As for the site, you know it well, pretend a customer asked you to reproduce it, don’t forget all the other data that shows up there in the left hand nav. It could make a great example in your session.

I might very well attend your performance session. I attend your sessions every year, security sessions, and this with only getting to attend 2 sessions a year; count of working on the showcase floor.

Honestly, I wouldn’t assume for sure that I could without knowing a whole lot more about the site than I do.

The other side of the coin I’d point out, however, is that the time it takes you to make changes is much greater than if you were using Domino.

If you’re going to be at LS2010, I’m doing a session called Performance in the Real World and maybe you’ll see if I have some ideas there.

Profiles and feeds 426
Blog Posts 50,743
Hit Table (ensuring one click per ip and computer) 2,821,992 (fields include ip, timestamp, location id, profile id, blogpost id, and random cookie value) and every record has to be unique.

Make each a form or their own database, whichever you choose. Now put them all together and list 100 at a time in descending order by date with pagination. I will gladly give you this data to reproduce if you think Notes could generate this view in under .6 seconds, on an equivalent server/pc, which is essentially a slow desktop by today’s standards. If you’d like… and to truly replicate this you’d have to include the the load of everyone adding records to the hit table, so we’d need a load generator, not to mention all the Google crawl entries that are stripped out every hour on schedule.

UPDATE: to conclude, you are correct you have to have a very large data set to consider an other platforms, I only wrote this to show that the platform I chose was a practical fit.

Come on Andrew, tell me this isn’t fun to consider

We’ll table that one though — another time.

“We”, when was I excommunicated? Just because I chose another technology to create the site doesn’t mean I’m not a Notes guy.

As for using the email address. If only you saw the feeds I get. You’d quickly come to the concussion that many don’t follow the standard. Just to confirm, I chose at random a feed from the last 5 sent, the first one didn’t have an email address so i gave up proving the point further.

The way I’d map the blogs to accounts is to replicate the method Technorati uses. It would be very easy to implement, just not sure what it will get me and what follow on issues it will expose.

As for flexibility, yes Domino is flexible at the cost of scaling and performance with large data sets; I cringe to say this but we both know it’s true.

Of course, if PL was written on a Domino server, it’d be easy to use that to tie in the owner’s account with their PL login (if they have one) but then, that’s a Notes guy talking — we tend to view data in a more flexible way than relational people do.

As always it’s ideas like this that make the site better and for that I thank you.

Planet Lotus has been good for the community and continues to be.

That said, I think the same thing I said in email can be said here; and maybe add to the discussion that way:

I think the facebook model is a really good framework for the discussion. When I blog, Facebook is configured to pick it up and post it to that site. Their reply system then can sometimes take precedence over the one on the site because people will read the content there and never click the link. In both cases, I can opt out of automatic updates and thus the comment system. In the case of Facebook I can remove the post, or delete any comment I don’t like.

I think with yours, a few things would help it fit better into the blog ecosystem:

#1 – If someone does comment, it should notify by email the person who runs the blog.

#2 – The blog owner should have the ability to remove a comment (or all comments) — possibly with an editors mark replacing it saying “comment removed at bloggers request”.

#3 – The blog owner should have an opt out option to not allow comments on all their posts (or better on specific ones). Most blogs offer this functionality so that when you post something controversial (or accidentally raise everyone’s hackles) or for some other reason you don’t want replies, you can do that.

#4 – Comments should be very limited in size/scope. I think the “___ likes this” facebook functionality is a good example. If it were something like “like/don’t like/thanks/congrats” it would do very well. If it were a very short comment (50 chars or so) that would be my second favorite. The idea is you’d be able to express a very short sentiment, but not excoriate someone or self promote in that space. (though in 50char, you could still post a link or write “bullshit, you liar” or something). The thing is, you’re providing a place for potential troll behavior where the author can’t control it.

These are of course, just my own preferences. I’m not sure it will matter much to most people — and it’s not something I’m going to lose sleep over.

@Chris, good point, there should be a feed, and there will be if people use it. The absence of feed isn’t effecting the adaption rate however if the adaption rate increases a feed will be created. As for the number of comments, it’s there, next to the icon, and all comments are listed under the post.

Thanks @Bob!

@Chris, the UX will improve with adaption, the current UX is a good test for the feature, if people aren’t willing to jump through what small hoops there is then it tells something about the demand of the feature.

Could you pull this in for blogs that support it and show the comments from the actual blog? That will move the ownership of the comments to the blog. Also blogs that support it in the RSS feed would have a link to the page to create new comments, some even have a web service to create comments.

Expanding the #bubble idea in Chris’s comment above if the rss feed of the blog you are reading supports the number of comments tag you could use that for the bubble to let people know how many comments there are on a particular blog entry.

I definitely don’t think PL has jumped shark. I am constantly promoting it in my presentations as THE PLACE to go for Lotus discussions.

And for that, I thank you.

I will also give every effort to *improve* those resources any chance I can give — it’s the only way after all that I can give you an educated opinion on the given topic.

That being said, I actually like the idea of the comments, as it gives me the ability to see who’s “talking up” the given post. The UX could be better, ie: instead of the page-to-form/thread navigation, an AJAX-based popup comment form floating over the given post. But now I’m just giving you ideas on v2.0

Real estate is something I take seriously as well and if people start using it there are many ways to reduced it’s impact.