Friday Oct 12, 2007

Roller: Screencast on Customizing your blogs' side-bar

Here is a screencast on how to customize your roller blogs' side bar . Basically i wanted to add a content "My Favourite Blogs" (as seen on the image here) in the side panel. The idea is to add some of  my favourite blogs under this section. Roller allows you to customize your template. Below are the steps involved :

 
Login >> Design Tab >> Copy a Theme and Update >> Edit your blog template >> Side bar >> Add the content and save

 
Portal Post has done some good customization of side bar . Some of the blog customization ideas will be:

  • Add a image icon to your blog. It could be your photo or a image url
  • Add widgets to your blog (email counter, subscribe this blog option etc) to your blog. You can use Feedblitz service
  • Add your Favourite Blogs, Links or whatever you want to share with your visitors on the sidebar
  • Create a Tag Cloud on your sidebar so that visitors can quickly find the most popular tags in your blog

Posted on: Oct 12, 2007

Posted by: thekkadath

Category: Misc Technical

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Sunday May 06, 2007

Roller fails to start in Tomcat (after restarting windows)

I restarted my Windows machine and after restart, Tomcat couldnt start the Roller Instance . The roller.log under $Tomcat_Home/logs directory shows the below error

ERROR 2007-05-07 10:33:41,859 JDBCExceptionReporter:logExceptions - Cannot create PoolableConnectionFactory (Server connection failure during transaction. Due to underlying exception: 'java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect'.
** BEGIN NESTED EXCEPTION **
java.net.ConnectException
MESSAGE: Connection refused: connect
STACKTRACE:
java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect
    at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method)

 

Solution : Quite Simple , Start the MySQL service and Now try to start your Roller instance from Tomcat

Start >> Settings >> Control Panel >> Administrative Tools >> Services >> "Look for MySQL service name" >> Start MySQL service 


Posted on: May 06, 2007

Posted by: thekkadath

Category: Web 2.0

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Thursday May 03, 2007

Dealing with Unexpected Exception problem in Roller 3.1 (Unable to Create a new entry)

Recently i had a problem with my Roller 3.1 installation. I configured it correctly as per the install guide (not the Mail part of it -mail.jar and activation.jar. It was not in my $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib directory) but when i create a new Weblog entry, i get a "Unexcepted Exception" screen  . Roller wont allow me to add a entry to the newly created weblog .

Solution : Copy both mail.jar and activation.jar  and put it in $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib directory

Below is the Tomcat Error log

INFO  2007-05-03 11:42:53,406 PreviewServlet:init - Initializing PreviewServlet
ERROR 2007-05-03 11:47:43,437 StandardWrapperValve:invoke - Servlet.service() for servlet action threw exception
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/mail/MessagingException
    at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredConstructors0(Native Method)

Posted on: May 03, 2007

Posted by: thekkadath

Category: Web 2.0

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