It seems for blogs.sun.com WordPress was considered at one point, but they decided to go with the Java product Roller instead. Too bad, because their feeds seem strange, they have terrible URIs, and I have no idea what’s the permalink for a page. Anyway.
Matt,
Roller was my first blog. I didn’t know about all the features that a blogs should have. My present client is a Java shop for all the applications. So I installed Roller. Boy it is a let down feature wise. I like the response time, multiple blogs etc. Infact having been active in the WP community for sometime has made me think why is there so many lines of code in Roller.
Pankaj
Maybe they wanted a multiblog system :p
Let’s answer in order here:
Tim Bray proposed WordPress and I was more in favor of Roller because I have experience with it, we know it scales thanks to the JRoller instance, it fit our requirements of hosting multiple blogs, and it’s in java so we can hack it to our heart’s content. Other people at Sun shared my opinions, so we wen on with Roller.
I haven’t tried WordPress so I can’t judge wether it’s better or not.
Feeds seem strange, can you be more specific? Then we can try to fix that.
Permalink is a good comment: they exist but currently they are not exposed in the theme I use. I will add this requirement for the Sun theme we develop.
For example for my post that you comment about, the permalink is http://blogs.sun.com/pat/20040607#blogs_sun_com_cool_history
Terrible uris, I guess you’re talking about the roller/page part of uris: these are not necessary, since we have an Apache front end which rewrite urls.
http://blogs.sun.com/pat/20040607#blogs_sun_com_cool_history seems good enbough to me, at least as good as http://photomatt.net/archives/2004/06/08/sunny/#comments 🙂
But we need to start expose these and maybe redirect the roller/page uris to their reduced counterparts.
Thanks for the feedback.
P@
Thanks for dropping by Pat, some specific feedback:
Some of this may be related to the theme you’re using. It’s not clear what is a permalink to an item and what is a comment link, and why they are different. I would suggest making the titles larger (they don’t stand out very much now) and making them link to the permanent location of the entry.
Cruft-free URIs can be a lot of work to do right. I’d recommend Matthew Thomas’ writing on the subject.
Looking at your feeds, they seem just fine. Not sure what I was referring to in the post. However you have a RSS validator button linking to the feed itself, which is a little confusing. Usually those link to the validator address that validates your feed, like valid HTML and CSS buttons do.
If I click on 14 in your date, it takes me to http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/pat/20040614 which I would guess shold just show me posts from that date, but it seems to be identical to your front page. It’s not clear why the 14 should be a link anyway.
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/pat/comments linked in your menu shows a blank page. The weblog link in your menu goes to http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/pat/Weblog which is also identical to your front page, but it’s not clear which people should actually link to you with. The “Home” link is identical to your front page, yet links to a completely different third URI.
Why can you browse to months in the future? Links in the calendar also seem to have jsessionid information attached to them, though it’s not clear why a session would be started if I’m just browsing days (but not if I click a “comment” link or other internal links). This also would create crufty links for anyone just copying and pasting the address bar to link to your site.
Anyway, these are just a few things I immediately noticed about your site. I came by originally because you had mentioned WordPress and I found it interesting that came up. I’m not at all surprised you guys went with a Java application, it makes sense given the context. However if you want a weblog consultant, give me a call. 😉