Pebble 1.4 Final Is Here
Simon Brown released his excellent weblog software Pebble 1.4 today. (It's still Sunday around here, java.lang.System.nanoTime() being 1077499848027663000 right now.)
So I grabbed the war file (actually did a cvs up -dP; ant dist) dropped it in to my JBoss instance, worked on the theme a little bit. I do have to restart JBoss this time to make the newer version work. Otherwise JBoss would complain about a tag not being defined in admin.jsp. I think it has something to do with the way JBoss loads classes.
I'm also doing something new this time. I have enabled pinging of JavaBlogs.com on new postings. I'm eager to see how that works.
Just last week I was talking with a colleague about Weblog software and here's what I told him:
That depends on what you want to do. Pebble certainly has been good for me. I actually tried to setup Roller before I heard of Pebble, but Roller is just too complicated for me.
Pebble pros:
- Open Source
- Simple to setup
- Data are saved in a directory structure (that I commit to CVS on a different box everyday)
- Data files are XML
- Simple web interface to write blogs and administer site (altering themes, upload images, etc. from anywhere on the Internet)
- Supports multiple users each with different themes (I haven't used it)
- Categories (I haven't used it)
- Pinging aggregator sites such as JavaBlogs.com when posting new blogs (I haven't used it, JavaBlogs.com polls my server every 2 hours)
- I've been running it for 214 days, and Pebble never died on me. Then again, I don't draw that much traffic.
Cons:
- No spell checker (I have to preview, copy to file, run spell on file)
- Hand code of HTML tags (not that big a deal for me)
- Single man project (Simon Brown has been very responsive though)
I'm not trying to put down other Weblog softwares here. I'm just saying for my use case, a one person blog on a cheap Linux box behind a DSL line, Pebble has been a good fit.
Thanks a lot Simon!