So I've decided to give it another shot. My last blogging attempt (along with it's short-lived corollary, my internal Sun blog) was sustained for a while, but quickly faded after I started working here at Sun Microsystems. After much contemplating, though, I think I'm at a point where I can give it another go.

With this decision made, the first order of business was to decide on the location of my Blog2.0. I did consider reviving owenkellett.info, but ultimately I decided to leave it alone and go a different route for a few main reasons:

• As an employee of Sun Microsystems, I do feel somewhat compelled to contribute to the corporate blogging effort that Sun, and in particular CEO Jonathan Schwartz has pioneered.
• owenkellett.info was started before my first full-time employment and has a very limited overlap with my current tenure at Sun.
• I felt the need to start fresh but do not yet want to purge my previous blog's identity.

Considering all of this, I was left with an obvious option: launch a new, public, personal blog as part of the blogs.sun.com community. My only apprehension about this prospect, though, was that Sun's blogging site uses Roller as its blogging engine while I had become particularly attached to Wordpress during my owenkellett.info toils. Having previously explored Roller, I was not left particularly impressed.

It turns out, however, that Roller, while it may be behind in a few features and have less-robust plugin support in comparision to Wordpress, suffers mostly from its smaller user base and less established development community. Thus while Wordpress has a large collection of community developed themes and plugins, Roller has a much smaller set. In addition, it may just be a matter of personal preference, but I don't like any of the stock Roller themes installed for blogs.sun.com. To be vague, they all feel very "Web1.0" as opposed to belonging to the blogsphere "Web2.0" style.

So last night I dug through the Roller docs and cracked open a can of css to see what Roller can really do. I have to admit that I am a fan of the Java/Hibernate combination which makes up the foundation of the back-end engine. Additionally, the use of the Velocity template language to generate the web gui front-end is pretty slick and makes for fairly clean, modular, and simple theme and template code. And while I don't claim to be a css expert by any means, the result of my efforts is the layout of this site. In my opinion, it looks more "blog-like" than any of the stock templates in the blogs.sun.com library. [Although since I do not have a machine with Windows installed anywhere that is readily accessible, I still have not been able to test the layout on Internet Explorer. The structure is fairly basic though, and to the best of my knowledge W3C standards compliant.]

In any case, I'm back. Hopefully I can stick with it this time, and that this blog will help me to keep my perspective on whatever lies ahead.