Solr has a snazzy new website!
A couple of comments though:
Features
The Features page starts with impressive svg icons but aren’t hyperlinks to more information on the page or elsewhere. Seems like a wasted opportunity to navigate to deeper information about that particular feature.
Further down on Features there are large bands that headline “detailed features,” which don’t correspond to the features named in the SVG icons, although in addition to brief text, they offer hyperlinks to the Solr Ref Guide.
Inserting Solr Ref Guide links for the more detailed SVG icons would accord with my expectations for such a page. You?
Would you still need the no particular order “detailed features?”
Resources
The Resources cites very high quality materials but it seems a bit sparse considering the wide usage of Solr.
Moreover, I’m not sure the search links to Slideshare, Lucene/Solr Revolution, YouTube and Vimeo are as useful as possible.
The Search *** for Solr links with comments:
Varying results. The URL http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?&q=solr returns 5769 “hits” consistently. However, if you substitute the entity reference for &, that is & in the string between the “?” and “q”, the results are 4243 “hits” consistently.
I discovered the difference because I used the resolved entity reference in the URL for this post and checking the link gave a different answer than the URL at the Solr page.
The general search results are in no particular date order. Add a date to your “Solr” search string to narrow the results down. Adding 2012 to the search string gives one thousand one hundred and seventy-five (1,175) “hits.” Not that I would want to search that many presentations for one relevant to a particular issue. Curated indexing would make a vast difference in the usefulness of Slideshare.
Lucene/Solr Revolution Videos from Past Events
Prime content for Lucene/Solr and yearly organization helps you guess at which Lucene/Solr version is likely to be covered. Eight conferences and there is no index by across the years by concept, issue, etc. Happy hunting!
Ten thousand and six hundred (10,600) “hits” where the first “hit” is four years old. Yeah. Searching YouTube is like flushing a toilet and hoping something interesting comes into view.
At a minimum, use Vimeo Solr search sorted by date link which gives you the videos sorted by upload date. YouTube does have within N time but it only goes to one year and no ranges.
Two hundred and seventy-two (272) “hits” with the top ones being two (2) and five (5) years ago. Certainly not in date order.
At a minimum, use: Vimeo Solr search sorted by date link instead.
Be aware that slides and videos resources tend to overlap so you are likely to have to dedupe your results with every use.
A deduped and curated index of Lucene/Solr resources would be a real boon to developers/users.
Update: November 16, 2014. Apparently other people shared my concerns over the homepage and it is now substantially better than I reported above. Alas, the search links I mention remain as reported.