.0
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Pop Quiz Answers
Index

Blogs and newsfeeds - the world is your audience


Thanks to newsfeeds, you can make your blog's posts available for people to read through Technorati, Digg, del.icio.us, and all the other social bookmarking sites or aggregators. Basically, you first need to register on the aggregator site, then configure your weblog to ping the social bookmarking site. After that, each time you post on your blog, it will ping Technorati, Digg, DZone, and so on, and the aggregator will pick up the latest content from your blog by means of your RSS feed.

The following diagram shows the full process with Technorati:

This is basically the same process for all social bookmarking sites and aggregators. So, as you can see, the URL feed (or newsfeed) of your blog helps you to promote your blog on the blogosphere!

What is a newsfeed

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.

Feed Format

Definition

Example URL used by Roller

RSS

A collection of several related feed formats used to publish information (blog entries, audio, video, podcasts) in a standard format. The most recent standard is RSS 2.0.

http://blog.ibacsoft.com/opensource/feed/entries/rss

Atom

The Atom Syndication Format is a newer standard for newsfeeds, intended to replace RSS.

http://blog.ibacsoft.com/opensource/feed/entries/atom

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.

How can a newsfeed help to promote your blog

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.