Russell Beattie

I was a bit insane yesterday suggesting that I could help start the Java.Blogs RSS site. I have no time. I'm already trying to do/learn too much already and getting nothing done. Adding more cool projects is just a form of somewhat-productive procrastination that really doesn't help me get any closer to my core goals.

However, it seems that Dominic really wants to do this and is just having trouble finding time (I can relate). Now that the subject's come up again, it looks like he's found some to at least install a demo of Viktor's Flock:

Flock demo

For those wanting to see what Flock is like, I have setup an instance of Flock running on this server.

It looks very, very cool and is 80% of the way to what I was talking about yesterday. This is awesome and gives me a great excuse to come to my senses and back out of this effort for now. Thanks Dominic and Viktor!

There's definitely more to be done to make it a cool destination site. Jim suggested in my comments yesterday to take a look at the Forwarding Address: OSX multiblog site as a good example. And from the other comments it looks like Dominic, Viktor, Raible, Dylan, Ugo and Spike might be interested in lending a hand. Maybe a mailing list would be a good way to start? It'll take 3 minutes to create a new YahooGroups, though this doesn't guarantee neither organization nor productivity.

I've tried to start a "community" twice before and it didn't really work which is why I'm not going to try again right now. The first time was for jAnywhere, which was supposed to be a wiki dedicated to developing J2ME apps (no one contributed), and later Simpleface which was a repository for UI Design Patterns (no one contributed). Both failed to get any real work done even though the mailing lists were burning with posts at one point in both occasions... People love to talk, but not to get much done. The only way to actually get something like this moving is to do it yourself. After you have something real produced, you can start to get people to help contributing. Dave Johnson can probably tell you how long it was before he started getting contributors to the Roller project even after his JavaWorld article.

So anyways, I hope to help with this and make snide suggestions (JukeThat!?!?!!?) but someone else will have to take the reins while I return to my dark little corner and continue work on my personal plans for world domination...

-Russ

Later... chatting with Jim online, I pointed out to him that you can keep track of YahooGroups lists via RSS. Just use this format in your aggregator: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Group_name/messages?rss=1