Portland Java Users Group joins ORBlogs Effort

For a little while, things were starting to seem disappointing in the ORBlogs effort. I origionally shot for Oct. 1st to get the BigBark code running, giving us a near immediate availability of the aggregator and Digg ranking. However, the time I’ve spent away from Java has made that nearly impossible. So we started talking about what the best options are, and if we should step back from the BigBark code at all.

Enter Rick Turoczy (Heh, that’s a pretty well used phrase by now, innit?) with a suggestion that the ORBlogs team contact the Portland Java Users Group. A quick email calling for help, led to a number of replies in a thread available on the Google Groups page.

The short Version: Craig McClanahan came out with both barrels swinging.

The Long Version: Remember the early days of the effort- mostly taking place on Twitter and FriendFeed? No? Well, we were discussing how to make ORBlogs not just another aggregator, but a complete tool, powerful, redistributable. My suggestion was an Open Source tool that was scalable that anyone could used (MediaWiki style) but that we could also enterprise, giving ORBlogs the revenue it needs to grow. Craig suggested something very similiar, although from the perspective of a programmer. Read the thread for full details.

However, I still think that we should get BigBark running, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that people want ORBlogs back now, and we can accomplish that. Here are my thoughts:

• BigBark is basically ready to run. We need to dust it off and turn the key, this makes it an optimal instant, if temporary, solution. Patrick agrees with this assessement, am I right?
• There are at least 1800 blogs currently indexed which are now not served. Many of these folks are, understandably chomping at the bit since we (i.e. I) originally shot for Oct. 1st.
• There are a large number of blogs (I have 4 alone) that are not indexed which need to be added to ORBLogs ASAP.
• Having BigBark up- and experiencing the slam of hundreds of bloggers hitting it with full expectation- will not only give us juice, it will give us data and information on what we want and need in the larger effort.
• The thought was that it was a mere few days to get BigBark running with strong Java people, so it would not take away from the longer term effort.
• Once BigBark is running, we can spend the actual time to design an excellent system while blogs are  being indexed and traffic is being generated. this will make the blogging community very happy.

I agree with Craig that we should seek the architecture like the one that he outlines, but my thought is that this will (if we do it right) will take time. As I was writing this, J-P Voillequé shot me a Twitter Post stating that he would rather wait and have something longterm and stable than something right now. An excellent point.

It seems to me that the BigBark code would allow us something very strong and stable immediately. Something with which we can have blogs indexed and added, and have people hitting the site to generate traffic. Of course, if we could have such an architecture built in a couple days, we could ignore BigBark, but that is rarely, if ever, the case.

So, my thought: Have these enthusiastic Java programmers spend the few days getting BigBark cleaned up immediately. Then, spend the time to design something fantastic. We may even have enough programmers joining that Craig can lead a team in parallel on design.

What’s your opinion?