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developerWorks Lotus team blog

The right to blog does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.


Blogging offAugust 8 2008
With the last blog entry prior to this one dated March 17, 2008, it's obvious this blog:
  • Is defunct
  • Has passed on
  • Is no more
  • Has ceased to be
  • Has expired and gone to meet its maker
  • Is bereft of life and rests in peace
  • Would be pushing up the daisies if we hadn't nailed it to the server
  • Has metabolic processes that are now history
  • Is off the twig
  • Has kicked the bucket
  • Has shuffled off its mortal coil

This is an ex-blog.

Well, sort of. Some of the folks who are working on developerWorks Lotus will be blogging on another Lotus blog, the Lotus Technical Information and Education Team Blog. If you are following that blog, you know it contain many posts about the new set of Lotus and WebSphere Portal wikis we have been working on recently.

We plan to keep the developerWorks Lotus team blog on the servers, because we know there's nothing more interesting than archived, stale, dated blogs entries. But, we get a kick out of some of the posts we did in the lengthy blog period from November 2006 to March 2008, an eternity when our original goal was to blog for two months.

So, thanks for reading the blog, and we'll see you on the Lotus Techn






Wiki ratings: Are they hot or not?March 17 2008
In the grand scheme of things, do ratings of Wiki-sourced content work?  

Traditionally, ratings systems are a mechanism that provide a quick, painless, and easily deployable way of soliciting and collecting opinions from a community of users.  The ratings can be thought of as a combination of 3 values:  the item being rated, the person providing the rating, and the ratings data itself.  For content that is more static in nature, there is much less chance of ratings data becoming obsolete due to the underlying content of the page changing.  

In other words, my opinions about the quality and accuracy of the information on a Web page that doesn't change are probably going to still be valid in the future (unless my initial ratings data was skewed by a misunderstanding of the information upon first encounter, but even then I should be able to rectify that by updating my original rating).  

However, in a more dynamic and fluid environment like a wiki, the content is much more likely to have multiple edits applied to it as the content evolves, and my ratings for past revisions might not necessarily be applicable to present/future revisions of the content.  In this type of scenario, what value do ratings bring to the table and how should their life cycle be managed?  Do we take the ratings data at face value with no respect to the time line of revisions?  Or should ratings be a more fluid data set that is respective to time (for example,





Back available: Notes1/NotesWebMarch 14 2008
The Notes1/NotesWeb (notes1.notes.net) server has been restored. This is one our of servers used for Notes client access to Lotus forums such as the Notes/Domino forums.

For information about connecting to our public server for accessing our databases via your Lotus Notes client, see our article, "Viewing developerWorks Lotus in its native Notes format."

Notes1/NotesWeb unavailable due to hardware issuesMarch 14 2008
We have been experiencing ongoing hardware problems with Notes1/NotesWeb (notes1.notes.net), which is one our of servers used for Notes client access to Lotus forums such as the Notes/Domino forums. We are working to resolve the issue, and in the meantime, we ask that you use our other public Lotus Domino server Notes2/NotesWeb (notes2.notes.net).

For information about connecting to Notes2/NotesWeb or accessing our databases via your Lotus Notes client, see our article, "Viewing developerWorks Lotus in its native Notes format."

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience.



Forum search and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6March 3 2008
We are aware of a problem that does not allow Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 users to use the advanced search form to search our discussion forums. The problem is caused by an incompatibility between Internet Explorer 6 and the code used to measure our Web site traffic. The code is owned by another team, and we are working with them to resolve the issue.

In the meantime, there are workarounds to allow you to search our forums:
1.        Use the search bar located in each forum view. Although the search bar provides only basic functionality and no advanced search options, it continues to work in each Web browser that we have tested, including Internet Explorer 6.
2.        Use either Firefox 2.0.x or Internet Explorer 7. No search problems have been reported with either of these browsers, so if one or the other is available to you, we recommend that you use it until the issue with Internet Explorer 6 is resolved.

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you and thank you for your patience while we continue to work on the issue.