P@ Sunglasses
e hënë qershor 07, 2004
Tucu on RSS Tucu, alias Alejandro "Portlet" Abdelnur never wanted to blog, but gave it a try when blogs.sun.com was launched.
I'm glad he did: his first post Syndication feeds hell is very well thought out.
It's like the approach has been "It would be nice if when I post a weblog the following happens" instead of being "It would be nice if I can do the following when posting a weblog".
We've been working together on a RSS-Atom-Syndication related project for a few months (more about this soon :-) and he's discovered the oddities of these specs with no schema and weird protocols that are implemented differently by each implementation :-)
The artifact that captures the best this webloggish mentality of "would it be cool if it did this?" is the incredible Lazyweb. It sounds like a joke at first sight but the mechanism is very interesting and I can see some adaptations of this idea when corporate blogging has gone mainstream and people are used to blogs, trackbacks and other features: forget about polls, questionnaires. The product manager of tomorrow will just organize and prioritize a big Syndication feed from his product's Lazyweb's instance.
( Qer 07 2004, 11:01:25 PD PDT ) Permalink Chat about it
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blogs.sun.com: cool history in the making!
Tim Bray commented about blogs.sun.com yesterday
Then it seems like IDG started the ball rolling this morning with Sun blogs show uncensored public face.
After the watershed april 7th meeting with Tim Bray and Jonathan Schwartz where we decided we should make it easy for Sun employees to blog, both internally and externally, we had some discussions in the internal bloggers mailing list about how to enable employees to start an external blog.
The 2 options were to have them start their blog on an external hosted system, such as Typepad, and eventually reimburse them for the registration, or host it ourselves and create blogs.sun.com. For the self hosting people were talking about Movable Type or WordPress.
I proposed that we used Roller instead, since it is written in Java, is fully featured, designed for hosting, proven as scalable by Javalobby, and well architected.
I was bracing myself for long discussions, and was really surprised at how fast things happened after these emails: Will Snow, who manages sun.com shot an email saying it was possible to setup Roller on an external server, and John Hoffmann promptly installed it.
In early May I created a small internal app called BURPS (Blogs.sun.com User Roller Provisioning System :-) that lets people which are in Sun's ldap with the roles employee or intern create an account on blogs.sun.com.
It also optionally registers them in an internal mailing list for bloggers.
John also wrote some Apache rewriting rules to let you access weblogs and feed urls in a more friendly way. Roller blog urls are usually like this:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/pat/20040427#blogs_sun_com_is_up
and we want them like this:
http://blogs.sun.com/pat/20040427#blogs_sun_com_is_up
The roller prefix can be gotten rid of in Tomcat by deploying Roller as the default webapp.
But the page prefix is required by Struts (Roller is a Struts app) so you need Apache and mod_rewrite to get rid of it.
The system's been up and running for a month now and it seems today is the big day where they do press releases and stuff.
I've seen already 11 new user registration in the past 3 hours: not an "internal" /. effect yet but encouraging:-)
Let's see how it goes.
( Qer 07 2004, 10:08:47 PD PDT ) Permalink Chat about it
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This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.
