These days, the term Domino blogger often means someone who is a Domino developer or administrator who maintains a blog. It may or may not be strictly technical (or even technical at all). Since Lotusphere 2003, quite a few blogs have started and died after a month or two. That's not unusual, as it takes a certain level of commitment to continue to write to an audience. Others have continued to blog but have taken significant breaks due to workload or lack of interest. And, of course, many of us still continue to share our lives, thoughts, and opinions on a regular basis. Because of that commitment, there is a closeness in the Domino community that is exciting to be a part of.

I had an opportunity to communicate with each of the authors of the main Domino blogging tools. They shared their thoughts about how they came to write their software, the state of Domino blogging, and where their packages are headed in the future.

BlogSphere by Declan Lynch
Declan started BlogSphere (at http://www.blogsphere.net) as a personal blogging tool. He was unhappy with the software he was using, so BlogSphere was an attempt to rewrite the functionality using Domino. Once a certain point of stability was reached, he converted his site to BlogSphere and offered it for use to others. As more people started to use the template, Declan decided to release the application to OpenNTF as an open source application. According to Declan, "I think this was the best move for the software. It allowed people to be able to report bugs and as we have seen recently it has allowed others who are using the software to be able to make their additions to the template. The current beta has a few new features and there are a few others that just need to be polished off."

While Declan would like to continue to enhance the software, there are other matters such as a regular job that limits the amount of time he can spend on it. But due to the open source nature of the application, other developers are making changes and contributing them back to the core package. Because of that format, BlogSphere continues to move forward even though Declan currently can't be as involved as he would like.

He sees the current number of Domino blogs being relatively steady right now. While some existing blogs die off, others rise up to take their place. "If you have a look up on News4Notes and look at the links list for Domino Blogs there are over 200 links... That's not bad going for such a close community."

DominoBlog by Steve Castledine
DominoBlog (at http://www.dominoblog.com) was not originally intended as a blogging tool, according to Steve. "I wanted to put some content management software together for Domino that could be designed using third party software like Dreamweaver imported into Domino and people could just use tags (DXTags) to place Notes-entered content." But once the software was released for use by others, it took off in different directions. Users wanted to be able to have blog-like functionality within a Domino environment that wasn't currently available. DominoBlog was the result.