RepLog Interim Project Page

Hello. You've found the interim project page for RepLog.

I created the RepLog project because of comments like this one, from this thread posted after the Typepad outage in late 2005:

Hi,

One thing you could do is make it possible, easy, for a blogger to create a full backup of their site independent of TypePad severs.

I can cope with an occasional hiccup with service but having just uploaded, added titles and comments on 130 images the day before the outage was somewhat distressed to see them gone today. Yes, they will be back - hopefully... but what if your backup system has a total failure. There is a lot of time invested in content but users have no easy way to archive it. I'd happily devote a few mb of my harddrive to maintain an off-line backup.

You can export post content but not the site structure, templates, photo albums etc as a whole. Perhaps something to consider?

Also, I often like to work on laptops or otherwise offline. Ideally my blogging site would let me set up multiple servers, each of which has all my content; I should ideally be able to edit my content on any server, and later synchronize the servers so they are consistent again. And if any server dies forever (i.e. my laptop is stolen, or my ISP goes down hard), I can be back online again as soon as I can install a webapp and re-synchronize my content. And I'm not just talking about postings; I'm talking about images, categories, comments, EVERYTHING.

I know of no blogging platform that supports this. So I'm writing one. This is it. "RepLog" is short for "Replicated Weblog."

I'm a Java EE programmer by disposition, so I'm writing this in Java. And I'm also interested in learning some of the latest Java technologies, so I'm using them. Originally I characterized this as a "lightweight" project. It won't be. Java EE is heavyweight. But hopefully it will at least be a very minimal amount of code to add new kinds of replicated objects to the system -- my goal is for this to feel Rails-ish, in that adding new kinds of objects (blog postings, blog categories, blog users, comments, images, external links) will involve writing only one Java class, with everything else (database, interface, replication) Just Working.

In any case, this project is very definitely a spare-time project, and I don't have much spare time these days. But I will be moving forward as best I can and will update this page (and the project blog) as things develop.

Thanks for reading!

Sincerely,

Rob Jellinghaus