Blogging Roller

Meena Vyas, Murthy Chintalapati and Allen Gilliland just published an article on BigAdmin that describes the architecture of blogs.sun.com, a Roller, Sun Web Server, Memcached and MySQL based site that averages 4 million hits a day with its two SunFire T2000 servers at 97% idle. You can get the article for free (registration required) here: Sun Blogs: A Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 Reference Deployment

This week was a big week for Roller, development and deployment-wise. As you may already know from Linda Skrocki's blog, Roller 4.0 went live this week at the premier corporate blogging site blogs.sun.com (BSC) with some nice new themes, easier blog customization and a UI that has been completely rewritten to do use Struts2. Check the What's New in Roller 4.0 page to learn more about the upcoming release.

But don't get too excited, you can't download Roller 4.0 just yet. Sun deployed a pre-release version of Roller and if you want to do the same, you'll either have to build it yourself or wait for the official Apache Roller 4.0 release coming out this summer. And don't be too disappointed, that's one of the nice things about Roller: before we make a release, the code is battle tested on blogs.sun.com. Big thanks to .Sun Engineering for that.

A couple folks wrote into to tell me that GIS software developer ESRI is blogging with Roller, something I've been meaning to mention for quite some time. In fact, I've been meaning to mention it for over a year and now it's time to wish ESRI a happy 1st blogaversary. Man, how time flies.

That's it for this weeks installment of Roller Strong. Y'all come back now.

It's hard to believe it's been three years since the blogs.sun.com (BSC) launch. Sun bloggers are having a birthday party of sorts around the tag bsc3years, so check out all the posts. My favorite is Linda's, which sums up the successes and reasons for the success of BSC. I think she's right on the money with her comments about employee blogging. Let me add this: you don't need a marketing team or a blog consulting firm to write your company's blogs. Trust your employees. Encourage them to blog and, if you can, provide the enabling infrastructure. I think I may have said that before

I still remember how amazed, surprised and pleased I was to learn that Sun was using Roller. I found out on May 5, 2004 via Roller; I noticed referrers from blogs.sun.com and just couldn't believe my eyes. Shortly after that I wrote to Tim Bray, who introduced me to Will Snow and soon I managed to become part of the BSC phenomenon. I'm proud to have played a part in the BSC success, but the success was certainly not due to the Roller software; it's the bloggers who made BSC. So here's to the BSC bloggers: happy birthday!