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Goodbye Planet Lotus Readers?

The owner of Planet Lotus, Yancy Lent, asked me yesterday if he should move this site to "Planet Sharepoint" instead. At first I thought it was a joke, but it turns out he has a sister site just like the Lotus one that's only for SharePoint feeds.

Anyway, I said no, don't move it, as the SharePoint posts on here are likely to be short-lived, sporadic and intermingled with Lotus postings. And that, either way, they're of interest to the readers of the Lotus stuff as they're written by a Domino developer.

However, he seems quite insistent and hinted that he'd have to "de-list" me in the interim and asked if I thought was "fair". To which I said, no, I didn't think it was fair. Not unfair on me, but on the users who've grown to rely on his site as their one-stop source of Lotus postings.

If he de-lists me what happens then? Do the visitors I'd lose (7% of my hits) assume I've fallen off the face of the earth? Or do they then have to remember to check here directly or via RSS instead.

It all stinks a bit of control-freakery to me. Expecting to be able compartmentalise a list of blogs in to one bag is bound to be an impossible task. If he didn't have a Planet SharePoint site would his email ever have arrived I wonder?

Yancy said that was I was doing was like:

Coming to a Manchester United forum to talk about Arsenal.

But it's not though is it. Nothing is ever that black and white and his analogy just doesn't work.

What I said to Yancy is:

Do what you like though, I'm not really that bothered. I just think you're doing a dis-service to your visitors.

I also said:

I talk about what I'm doing at the time. Right now it's Sharepoint. Next month it could be something amazing with Domino. Who knows.

What I'm getting round to saying is that if you trust Planet Lotus as the definitive source of Lotus blog posts then maybe you need to be aware that what you're reading is being dictated to you.

I don't know what he's planning on doing, but wanted to make you aware of what he might do. If you're a Planet Lotus visitor and see no posts from me in the coming days or weeks then you know why. Might I suggest you use RSS or Twitter instead.

I put a quick survey here to see if you think what he's suggesting is a good idea. Let the people decide I say.

Comments

  1. "Interesting" approach....

    A pl clone is easily built ofcourse...

      • avatar
      • Liam McLaughlin
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 05:17 AM

      This strikes me as extremely petty - to continue the football analaogy its like Yancy is saying this is my ball and I decide where you play.

      So what about content you have provided in the past about LAMP and the current Domino/Flex postings. Will these be moved from Planet Lotus?

      Tried voting but am getting someone already voted.

      Fortunately I don't rely on Planet Lotus for pointers to your excellent content - long may you continue to post in whatever direction you might follow.

      Show the rest of this thread

      • avatar
      • Liam McLaughlin
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 05:19 AM

      Sorry Dennis - not intended as a response to your comment!

      Hide the rest of this thread

      1. No worries ;-)

    • avatar
    • Lee
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 05:12 AM

    I don't use Planet Lotus very often but I agree that the analogy he's using is a total nonsense.

    I would imagine there are many Domino developers who would be interested in your findings thus far about SharePoint. Therefore it deserves it's place on Planet Lotus.

    If he's into football analogies then surely a better one would be:

    Going to a Manchester United (LOTUS) forum to talk about an Arsenal player (SHAREPOINT) that Manchester United are *thinking* of signing. The subject is still primarily Arsenal but it's still of interest to the Manchester United forum.

    Sounds like a pretty blinkered approach to running his site IMO.

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 05:18 AM

      Agreed. Your re-worked analogy works much better.

      • avatar
      • Darren
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 06:17 PM

      I'm just a bit concerned that Lotus = Manchester United in this equation. Microsoft are more like Man Utd... popular for no good reason and loads of money to throw around.

  2. This is crazy

    • avatar
    • Mike
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 05:20 AM

    Not knowing what other products are doing/how people are approaching transitions/the pain they are feeling/wins they are making is a very dangerous thing if ignored

    It's very blinkered Yancy. Please don't de-list.

    Stay on PL!!!

    (I went to vote, but it said someone at my IP address had already voted!! Maybe my coffee cup clicked the mouse whilst I was in the loo? :-) )

  3. Don't assume this is Yancy's idea. After all, your site has won an award for being such a great Domino ressource.

    I suspect that Yancy has been "asked" to remove your site. IBM likes to use PlanetLotus as a marketing ressource. A sensible discussion on how a Domino developer gets along with Sharepoint does not fit into this pictures. If you would spread some FUD about Sharepoint, things would look different.

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 05:27 AM

      The idea of it being a conspiracy did cross my mind. If he really is doing it under pressure then he needs to consider his role and obligation to his users. Like I said to him in the emails "It's not about me or him".

      Show the rest of this thread

    1. Neither I nor anyone on my team has made such a request. PL is Yancy's site and I personally do promote it but "IBM" would not make such a request. The issue of off-topic bloggers has come up before, several times. Yancy's site, Yancy's rules, I have no real issue with him doing as he wants but think Jake's poll is a fair approach.

      Show the rest of this thread

    • avatar
    • Nick Wall
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 05:33 AM

    Doesn't make any sense to me: you've been a Domino guy for years...isn't there a cross over of integration between Sharepoint and Domino anyway (without going into the whole Domino vs Sharepoint thing). Many companies are using both, so and understanding of both technologies is beneficial to both administrators and developers of Domino and Sharepoint. I've been following your Sharepoint entries with great interest.

    I have an idea, since you have Domino and Sharepoint entries, shouldn't you be listed in both of Yancy's sites ..?!?!

    I use PlanetLotus a lot...but regardless, I'll just stick you back in my RSS feeder.

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 05:38 AM

      He did suggest that I create *two* RSS feeds on this site. One for Domino and one for SharePoint. Yeah, right.

      Interestingly his Lotus site picks up on keywords in your post to mark how relevant it is. One of those keywords is "sharepoint". If he knows a post has the word sharepoint in it then he can filter it his side. Is that really what his users want though?

      Show the rest of this thread

  4. De-Listing this site would be a big mistake!!

    If it is like vowe said, than pls. de-list my site , too. I do not want to be a part of any marketing plan.

    1. Ulrich, you do not fit into any marketing plan. ;-)

      Show the rest of this thread

    2. and mine

    • avatar
    • Ed S
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 05:42 AM

    No sense to me either! Ive been coming to this blog for years now for helpful and innovative posts about how to get around Domino cludges for web development. I have come to trust Jake's judgement and have been extremely interested in a non biased report of your transition/exploration/experiences on Sharepoint (and other software). In my opinion Jake has always said when and where things are easy to do or clunky in the software he has used.

    If Volker is right that IBM or a. n. other has requested this stuff to be removed from PL then that's madness. Surely we all want to know the good and bad points of the software we use and its competitors in the market? I would rather have an open account like what has recently been written here than read the salespitch tit for tat marketing dross that comes from both sides of the Lotus/MS fence

  5. PlanetLotus is not neutral. It is a site to push IBM Lotus and sells advertisements. Being removed from PlanetLotus does not remove you from the Internet.

    • avatar
    • Bill
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 05:56 AM

    Um - I asked to be delisted from PlanetLotus as I didn't want to be seen as a Lotus Fanboy. Quite a lot of what I have said in the past is quite definitely off the 'fan' spectrum, and to be quite honest, the work I'm doing right now cannot be shown (such is its tedium).

    If the yellow bubble is shrinking (a good article only gets a few hundred hits now) then I suspect that planetLotus's continued usefulness to those folks who do Domino stuff might be called into question.

    Its odd therefore for Yancy to open this thread of discussion with you - I'd probably go along with vowe's suggestion that he's having pressure to bear.

    Coming off PlanetLotus hasn't seemed to affect my site as much as my lack of current content. I'm guessing folks will revert back to feed readers at some point in any case.

    Perhaps I should do some xPages articles and put in lots of exclamation marks (!!!!) as well as some really leading subject lines. That seems to be how the system is gamed at the moment.

    Its a shame, but that seems to be the game that is being played right now.

    ---* Bill

    1. Bill, you have to be a nucking futter to do that.

  6. Why can't you be on Planet Lotus and Planet Sharepoint. I don't really think of PL as a forum and so I don't expect to only see posts about Lotus. I expect to see more of what is of interest to the Lotus community, be that iPhones, Sharepoint, Tree houses or whatever.

      • avatar
      • Darren
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 06:20 PM

      Absolutely agree Tony... am I going to be de-listed if I post more info on my unfeasibly small dog or review Brandon Boyd's solo CD (which I may do this week)?

  7. This is one of the reasons I only use PlanetLotus to find new blogs that I don't stumble on myself. I check the PlanetLotus blog listings maybe once every couple of months for new blogs. I maintain my own "Lotus Domino" group in my reader, based on my decision points.

    I'm not sure about the conspiracy angle; I think this is just Yancy's attempt to categorize feeds, similar to the way I do it.

    I suspect I will always use my own feed reader and my own group listings to categorize and filter my feeds.

    • avatar
    • Axel
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 06:29 AM

    From my point of view those english football clubs doesn't differ much. I've allways fouind this fanatic black and white view of some "real" domino consultants absolutely patetic....

    Sharepoint is widely adopted in the IT world of today. And its good to know about, even if you are Domino consultants. Or an ex-Domino consultants who calls himself Enterprise Java Consultant and currently works as a Linux admin. No sane persons cares. In the end its all computers.

  8. A few views on Sharepoint, particularly from the viewpoint of a Domino developer, I think can be a good thing. The reality is that most organizations use a cross section of technologies and understanding how those techs can integrate and leverage each other can only be positive.

    I for one would like to see more posts on how xPages apps could be surfaced in Sharepoint. Not because I am doing anything with Sharepoint but because if Sharepoint users can learn how to leverage Domino to increase the value of both platforms then that has to be positive for everyone. You never know we might even attract a few Sharepoint developers to explore the Lotus world....or Planet for that matter.

    I wouldn't dismiss having two rss feeds. You could then post to just Lotus, just Sharepoint, or when appropriate both. Getting a little Domino integration content onto Planet Sharepoint might be good as well when appropriate.

    • avatar
    • Lance
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 06:34 AM

    I've never really found Planet Lotus to be that useful. A good feedreader is a better bet.

    I'd agree that the pressure is on, and its on IBM more than on Yancy.

    Actually Jake, you're articles about Sharepoint have been great. Getting that hands on in the trenches information is helpful.

    And if IBM were reading, what they should be hearing is that it IS easier to do things in Domino! I can produce things for my users so fast their request hardly has time to sit in the queue sometimes, always amazes people... But they don't realize how simple it is for me, we have everything templated, so I can produce a department website in seconds, across multiple servers with full text indexes in place. I'm afraid that level of Customer Service won't be there when we move to Sharepoint. I hope I'm wrong.

    Keep up the objectivity Jake, it helps!

  9. Hang on, I recently saw book reviews completely unrelated to Domino. In fact on that same blog, the majority of the posts are book reviews, interspersed with the occasional MS/Google bashing. We can presume that feed will be removed as well soon?

    Keep up the good work Jake. I recently returned to Domino after a break and still hit your site for tips and reminders.

      • avatar
      • Mike
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 07:09 AM

      ...and don't forget all the "completely relevant" iPhone posts :-)

  10. I'll just chip in that I agree too, that Codestore should stay on planet lotus. I have no idea on the conspiracy theories... hehe, I wonder if it isn't IBM suggesting... but MS, who are trying to pull Jake to the dark side! hehe. (attempt at humour)

    More seriously though, the days of one product platforms seem rare. Plenty of other things are around that Lotus touches, whether MS, RDBMS, webservices, Mobile Tech, 3rd party system integrations, so there should be MORE scope and relevance, not less, when people are looking at other technology pieces and sharing how they find these challenges.

    back to light hearted...

    However, given the recent world cup, a more refined analogy (even though I'm not really a football nut..)

    I would have thought that, in the Manchester United Context.. it's like Jake being put out on loan to Chelsea / Real Madrid, as they're paying a chunk of cash for his superior skills and they've had trouble scoring recently...but the Man U faithful still have respect for Roy Kean/Bryan Robson/Mark Hughes or someone such, where they're at another club, however permanent, but still know they have some magic to give and you'll still turn on to see their goals.

  11. I agree with whoever said you should be listed on both sites. It's not like you're some shmok who just started out blogging about his switch to Sharepoint.

    Sorry to switch to American terms but you're probably the Wayne Gretzky (or since I'm a Wisconsin guy... Brett Favre) of Domino Development. "Codestore" is the site everyone mentioned in their interview for sites they read when trying to impress the interviewer. Your site still contains valuable code for the Notes people. Does anybody remember the blog-a-thon?

    Don't let Yancy push you off the Notes side. If he wants you on both... that makes sense.

    Good luck!

  12. Incredibly short-sighted...

    Jake, I can't believe that Yancy is pushing this so hard off his own back.

    In my experience, Yancy has never been less than reasonable about having blogs listed and unlisted on PL, and has seemed open to all kinds of posts on the site. In particular, I would have thought that a lot of Volker's posts would be way outside any particular 'Lotus-friendly' filter that he could apply - but his site (I would say blog, but...) is still listed on PL.

    You need to make your own decision of course, Jake, but personally I wouldn't hesitate to consider this another suggestion that the route you are taking is the right one for you. PL (and the yellowverse) needs bloggers like you more than you need it...

  13. if PlanetLotus taking this path, stop to interest me.

    Here you have a fan of your articles that will not lose

    A Greeting

    Dani

  14. I agree with all of the above. I remember the Collaboration Technology blog being removed for a similar reason - I think one of the guys there (Ian?) had gone to Microsoft. To be honest I still use the Google Reader gadget and most of the guys I read regularly now such as yourself, Volker, Stuart, Ed etc I originally found thanks to young (ahem) Bill B's connections on his blog. I have voted but I am one of many (I suspect) that will continue to read you regardless of whether PL delists you or not. Seems a strange move.

  15. Planet Lotus is a blogger circle-jerk. Vanity posts like "I just bought an iPad" are fine, but posts on Sharepoint with actual technical content are not? You're probably better off not to be associated with it.

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 07:39 AM

      I've considered asking to be de-listed in the past, but refrained, as it's all about the users. If people use it to come to my site then who am I to complain if I personally don't like the site or agree with how he copies all my content and makes it available on Google who might then decide I duplicated *their* content and downrank me for it...

  16. Jeff, disagree. PL is a good site. Yancy would be doing great if he received fewer "suggestions".

  17. Is there an actual policy published somewhere that determines what blogs should be listed? This seems to be censorship in the extreme. If you continue to blog about both SharePoint and Lotus Notes do you get kicked off both? If I stop saying bad things about SharePoint and mention of a few of the positive about the product do I risk being expelled for "bad behavior". I would like to see somebody step up here and explain why explain why one of the outstanding members of the Lotus Community (a Lotus legend) and 2007 LOTUSUserGroup.org blogger of the year should be expelled from Planet Lotus. I doubt there are many people in the community who would like to see Jake's efforts over the years "rewarded" in such an underhand way.

    • avatar
    • David Goodchild
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 07:42 AM

    To be honest I've linked to yours, Ed's and a couple of other sites via RSS for quite a while and do not use PL - much PL content is blinkered (or irrelevant or misleading) and to get good technical tips or more objective viewpoints I look elsewhere (here included). Being an expert in a product at the (intentional) exclusion of others leads to FUD, which I was always told only people from other products used.... and it also shows a lack of knowledge in many customer situations. I heard someone say "Yellow Peril" instead of bubble the other day - hope that conversation turns out to have a different ending.

  18. <puts tinfoil hat on>

    Perhaps this did not originate with Mr. Lent, who always seemed to be an upright kind of guy.

    <furtively looking for yellow helicopters>

    1. < barrows tinfoil had>

      So that would make him a shill, right?

      <crumples foil and tosses it into the recycling bin>

  19. Utter bs...this has been a great resource and should definitely remain. SP is a fact of life in our world. Experiences with it from a Domino perspective enlighten and inform.

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 08:02 AM

      If nothing else it's a little discouraging for myself. I spend a lot of time to trying to inform and educate. Recently I've assumed SharePoint would be of interest to all Lotus developers (as it's proving to be), but then I find myself being asked to keep it outside of the "yellow bubble", in effect.

      Show the rest of this thread

  20. Nah, no conspiracy. Yancy is probably just trying to get some 'decent' content posted on the other planet.

    • avatar
    • Richard C
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 08:10 AM

    I used to be listed on Planet Lotus, but no longer (I requested to be delisted). Since delisting, I don't use Planet Lotus. Google, Yahoo and a feed reader are my best tools.

    Jake, just don't stop posting stuff - whether it is Lotus Domino or not.

    I enjoy reading your experiences with other tools of our trade and look forward to more of the same.

    • avatar
    • Carl Abrahamson
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 08:22 AM

    Generally I prefer to lurk... but had to 'speak' up on this one.

    I swing by the Planet Lotus on occasion to see what is doing, but I usually end up clicking on listings for folks I already visit. A codestore.net de-listing wouldn't change things for me much.

    I like the SharePoint content as I too am working with both Notes/Domino and SharePoint. Thumbs up on the occasional DIY stuff too. Keep posting and I'll keep reading.

    I vote for planetjakehowlett.com

    • avatar
    • Richard Shergold
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 08:23 AM

    Jake, it sounds crazy to me. And quite ironic really because I would suspect that quite a lot of what you find out about Sharepoint will have you singing the praises of Notes/Domino. Yours has always been the site I read the most and I have been especially looking forward to hearing about your progress with Sharepoint. So I will certainly be going back to the RSS feed if you get kicked off.

  21. I have attended share point training recently and have asked a question similar to the dblookup.

    The answer was "there is no facility like dblookup in share point."

    I do not know why the people are crazy about sharepoint which has very limited functions.

    1. You attended Sharepoint training and asked if there was a dblookup function?

      People are crazy about sharepoint because it's out-of-the-box functionality is actually quite good.

      It's the customizing of it that is costly and pointless.

      Show the rest of this thread

  22. Odd that this would happen as PL is usually quite good about things, although when blogs have disappeared they usually are because the owner requests it.

    I'm not a developer but your LAMP series helped with some troubleshooting a few times.

  23. Jake - I like your site, so I bookmarked it in my feed reader, which I use more than I use PL. I like PL too.

    Either way, I will continue to be a reader. Keep going!

      • avatar
      • Gaston
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 05:06 PM

      I would have given everything to get this comment on my blog :-)

      Show the rest of this thread

  24. Btw, your survey is a nice proof of "vowe's Gesetz der konstanten Armleuchterquote" roughly translated as "5-percent-rule". ;-)

    • avatar
    • Sagar
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 08:54 AM

    There is a larger trend where many organizations are migrating their apps to other platforms like websphere, websphere portal server, open source java (jboss, liferay etc), php, Filenet, .Net, sharepoint etc. In those kind of projects a domino developer or administrator plays an very important role. Your articles and blog posts about sharepoint ( and before about Flex) are very useful for most domino professionals (or professionals who also work on domino).

  25. Jake, it's only a tempest in a teapot. http://twitter.com/edbrill/status/18440515577

    • avatar
    • Turtle
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 09:44 AM

    I guess this could potentially mean that if a site doesn't post *enough* Lotus-related content, could it also be invited to de-list? I mean, in the last year, I've written a lot more about the wabbits and my health than about XPages...

    • avatar
    • axel
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 10:50 AM

    Looking at present java.blogs.com I see the following headlines (among first 40 or so entries):

    - Python Tutorial 2 – Variables

    - ColdFusion Builder Tour

    - It’s Faster Because It’s C

    - Basic Regular Expression & Quantifiers in Perl

    - Python Tutorial 1 – Introduction

    Completly normal that in those agregators there are posts about neighbour topics.

  26. Since you started this blog, what is the proportion of your posts about Notes/Domino to SharePoint? I think talking about SharePoint is a perfectly valid subject for a Notes/Domino developer. I'm pretty sure if we analyzed the other blogs on PL we'd see they don't only post about Notes/Domino. Are those blogs facing de-listing?

    I don't care if you're listed on PL or not. I read your blog first and find the PL site too much for me to sort through. I find I visit it less because I can't find things that interest me there.

    As far as SharePoint goes, I'll not be learning it even to keep customers. Life's too short to work with software I don't like. You can quote me on that.

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 04:14 PM

      Hmm, proportion of Domino to SharePoint posts? No idea. Too hard to tell. There are 1,427 blog posts and about 12 are on Sharepoint, but I don't know how many are Domino as I don't categorise them in any way, which would perhaps been a nice way out of this whole mess.

    • avatar
    • Mark
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 11:36 AM

    I just voted no.. As in NO it should NOT be delisted.. I guess I didn't get the way the question was asked. But The site should NOT be delisted !!!

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 03:53 PM

      No worries. I just updated your vote by matching the IP address of your comment document to the vote document. Now I'm off to cross-reference the names of all the voters for delisting to find out who my enemies are ;-)

  27. I see now reason why your blog can not be in both Planet Lotus and Planet Sharepoint. Though I do not like Sharepoint the reality is that it is there and is big.

  28. I don't read PL, and I'm not an author of a major blog, so I don't really have much skin in this game but I will say this: Years ago, you started writing about PHP and how coding in it did (and sometimes did not) relate to designing applications in Domino. It opened up ways of approaching issues for me and brought a depth of understanding to a subject I might not have explored. I think the same is true of SharePoint and Domino. There are ways in which those platforms do fundamentally similar things and yet the approach can (and sometimes should) be vastly different between them. I don't see what possible harm there can be in such a comparativist approach to design and design blogging.

    Feh to the purists.

  29. You can read the full email exchange here: http://planetlotus.org/6f93c0

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 03:44 PM

      Like I said on your site though Yancy - I'm not sure what you aim to achieve in posting the whole email exchange. It doesn't change things much. I know you say you "tried to work with me" but it didn't feel much like that. Reading back through it I think my side of the exchange was perfectly reasonable. Can you say that of yours still?

      And can you honestly say that this whole de-listing business would have come up if you didn't happen to have an aggregating site for sharepoint?

      On your site you say you've read through "some" of the comments. Is that a way of saying you don't think *all* of them are worth the time to read?

  30. I had similar problems with my feed to Planet Eclipse. Yancy should support feeds with tags and only pull in posts that the author marks as "Lotus" or something similar.

    I have recognized your blog has a lot of Sharepoint material, maybe you should ask Yancy to only pull a feed that has material related directly to Lotus.

    • avatar
    • Ferdy
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 01:11 PM

    This is against any form of logic. Jake is the pioneer of Domino development and Domino blogging. Useful and refreshingly honest for years in a row. Delisting one of the most valuable Domino resources, that has *actual* content(!) is close to insanity if you ask me.

    This whole yellow bubble thing is borderline madness too. In the real world, Sharepoint content from a Domino perspective is about as useful as it can get in these times. It is worth more than another article on xPages if you ask me. The real world has no bubbles, it has customers and families that you need to serve. Neither your customer nor your family gives a shit about your bubble and in particular not where that bubble would begin or end.

    If I were you, I'd tell him to delist me from both sides. Don't take that advise though. Your website is the entry point to your business.

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 03:48 PM

      Thank you Ferdy.

      You're right. To say Sharepoint is off topic in the Lotus world is to be in denial of reality. If that's how he wants it then so be it. As long as he's happy that's what his site's users want too.

  31. Hell, I'm on Planet Lotus, and quite a few of my posts are about Android these days. :P

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Tue 13 Jul 2010 03:44 PM

      It seems like it's ok to go off topic. Unless the topic you go on to is SharePoint.

  32. As usual, I can see both sides here. You've got a rich Lotus heritage and I've been following avidly for years but at the same time, the recent focus on sharepoint is annoying (to me anyway) so I just mark them as "read" in my RSS feed reader.

    I don't really use Planet Lotus as I prefer to have my own RSS Feeds that I control - and from sites that I want to follow.

    In that sense, it doesn't matter what P.L. does, you're safe on (my) list until I get completely fed up with the sharepoint stuff. :-)

    • avatar
    • Jonathan Lewis
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 05:34 PM

    And thats why this site continues to be a great resource.

    You don't comply with someone else's predetermined categories. You give away a lot of time and effort to the community. You honestly and intelligently describe how you work and share the info. I'd be guessing, but I'd say that most of your readers are Domino developers in the real world where SharePoint exists and to not acknowledge it is ridiculous.

    And the funniest thing? The most relevant Domino thing for me right now is whether an experienced and respected Domino developer (and someone I expect to get an honest opinion from) thinks SharePoint is a goer. You talking about SharePoint could not be more Domino orientated.

    I hope this is a storm in teacup and Yancy sees sense. It would be a disservice to his readers to de-list you.

  33. I really won't be affected as I come directly to this site anyway.

    You've been a lifesaver on more than one occasion, in my job as a Lotus consultant. Hopefully PL will realise that and leave well enough alone.

  34. Jake, if Yancy abandons the de-listing campaign, is this over?

    If so, let's "encourage" him to do that and shake hands?

    We need all the Lotus love that we can get IMHO....

    1. Seriously, you called it a "campaign?" Are you f'ing kidding me?

  35. I agree with Yancy.

    Everything must fit into a tight little box. For example, I like vanilla icecream. I never eat any other flavor. If I did I'd expect my local supermarket to ban me from ever buying vanilla again.

    If I were a developer I would never consider using anything other than Notes formula language and lotusscript, to do so would be inviting a Lotus Jihad.

    I say flip the bird to those 7%. You may well pick up 300% more by being listed on the sharepoint side.

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Wed 14 Jul 2010 03:23 AM

      Everything can't fit in to one box. I think Yancy's email to me was borne of his frustration in trying to do so.

      Anyway, what is it with people and their bad analogies. You'd expect a shop to stop you buying vanilla ice cream if you tried another flavour? Huh?

    • avatar
    • Giulio
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 09:26 PM

    Reading through all the activity, I think Yancy has a bigger problem than whether to list codestore as sharepoint or lotus.

    His problem now is that the community is defining the meaning of what planetlotus/planetsharepoint stands for.

    Yancy may have a definition that has the perspective based on technical content, whereas the community treats it more on a personal basis.

    What happens if you get on planetlotus (or sharepoint for that matter), and never mention technology and talk about the pushups you do, or how far you run, or what gadget you have bought. Would that warrant your exlcusion from it ?

    • avatar
    • Rishi
    • Tue 13 Jul 2010 11:17 PM

    Yancy statement sounds like Talibanis.. Does this planetLotus server situated in Afghanistan ? lol

    Jake keep it up your good work..Every developer needs exposure and you're providing em all.. Thks for all your good work..

  36. Can anyone point me to the PlanetCOBOL site please?

    • avatar
    • Matin
    • Wed 14 Jul 2010 02:56 AM

    Jake, I've read your blog for years and dip into PL from time to time. Like Dave I tend use PL to locate new blogs and the track the rss myself if the content is of interest. For me its all about the quality of the content and the relavence to my work, anyone who argues that Sharepoint is not relavent to anyone who works with Domino clearly doesn't recognise the challenges faced by those with Domino skills. I find it hard to understand how any blog entries which deal with Sharepoint from Domino developeres perspective and highlight the difficulties in picking up nd working with the product can be deemed not appropriate by Yancy.

    • avatar
    • PaulG
    • Wed 14 Jul 2010 02:57 AM

    Yancy needed to create "planetDeveloper" and tag the sites accordingly - or even leave it up to those listed to ensure they are tagged in the right groups.

    Then you'd have a good aggregator. As it stands - what use would PL be to someone like you Jake - when you work with so many different languages and technologies?

    Is PL really a site you visit often? I know I don't.

    • avatar
    • Alastair Grant
    • Wed 14 Jul 2010 07:23 AM

    Yancy could even let the users of PL have input on who should be listed / not listed.

    like an "Idea Jam" and then order new posts in some related hierarchy.

    Traffic is traffic so never de-list, it's like closing your shop door.

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Written by Jake Howlett on Tue 13 Jul 2010

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CodeStore is all about web development. Concentrating on Lotus Domino, ASP.NET, Flex, SharePoint and all things internet.

Your host is Jake Howlett who runs his own web development company called Rockall Design and is always on the lookout for new and interesting work to do.

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