Blogging Roller

Dave Johnson on social software, open source and Java

New front-page on blogs.sun.com

Today Simon and Eduardo point out the cool new front-page at blogs.sun.com, which features a site-wide tag-cloud and a display of the newest blogs on the site. By the way, everything you see on the front-page there is possible with the stock release of Apache Roller 3.1 a some tweaks to the front-page theme.

Dave in General Comments[3]
Comments:

Is it possible to switch pack to the old version of the home page? I find the tag cloud and the "new bloggers" columns to be little more than visual clutter. With the new page, far fewer blog entries are displayed, so the site is significantly less useful for me.

Posted by Derek Morr on July 20, 2007 at 12:12 PM EDT #

<p>This is the first positive comment I've seen on the new (as of 2007-07-20) blogs.sun.com look. Frankly, I despise it, and I suspect that anyone that comes to blogs.sun.com for recent entries does too. I think the point of having a prominent tags box must be to help readers who are looking for answers, rather than recent blog entries, but surely we can help both kinds of readers?</p><p>And sprinkle some Ajax please -- no more page reloads. And make the boxes more like portlets that I can just turn off or move around boxes to my heart's content, and make the default page not have such a huge tags area, and add an Ajaxy scroll-bar to the recent blog entries box, make that box bigger, provide an option to automatically update that box periodically, and...</p>

Posted by Nico on July 20, 2007 at 12:40 PM EDT #

<p>Yep, I've been reading the internal thread about the front page and I agree with the common complaint: the new front-page could be arranged more efficiently. And Nico you are correct, BSC could make much better use of Ajax on that front page. All of your suggestions are possible with standard Roller page template code; Roller can do JSON and Dojo, etc. But also note that the BSC team has limited resources. I'm sure they'd welcome your design and code contributions ;-)</p> <p>I like the new front-page because I think the site-wide tag-cloud rocks and I really like having the new blogs highlighted. I read the site via feed reader, so when I visit the front-page I'm looking for things that don't come through the main feed, things like site-wide tags and new blogs.</p>

Posted by Dave Johnson on July 20, 2007 at 01:24 PM EDT #

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