A big "THANK YOU!" to Simon Brown, the creator of "Pebble" java-based blogging engine. He just released the new Pebble 2.3 - this is truly the easiest-to-setup java-based blogging engine I've ever tried. Its features are also excellently designed and very powerful.

I installed the new release on my blog and found that it loads MUCH FASTER than the 2.2 - probably because "Added a GZIP compression filter to reduce page loading times." as described by Simon in his blog. I was feeling that the 2.2 was loading too slow, now I'm very happy that this new release solved that problem - loads much faster!

Tips for Apache Tomcat 6 Users:
When you install the "pebble.war" to your tomcat server, you can rename it as "blog.war" (to automatically set its path to /blog on your site) and upload it to the "$TOMCAT_HOME/webapps" path, then restart your tomcat server.

Another way is to simply use the tomcat application manger to deploy your "blog.war" via its web-interface which is normally at "www.yourdomain.com/manager/html" - you don't have to restart your server this way.

Please remember to copy the ".jar" files from the "lib" folder which came in the pebble-2.3.zip to your $TOMCAT_HOME/lib/ folder.

Click here to go and get the latest Pebble release for your site/blog Now!

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