.:MattTopper.com:.

Well, part of starting Ora-Click I wanted to start a series of blogs covering the top 5 articles of the week. Due to some technical difficulties I’m a week late, but I promise to make it extra extra interesting. So without further ado here are the top 5.

1. The big story of the week wasn’t Jakes post on the “8 Things” but actually the User Your Nose to Install an Oracle Database article. Some people claim that Oracle software is among the hardest to install. I tend to agree many of the earlier releases (<8) were a pain in the butt, but Oracle’s come a long way since then. Just to prove it Howard posted a link showing exactly how easy it is. I would love to link to it, but as I’ll discuss later Howard has shut down his blog until the “8 Things” craze slows down. When he gets back to earth the article can be found here.
2. The second article covers the new fixes and features of the latest mix.oracle.com release. I’m proud to be member 41 on the site and really think its a great way to get open and honest customer feedback. As the site grows there’s definitely some new features that need to be added to help manage consuming all the new content but knowing the AppsLab guys they’re already working on it. I would love to see Oracle open up the source to mix, as suggested by Jake here. I know that Anthony and Rich are overloaded fixing bugs and working on new features, it would be great to have the Oracle community contribute back to the site. They guys could review all the changes before it got merged into the main trunk. This would be a major change for Oracle and probably take a bigger effort building an Sourceforge like Oracle site, wait, we’ve already started to discuss that.
3. The third story talks about the official death of Netscape Navigator from Jake at AppsLab. Seriously, you would think it’s this guys job to blog all day. I have to say that Netscape was my official first “http” browser and I spent too many hours in my teens (yes I’m that young) in front of that or AOL’s built in crap browser. I was pumped the first day I learned that I could use Netscape at home with AOL just like I had in school. Not quite sure why the Oracle blogosphere pumped this to the top of the list, but I think we need to start checking who’s bumping these stories. My guess is that it was on top when word of ora-click started hitting the blogosphere.
4. Fourth story!!! (Sorry, I couldn’t help the diggnation reference) is from Dimitri Gielis’ blog a talking about the recent upgrades to the Oracle hosted Apex environment to the latest 3.1 release. I think its really great that Oracle is releasing the software to developers on this site as a sort of “public beta” before releasing it to the masses. Its a great way to drum up some free testing and buzz around the product before it’s released. The jDeveloper team has been doing this with the technical previews, I would love to see Oracle do this with all of their software in pre-built virtual machines, I know its tough with the licensing and the fact that features may change before the production releases, but I think people can get beyond that to get their hands onto the software earlier. And finally…
5. The last on the list was really a tie between a lot of the “8 Things” blogs that Jake started here. The “craze” really caught on and as one of the original people Jake tagged I still haven’t finished my eight. It’s not that I’m not going to do it, I just haven’t had the time to put it together. I promise it’ll be done by the end of this week, just in time to send Howard back into a frenzy. The “craze” started some backlash with a couple bloggers calling it spam and complaining that it was filling up their feed readers with garbage posts. You can see how “crazy” it got by putting “8 things” into Eddie’s OraNA.info search. This doesn’t even cover all of them, because of the backlash Jake felt it necessary to post a little about why he started the whole thread. I tend to agree with Jake that its all in good fun and doesn’t hurt anyone, as a matter of fact I think its a good idea that we put a page on the official Oracle Wiki tracking everyone’s responses. It would be great to track all of them over time.

Well that’s it for review #1 of the ora-click top stories. Maybe in the future we’ll turn this into a podcast inviting the top posters for a discussion each week. Let me know in the comments if you think thats a good idea. Look for me to start posting this on its regularly scheduled time on Thursday nights giving people something to read right before the weekend or first thing Monday morning recapping the week’s best posts in the Oracle world.

PS- The WordPress plug-in is still coming soon, I just haven’t had a chance to finish it yet, still getting back into the swing of things.