Ken's Blog | Welcome to my blog

Friday, 21. January 2005

Welcome to my blog01/21/2005 09:16 PM

I guess it's time to be another blogger lemming. Hopefully, some of my notes will help someone out there in blogger land. This blog uses OpenNTF's BlogSphere. I did try ProjectDX, but it seemed more sluggish.
The default template for blogsphere also looks a bit better than the ProjectDX one (although that's a preference thing). The Blogsphere template seems more like the other Notes R6 templates. I like the blog comments editor a lot more than the ProjectDX one and I'm sure readers of the blog will as well.

One thing that has always annoyed me a bit is how Domino blog templates are so much slower than blog software written to run on different web application servers. Too see how bad this is, run a Domino server on a grossly underpowered machine like an old Pentium-266. If you try both templates out, you'll notice that ProjectDX seems to be slower both when you edit a blog entry (using a Notes client of course) and when you display your blog page. Maybe the Domino blog templates should use RenderToRTItem to cut down on how much stuff has to be generated each time the page is refreshed? What should be interesting is how much slower Blogsphere gets as more entries are added. Maybe folks out there who have run blogs for a while can try copying their blog entries between templates to check out the speed?

And I'm sure folks out there are wondering: why bother w/ Domino at all? Why not just run a public domain PHP or JSP based blog template? Two things: Domino rich text and replication. A lot of other blog templates use the relatively crude rich text browser implementations to do rich text; it mostly works most of the time, but why bother if you can use something that has a nice UI and more features? Also Domino replication means this database is backed up easily and also can be edited on any Notes client while being disconnected from the net; a quick replication publishes any changes.

Update 2/1/05: one big stickler I found w/ Blogsphere is that it doesn't support file attachments in blog entries. This is in the 2.0beta2 version, so that's something that you should check before committing to any blogging software.

Comments :

1. Declan Lynch01/30/2005 12:26:54
Homepage: http://www.qtzar.com

Ben,

The bug you mention is something you will find in any IE generated page that uses CSS to create blocks. If you don't define a height for the block in the CSS then you get that weird display issue. It's not a template issue.

Ken, welcome to the Blogosphere. I look forward to reading your entries.

2. Bruce Elgort01/29/2005 21:30:38
Homepage: http://www.bruceelgort.com

Ken,

Welcome to the blogosphere!

Bruce Elgort

3. Rock01/29/2005 15:23:23
Homepage: http://www.LotusGeek.com

Welcome to the blogosphere, Ken! The Blogsphere team has made significant strides in making the latest versions of Blogsphere faster. Also, Ben - I just avoid the IE issues by using FireFox, and quite frankly I am not worried about the IE issue because I have noticed it in other sites as well in IE, so I figure the IE users are used to it.

Not to mention I am really, really pushing everyone to move to Firefox. It is time...

Rock

4. Ben Rose01/28/2005 14:12:27
Homepage: http://blog.jaffacake.net

Very interesting comments. I never considered performance, clearly my hardware is just too quick to notice. I certainly have never noticed a significant different in page load times between different bloggers. It's more bandwidth dependent that anything.

I actually started my Blog on blogsphere and then moved it over to Dominoblog, purely because of a nasty bug I couldn't workaround.

Using the IE browser, which a massive majority of users still do, I get continual txt display issue on blogsphere sites especially in the comments area. Highlighting the txt makes it visible but until then it looks like a blank or incomplete comment.

I understand it's an IE specific bug, something I didn't want my readers to suffer