The hot news of today is that Wikipedia has gone dark. This is to protest the introduction of the SOPA Bill. Now, the SOPA Bill does on the face of things sound very bad. It even sounds very bad for websites outside of the USA. This is especially true given that the USA still controls the DNS for domains such as .com, .net, etc. This Bill could turn out very bad for the rest of the world.

So, as a consequence, Wikipedia has gone dark. In my view this is a good, effective protest that will hopefully get people's attention. The only problem is that this for all of the English version of Wikipedia, rather than just for USA located viewers. So what if you are sitting in a country like the UK, Canada or Australia which is unlikely to successfully lobby for the removal of this...? What if you need to get work, or even home-work done...? And you are being hampered by this blackout.

Tags: java | liferay | maven | persistence

Although I last wrote about Liferay nearly a year ago, I've been using Liferay in various different projects. It's a great way to get code into onto the web. With Liferay there is no need to reinvent the wheel and keep on implementing users, groups and basic security. There's also little point in writing your own persistence classes. So read on for a quick overview on how to get Liferay to write these for you.

This is a quick post to say Happy New Year to all the people who have found this blog useful...! It's also a handy time to let you know that we have much planned for 2012.

And yes, that does include a site re-vamp...!

Here's a quick tip that will help people who have installed OS X Lion Server. Lion Server includes a Wiki Server that (in my opinion) is one of the best Wiki Server's out there. Full WYSIWYG editing and its very simple for anyone to use. The whole interface is simple and polished. The whole thing is built on Ruby, and serves as a great example of a Ruby Web App.

However, sometime the Wiki Server won't start, causing problems for the Web Server. Here is one solution to this problem.