Blogging about the Blog Platform

MSDN/TechNet Leaderboards Now Live!

Sean Jenkin — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 18:53:00 GMT

As per my previous posts, we've finished the integration of the MSDN and TechNet Blogs into the Profile and Recognition system, allowing us to recognize the contributions from bloggers, commentators and raters. Now that the data is flowing in, we've been able to take advantage of a new feature from the recognition system, Leaderboards.

To get things started and to get some eyes onto the leaderboards, we've put 3 leaderboards for each MSDN and TechNet on the blog sites and they are available here (which is also the View All Blog Posts pages):

MSDN: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/default.aspx?PageIndex=1
TechNet: http://blogs.technet.com/b/default.aspx?PageIndex=1

The leaderboards are as follows:

Most Active Contributors: Count of Blog Posts + Blog Comments + Ratings on posts over the past 30 days.
Most Active Commentators: Count of Comments in the past 30 days (with the expectation that more of the non-blog authors will appear on this list).
Popular Post Contributors: Recognition Points earned in the past 5 days. Points are earned based on the quality and viewership of the posts and hence will shift regularly.

Note: The leaderboards will update daily so keep a watch to see who are the movers and shakers!

Congratulations to our first set of leaderboard contributors:

If you have any feedback, comment below. We'd love to hear it!

Recognition Across the Network

Sean Jenkin — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:54:46 GMT

If you’ve been paying attention to the MSDN or TechNet Blogs and Forums or the TechNet Wiki over the past week you may have seen some changes that include little hovering user profile cards and a new recognition system. I’ve mentioned it before but after a mighty effort by many teams last week, the major web sites across MSDN and TechNet are now running on one shared recognition system.

The new recognition system is using a “two-economy” approach. One, Recognition Points which are only earned when someone else in the community validates the quality of your contribution (downloads, votes, marked as answer, page views) and two, Achievements which are earned by general participation in the different apps. We have more details on the economies here if you want more information…

We are going to share more specific details as time goes on, like exactly what earns recognition points, what earns achievements etc. For now though we are watching the recognition system to make sure things are running as expected, our algorithms are working as planned and the integrated platforms continue to perform well.

For today though I’d like to share a little about the integration into the blogs itself. Firstly, if you hover over the authors name above a post you’ll see more details about the user including their avatar, name, affiliations (MSFT or MVP etc.). You’ll also see their total recognition points as earned across the network and the achievements they earned participating in the community. For those people who write comments while signed in, you’ll be able to do the same thing. Hopefully this helps you as a reader to better understand those who are long-term quality contributors vs. those just new to the sites.

If you watch closely over the next few weeks you’ll probably see your favorite blog authors points continuing to rise. We are in the process of replaying all blog activity since 2002 and are somewhere in 2006 right now so we have a lot still to process. Once that replay is done, things will settle down and it’ll be more obvious when blog authors are contributing quality content that perhaps we should be paying attention too.

“What about me, I’m not a blog author?” – true, the option to earn recognition points is currently restricted on the blogs to Microsoft Employees who can author on a blog. But we’ve got a few other ways for our blog readers to earn some achievements. Those include commenting on a blog post and rating blog posts. We have a few achievements at different levels for these interactions.

Now, as the title of the blog post suggests, we have been working to bring recognition across the entire network. You’ll now find Forums, Galleries, Blogs and the TechNet Wiki are all reporting your activities to your profile. You can build your own recognition up by contributing and participating across these applications in various ways. We are also working on integrating the Library and Silverlight.Net sites into the system and hope to have those online in the next few months.

We’ll also be continuing to expand the recognition system to give you deeper stats on how you earn your points, in what technology space, when you earned them etc. We are also looking into the social graphs that are being created as people interact with one another, tracking your favorite topics and working out potentially what a personalization story might look like.

Lots more to come and I hope you’ll stay and be part of the journey!

Too nice to work!

Sean Jenkin — Fri, 20 May 2011 17:39:00 GMT

When a day comes along that looks like this out my office window... well let's just say I'd work a rainy Saturday to trade for being outside today ;-)

Time for some noise again...

Sean Jenkin — Sat, 07 May 2011 00:11:00 GMT

Well folks I'm back. I've been busy working on a whole slew of things around MSDN and TechNet including these blogs, our TechNet Wiki and our central profile system. You may have noticed if you've viewed your profile lately that we are in the process of introducing a new MSDN/TechNet/Expression technical profile and recognition system. We are working towards ensuring all you actively do across our properties of applications and sites is recognized and you are rewarded for your involvement. But more on that in another post later...

For now, I wanted to drop a quick line to talk about the blog platform upgrade we did last week. We made the move from Telligent Community Server 5.5 to the 5.6 release. A point release, should be easy eh? :) HA!. If we were using the platform straight out of the box, no customizations, maybe. But when you've got a whole bunch of dependencies, integrations, customizations, features that people forget about, 10,000+ blogs and the end of a long, dark, cold and rainy winter, well it takes some work. So I gotta say a big thanks to the team here who work with me on the blogs. John, Justin, Claire, Cindy, Sakthi, Sukesh, Sankar, Pam; well you guys just rock. Thanks for putting in the hours getting this release in place. Big thanks to Roger, Brian, Rich and Kelly at Telligent for their on-going support for us as well!

The changes are generally geared toward our blog authors but in the end that also benefits you. Here are some of the changes:

It's now much easier for our bloggers to incorporate content beyond text and images. Silverlight, JScript examples, TechNet and MSDN Videos and other rich media will work a lot better.
We also had reports about folks getting stuck in infinite Live ID Login loops. We believe we have this fixed. If you see it, please use the site feedback link on the home page and let us know.
Prior to this release we would serve RSS feeds either from the database or from the ASP.Net Cache. We now store the RSS in files that are updated within seconds of a blog post being published or changed. This means our Web Servers and DBs are far less taxed than before. RSS traffic represents about 20x our regular page view traffic so this is a huge improvement. As a specific example, while our DB is running about the same CPU levels at peak times, the actual requests per second we are handling has trippled. That's pretty impressive.
RSS feeds for comments per blog post are available.

In about 6 weeks, the blogs will be releasing again. At that time we will integrate into the new recognition system I mentioned earlier. If a blog author posts an article it'll appear on their profile. If you comment that'll appear on your profile (assuming you log in). There will be other actions and ways to earn recognition points and achievements by being an active member of this community. More information about the new system is available here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/ff395928.aspx

Have a great weekend. I hear the sun might show itself around here! Oh and it's mother's day here in the USA (and Australia where my mum is) - so here's to your mum's! :)

It's a bit quiet...

Sean Jenkin — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 18:18:00 GMT

It's been a few months again... bad me.

Anyway, the team is busy working on upgrading the underlying platform to the next version of Telligent Community Server (5.6). There are some infrastructure changes that need to be completed as part of this upgrade so it's going to take until the end of March to get that done. The new platform will give us a few new features, some more stability / performance and a few more pieces of functionality for our blog authors. When we get closer to release, I'll outline those in more detail.

As we look forward, we are going to continue our integration with the MSDN and TechNet Networks going deeper with activity integration and the upcoming release of our new recognition system. The recognition system is currently being tested in the new MSDN Code Gallery and will make it's way over to blogs, the TechNet Wiki, and eventually merge with the Forums recognition system. More details about that in the coming months.

I also want to recognize all the feedback we've received over the past few months. We hear you loud and clear about getting locale filtering on blog feeds, so that's in the plans for FY12. As we do some more FY12 planning we'll let you know our plans so you can give us feedback.

Thanks,
Sean

December Update for the Blogs

Sean Jenkin — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Earlier today we released an update to the MSDN and TechNet blogs. Some of these features are customer facing so I wanted to make sure to share these changes with y’all.

Localization: Spanish, German, Japanese

We are very excited to introduce Spanish, German and Japanese UI localization on the Blogs. This is a very important step as we increase the globalization of MSDN and TechNet. Please note that not all UI is localized as our blog authors can customize the UI which the platform doesn’t auto-localize. Language selection is currently accomplished very simply through your browser language settings. There is not currently a method for toggling this in the UI.

Note: Localized UI will only appear for users who are signed into the blogs. The language preference is stored connected to the user account. We hope to bring localized UI to anonymous readers of the blog shortly.

Example of localized Japanese UI

Comment Anchors

We’ve dropped a new commenting control to our bloggers which includes being able to permalink directly to a comment. Look for the hash (#) tag next to your comment to get the link.

Terms of Use

MSDN, TechNet and Expression sites will be moving on December 8^th to a single Terms of Use, shared across those properties. The blogs have been updated to point to this new Terms of Use and you’ll see the new TOU content once live.

We’ll back back in 2011 with continued improvements to ensure you get all the Microsoft news right here on the MSDN and TechNet Blogs.

Thanks!
Sean

Yo, it's been a while....

Sean Jenkin — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 06:39:00 GMT

So apparently I wasn't just right back and it's been 5 months since I blogged. Oh how time flies.

Anyway, updates to the blog platform are still taking place. Over the past few months we've been working pretty hard to update the performance of the MSDN and TechNet blogs. We'll see even more performance fixes continuing to be deployed over the coming months and we continue to push the scale of this platform.

I want to give a big shout-out to Telligent (http://www.telligent.com) who are the major force behind our blogging platform - many of their staff have worked many hours recently to ensure these blogs are up, stable and fully featured for our blog writers and blog readers.

Besides perf and bug fixes, we've been preparing some new features for y'all. First up is localization of the core UI elements. Initially we'll be rolling out German, Spanish and Japanese. We'll add more languages as time and priorities permits. We'll be tracking to see just how many people are actually viewing the site in localized UI modes as well. You'll get the localized UI if your browser is set to use one of the supported languages...

I'll post about other features as we get closer to deploying them. We are also working on what's to come in 2011 so hopefully we can share some of that in the new year (things like aggregated RSS for groups of blogs, filtering by language of blogs, RSS feed improvements, merging user profiles and membership with the rest of the MSDN/TechNet sites, activity tracking etc.). If you have feature requests, please use the site feedback link on the site home page and let us know!

Thanks!

Bytes by MSDN and TechNet

Sean Jenkin — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:12:00 GMT

Shameless cross-team promotion today... that and I did the little bytes by TN graphic intro ;-)

I will be back real soon with posts about the blog platform, FY11 plans, upcoming features etc...

---

Just wanting to raise awareness of this series of interviews with community developers and IT Pros...

Bytes by MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/bytes.aspx)

Listen or watch 18 influential community and Microsoft developers interviewed at Tech·Ed 2010 talk about mobile, the cloud, the client, and a variety of additional topics that they are passionate about. Check back weekly for the next installment in the series or subscribe and take it on the go.

BYTES by TechNet (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bytesbytechnet.aspx)

IT Professional Evangelists Keith Combs, Chris Henley, Matt Hester and Harold Wong interviewed 19 influential IT Professionals from Community and Microsoft at TechEd NA 2010 about Windows 7, Windows Server, Windows Azure, SQL Azure, BPOS, SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, Exchange Server 2010 and SQL Server 2008 and a variety of additional topics that they are passionate about.

Listen or watch interviews and check back weekly for the new installment in the series or subscribe to the RSS feed and take it on the go.

Bytes by MSDN and TechNet: Listen in on our latest series of interviews!

Listen in as Bytes by MSDN & TN interviews the brightest and the best amidst the developer and IT Pro community and Microsoft. Each interview shares tidbits on the latest technologies and announcements, providing you resources to keep your skills cutting edge! Check out our latest series!

Or, feel free to join:

Join the Bytes by MSDN Facebook Fan page!
Follow us on Twitter and Retweet!
Subscribe to the RSS feed

Web Camps Training Kit

Sean Jenkin — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:18:00 GMT

(passing along some great resources we are releasing today for free...)

Today, we are releasing the Web Camps Training Kit: July 2010 Edition - Download it here.

The kit includes all the content we presented around the world at the recent Web Camps events; presentations, demos, labs and more. Inside the new kit you'll find content that covers the following technologies:

ASP.NET MVC 2
ASP.NET 4 Web Forms
jQuery
Entity Framework
Visual Studio 2010
Deployment

We've also included the agenda so if you want to run your own Web Camp with some of our content, you can do that. Let the team know if you are planning to run your own - we'll help get the word out (webcamps [at] microsoft.com).

As a bonus we've also included scenario based content which comes in the form of complimentary slides, demos, demo scripts and hands-on-labs. These scenarios show you how to take your own web application from an idea and prototype all the way to getting more visitors and optimizing for performance using the Microsoft Web Platform and other technologies from Microsoft.

Prototyping Your Web App
Building Your Web App
Enhancing Your Web App
Getting More Visitors to your Web App
Optimizing Your Web App for High Performance

We are going to be adding new scenarios as well as fresh content covering the latest on WebMatrix, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, jQuery and more as well as brand new Web Camps! Stay tuned! Again, we're open to hearing your feedback and requests - if there is anything you would like to see in the next version of the training kit, let us know (webcamps [at] microsoft.com).

Windows Phone 7 Design Resources – UI Guide and Design Templates

Sean Jenkin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:39:43 GMT

Hey, they are giving me a free phone later in the year - the least I can do is pass on some blog posts to y'all... that said, I am into graphic design and so am definitely interested in hearing what you have to say about the "metro" design they are building for the phone...

With the Windows Phone Developer Tools in beta and Windows Phone 7 in technical preview, now is the time to build Windows Phone 7 apps in earnest, and we have refreshed our Design Resources for developers and designers to help you build beautiful apps.

The UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7 v2.0 has been updated for beta. With additional information and a new layout we hope you will find more readable, this guide provides detailed information about UI elements and controls, UI system behaviors, and the interaction model for the touch interface based on the design system codenamed “Metro”. Designers and developers should read this guide to learn about the dos and don’ts of UI implementations for their Windows Phone applications.

The Design Templates for Windows Phone 7 are a collection of 28 layered Photoshop template files and system fonts that can be used to create pixel-perfect application layouts, to help guide UI development, or to pitch an idea. These design templates showcase many controls that are a part of the Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta. They also include examples of controls that are a part of Windows Phone, but are not available as a part of the Windows Phone Developer Tools.

Let us know what you think. If you have suggestions or feedback about these design resources, please email us at wp7des@microsoft.com.

June Update Coming Tuesday Afternoon

Sean Jenkin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:43:48 GMT

Folks, just a short post to alert you that the June update for the MSDN and TechNet blogs is coming out on Tuesday afternoon (6/29). There is no expected downtime though if we blip for a few moments be patient… :)

Here are a few of the bigger things you may notice:

MSDN Site Theme – with the new UI/UX coming to the http://msdn.microsoft.com web site the MSDN blogs will be updated to match it. You can learn more about the main MSDN site theme changeover here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ff772739.aspx
Blog Home Pages – we’ve been listening to the feedback and we’ve created some new home pages. The focus is to help you find new content, popular content and to spotlight what’s happening at Microsoft. This will be an on-going process so keep providing the feedback…
Search a single blog – You’ll find two radio buttons on the search widget within a blog. This will allow you to search the contents of just that particular blog or within all the blogs on the site.
Font Scaling – All the header and body text has been changed from fixed size to variable based on your DPI and text zoom level.

And some of the smaller ones:

Not all blog articles were printing completely
The Live ID components were leaving useless HTML in the page.
Can’t access the password reset page without being already authenticated.
“Home” in breadcrumbs and blog options replaced with more content aware text.
Some blogs wouldn’t display the horizontal scrollbar when the content was wider than the browser.
Paging numbers were small and not mobile friendly.
Rolling blog post list didn’t visibly show which posts you’d visited before.
Extended characters weren’t being handled correctly in the social media syndication control.
RSS feed was only showing 15 items instead of 25.
No watermarking in main search box.
No indication in main nav menu that you were in the blogs section of MSDN or TechNet.
Default discovered feed in a blog was returning an error.
We’ve made it easier for our blog authors to include the Microsoft Translation widget.
We’ve made it easier for our blog authors to include code that has syntax highlighting.
A number of performance improvements (though that’s been on-going and will continue to be on-going)
and a bunch of other things that are for the blog authors only…

We are also moving into our FY11 planning at the moment and in July I’ll post some of the main scenarios and large features we are looking at. Will be looking for your feedback at that time to help improve and evolve the blog platforms!

Thanks,
Sean

The June Blog Platform Update…

Sean Jenkin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:50:00 GMT

Just a quick post to let folks know we are working on our next update. Some of the fixes are targeted at just the blog writers but we wanted to address some of the immediate feedback we got after doing the upgrade to the blog platform as well.

This is not the complete list, just a few things that come to mind:

Search within a Blog will be online.
Link color change for read posts in the rolling blog post list.
The Microsoft Translation Widget should be available in many more blogs. So for folks who want to translate content, this should be useful.
Paging numbers for comments and the rolling blog post list will be made bigger and more finger friendly for mobile viewers.
Changing the font size CSS away from a fixed size on the default themes.
Changing “Home” in the breadcrumbs to something less confusing (since there are 3 Homes displayed at times, also we’ll be highlighting the blogs tab so you know where you are…)
Adding back a few more redirects to RSS and ATOM feeds that got lost. (actually, this is now fixed)
Search handling extended characters (actually, this is now fixed)

Here’s a few items of that I’m hearing over and over that we’ll look at addressing in the future:

Language selection and filtering for blogs, blog posts and the rolling blog post list.
More options and larger page sizes for the rolling blog post list.
Default RSS feed on a blog leads to nowhere (we actually hope to have that fixed in the next update…)
Extended characters not always rendering correctly in emails.
Performance of the blogs. We are always going to be looking at scenarios where we can improve performance.
HTML rendering. We’ll keep looking for places we need to fix and fix them over time.

Look for the update by the end of the month things going to plan. Hopefully in July I’ll be able to share more of the FY11 plans for the blogs and be able to get your feedback on our directions.

In the mean time be sure to check out the announcements and releases from Microsoft on Kinect for Xbox 360 and Office 2010 this week!

Thanks,
Sean

The aftermath of the blog platform migration

Sean Jenkin — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 02:58:00 GMT

Well that was one long, long week…

My plan following the upgrade was to post about how it went and to introduce everyone to the new features of the site. And now it’s 9 days later… oh well, you live, you learn, you try to get some sleep once in a while.

I’m going to share some details with you but in return for that I’m also going to turn off anonymous commenting to this blog. If you want to say something, don’t hide and be anonymous. Step up and show your face rather than being a troll in the dark. I think it’s only fair that if I’m honest, you’re honest too.

D-Day… that’d be deployment day

The day started out really well. We had all the bits and pieces in place and ready to do our final deployment. Our bloggers had spent time over the weekend getting their updated designs in place and making sure their content was up to date. We began the deployment around 12pm and started deploying the final bits. Shortly after that we flipped the switch to let you, our blog readers in on the new design… and that is when things didn’t go exactly to Plan A. Well, Plan A for MSDN. The TechNet blogs didn’t really run into much trouble – we deployed, and given the scope of the content and the visitors, we were able to stay up and remain online…

However, MSDN blogs was another story. Over the next 20-30 minutes we saw our SQL Server (really sweet piece of hardware) start to get backed up with queries. That in turn backed up the web servers and before we knew it we were locking people out of the site. We removed a few widgets from the site that we knew could have an impact to performance and it helped a bit… but not enough.

We kicked into investigation mode while discussing in the background how long we had before we rolled back to the old version of the blogs. Yes, that was in our list of plans should things not get resolved quickly. We care about our bloggers internally and you our blog readers.

As we looked at the SQL traces and the site setup we found a page within the site that contained a full site tag cloud. The page was in the out-of-the-box platform deployment and just happened to be sitting at a URL the previous version of the blogs had registered with the search engines. Well, bad timing and all and the search engines decided that crawling that page right as we were going live was the best idea they’d had all day. Well every tag in the site turns out to be a lot for the MSDN Blogs and the resulting search crawl turned browsing the blogs into a crawl. Once we removed that page, things settled down for us.

After that we saw one more spike that afternoon. We have a full suite of analytics installed with the blogs. And we’d been running those for weeks without any issues. However after the search engines began their crawl the analytics system wanted to process all those page views and activity and that shot the analytics into overdrive. While the blogs remained online, we certainly were suffering from some very slow page loads. We’ve since moved any batch processing of the analytics into replicated databases to avoid this issue moving forward. Lessons learned.

Well after that we started to settle down. Well sort of. When a new blogging platform comes online not only does everyone outside Microsoft want to look at it, the 15,000 or so bloggers we have internally all decided it was time to post new articles. You just can’t script a movie story line like this. Anyway, all those bloggers posting and updating the blog designs took a bit of a toll on the system as well.

Finally around 4am I went home. Exhausted but at least we had the blogs migrated and accessible…

The days that followed…

We spent the next few days working through additional performance investigations and listening to the literally hundreds of people telling us how much we sucked for moving their cheese. We heard complaints about the W3C validation. We heard complaints about the rolling blog post list no longer existing. Heck, I think I even saw a few demands for someone to be fired… eeek!

Clearly folks are passionate about reading the blogs, which is great. However contrast what was going on outside the blogs and you come to realize this is all just very small. Oil was pouring out of the Gulf of Mexico and BP couldn’t stop it – if I thought I was getting harassed, I can’t imagine what they are dealing with. A 1000 dead Americans in the war. I even contrast it to my wife… she’s a counselor and she is dealing with 16 year olds who have no real home, no family support and are pregnant. Again, the blogs… small, really small in comparison to what’s going on in the rest of the world.

So over the past week we’ve assisted our bloggers get used to the new system. We’ve also deployed some performance fixes to both the blog sites. You should find both are now performing quite well even under load. We aren’t done but at least we are stable.

And today we’ve been able to bring back the rolling blog post list. No, it’s not on the home page – but it’s linked off there so it’s easy to get to. There were clearly some people very mad about this functionality not being online – however it was one of the casualties of the early performance issues we experienced. We tweaked a few SQL indexes and now the control is back. For some of you this is the only thing you cared about on the entire blog site – but based on our metrics, you’re in the minority. Most people find the blog content through search (external and internal to the blogs) and by direct visits to a blog. Anyway, it’s back now so hopefully that’ll help you sleep at night.

What’s up with the home page?

The home page has been updated to move beyond just the rolling blog post list. As a landing page to the blogs, new visitors need to land softly. The old home page, while clearly useful for some, actually was one of the weirdest experiences for new users I’ve seen. It didn’t even look like MSDN or TechNet. The traffic to the home page told a clear story – yes, some folks landed there, but that was less than 1% of our traffic. We have many blogs that receive more traffic than that. And if we wanted to move the blogs on to 2010, then we needed to look at the data and adjust from there. Which we’ll continue to do…

So we have a few things on the home pages now…

An editorial section. Right now there is a welcome message. As time goes on we’ll be updating that to be in alignment with spotlights and features from the corresponding MSDN and TechNet sites. We’ve clearly heard the feedback that we need to remove the silo’s of information and this is one step forward to bring consistency between our applications and sites.
Recent Blog Posts. The recent blog posts is a fast way to see what’s been posted recently and expand the reach of the RSS feed for the blogs. Many, many people follow the blogs solely via RSS and that’s great. We want to encourage that. You’ll now find the link to the rolling blog post list at the bottom of the Recent Blog Post widget.
Recent Site Activity. This lets you know what’s going on in the site, with the people you’re following and the activity you’ve performed. Perhaps you commented on a blog but can’t remember which one, just look at your activity and you’ll be quick to return. Again, as a landing page for the blogs this allows people to see the site is active and not be overwhelmed by a never ending list of posts.

If you’re one of those who just want to the old blog post list back then use the new rolling blog post list page. There is nothing else on the page to distract you. Enjoy. :-)

What’s next?

So at this point we’ve got the new blog site where we expected it to be about a week ago. We’ll be updating the help pages and finally getting to talk about the new features. Our bloggers are mostly up to speed now and I’m seeing a lot of posts come out daily which is great.

So what’s next… well we are working on the next update which should be out in a couple of weeks from now. This should include:

Bug Fixes: Yep, there are bugs. We’ve been logging them and we are working on fixing them.
Performance Improvements: There is still yet more performance we can wring out of this platform. We’re analyzing load times, SQL traces, CSS and HTML to reduce what we can.
Search within a Blog: Right now if you search while viewing a blog, you’ll get search results from all blogs. That seems like a great idea if you’re just looking for an answer if you don’t care where it comes from. But we also know searching within a blog is a great feature so that’s on the schedule as well.
Default discovered RSS Feed on a Blog: Right now it’s broken. It points to a search RSS feed that doesn’t exist. This one slipped through. We’ll correct this to be the posts for a blog.
A few new widgets: Our bloggers will have a few new widgets to use including a standard code syntax highlighter along with the Microsoft Translation widget.
Validation of HTML: We have identified a few issues with the HTML being output. We’ll fix those over time as we can.

Ok, with that I’m definitely late for dinner. Hopefully this post won’t cause a riot and we can have constructive conversations about the blogs, not just shouting, flaming abuse sent my way. I want to listen and I want the blogs to be a great place for all of us. Let’s keep the talk respectful and the comments on topic and we can move forward together…

Thanks,
Sean

MSDN and TechNet Blog Migration - Friday Update

Sean Jenkin — Sat, 22 May 2010 04:50:00 GMT

Now where was I? Oh yeah, that's right, deploying the final bits!

Today has been a great day. We began around 9:30am bringing online the migrated data and moving the migrated files into position. We also deployed the final web bits, updated our backend services, confirmed analytics was still in good shape and finally kicked off the search indexing.

After that we finalized site configuration settings, enabled our spam filters, turned on Windows Live ID, and did a light test pass across the site to ensure everything was in it's expected place. I use expected and not right because like in all software there are quirks and bugs. We'll fix 'em but at this point it's just as important to know where they are...

From there it was time to share the good news with the bloggers. They now have Saturday and Sunday to import their blog designs and complete any other work before we flip the sites over on Monday.

It's been quite a journey from when I joined this project (an eternity ago on December 16th 2009) and now our first real upgrade in 5 years is almost done. I'm super looking forward to moving on to monthly sprints and shipping incrementally the features our bloggers and you, our readers are already requesting.

Have a great weekend and we'll see you on the flip side!

MSDN and TechNet Blog Migration – Thursday Update

Sean Jenkin — Fri, 21 May 2010 06:00:00 GMT

On Track. It Is.

We completed and packaged our final build of the web application bits today. Site themes are done. MSDN and TechNet blog themes are done.

So Friday we begin the final deployment of the web bits and the migrated data. So perhaps your next question is, why are we going live on Monday and not Friday? It’s pretty easy to explain:

It’s a Friday and going live on a Friday is not really a good idea. It sure ruin’s the plans of those who actually want a weekend when things go wrong :)
With the millions of posts, users, images and files our integrated search needs a couple of days to catch up. The last thing we want to do is turn on the new platform and the search return zero results. That’s just dumb. :)
Many of our bloggers have been working hard on their blog designs – every day I see a blog that’s getting close to done and I’m awed at the awesome design and experience our bloggers are putting together. Anyway, I digress – the bloggers need some time to get their new designs imported into the new platform before we switch it on. That’s this weekend as well.

Anyway, we are almost there. Monday will be here soon and this will all be just a dream…

MSDN and TechNet Blog Migration – Wednesday Update

Sean Jenkin — Thu, 20 May 2010 06:02:00 GMT

Who would have thought that my little blog post and the blog migration would have been picked up by the press...?

It’s always interesting to hear what others think and we genuinely appreciate any feedback we receive. Good or bad, we won’t grow, change and get better if we live in a vacuum and ignore what others think...

Given that, I understand what Dave Methvin at InformationWeek is writing about. Yes, the cloud is where it's at. No doubt. We are preaching it. We are (mostly) living it. However there are still a lot of legacy systems out there and the MSDN and TechNet blog platform is one of them. The copyright on the software is from 2006. But I've seen the binaries and many of those are from well before that time. Most of this platform is 5-6 years old and the cloud from back then is not the same cloud that we have today...

Dave got one thing wrong though. We aren't in complete read-only mode. The only thing that's not online right now is submitting comments. If you look at the blog roll from the past 3 days you'll see hundreds and hundreds of posts. In fact, I'd venture to say there might be more posts this week than previous weeks. Yes, we asked all our bloggers to get their posts written and into the system before the data migration began. That just makes the migration easier for everyone. But we didn't stop our bloggers writing new posts if they needed to. I'm writing and publishing this post on Wednesday night while the migration is going on. Clearly we aren't that offline.

As to exposing our version- or feature-oriented view of software, this blog platform upgrade will actually result in us moving further away from that view (if it exists in the first place). We just couldn’t iterate on the old source base in any sort of agile or service-oriented way. With the new platform in place we’ll be updating the blog platform monthly with no down-time. Again, we just couldn’t do that with the legacy platform.

Anyway, with that, I’ll get off my soapbox and get back to finishing this platform upgrade...

Speaking of which – everything remains on track. Data is through the pipeline and we are slaving the night away testing. Final web bits go to pre-production tomorrow for final verification and then on to the production roll out!

Have a great morning, afternoon, evening, or night wherever you are!

Sean

MSDN and TechNet Blog Migration – Tuesday Update

Sean Jenkin — Wed, 19 May 2010 04:00:00 GMT

Data migration continued on schedule today and we are optimistic that everything will complete as planned. It’s good to see that our multiple dry-run tests of the data migration process have paid off with a smooth (knock on wood) production run so far!

Today we also completed the first part of the web site application deployment. This included deploying the base blogging platform and confirming our new production environment is all hooked up. We now have our IIS and SQL Servers in place, our fileservers setup, background task jobs running and the new analytics package configured ready to start collecting data!

We’ve also been working hard with our blog authors to make sure their updated blog designs are going to be ready for next week. It’s great to see a large blogging community at Microsoft working together on making the best blogs they can for all of you, our readers, partners, customers and friends.

To go along with the MSDN blog theme from yesterday, here is a look at the new TechNet blog theme – this is a blogs home page with excerpts of the posts, searching, tags, comments etc.

Blog on!

MSDN and TechNet Blog Migration – Monday Update

Sean Jenkin — Tue, 18 May 2010 05:00:00 GMT

Many thanks to the blog authors who have been helping to spread the word about the migration. Hopefully y’all surviving not commenting on the posts that have been published today… ;-)

So far, so good with the data migration progress. The many, many gigabytes of data in the databases along with the photos, images, attachments are making their way through the upgrade pipeline. Even with high-end servers we’ve still got quite a few days of processing to go...

On Tuesday we begin the process of deploying the web application files and confirming our new production environment is all hooked up. We have quite a few IIS servers to setup, large file servers to deploy, background task services to configure and a comprehensive analytics system to verify. It should be quite the day! :)

To wrap up this post here’s a sneak peek at the new MSDN default blog theme taking from a random blog I clicked on in our test environment tonight... Pretty sweet eh? :)

Until tomorrow…

MSDN and TechNet Blog Migration Has Begun...

Sean Jenkin — Mon, 17 May 2010 04:00:00 GMT

As I've mentioned in a few posts last week (and other bloggers on MSDN and TechNet have shared), the blog migration is getting underway tonight. As this post goes live we are backing up the millions of posts, users, comments, images, files and profiles to begin the journey to the new platform.

You should now find the comments on all blogs have been turned off though if you need to contact the blog authors many of them have a "email blog author" link on their blogs - feel free to use it.

As the week goes on, I'll try to provide more insight into just what's happening in the migration, more details on the new features and anything else that might be interesting for folks to know.

This is a big, big migration (and long overdue) so we thank you in advance for your patience and grace as this move takes place!

Thanks!

During the upgrade of the blogging platform...

Sean Jenkin — Wed, 12 May 2010 19:28:00 GMT

The upgrade to the blogging platform will begin on Sunday May 16th at about 9pm PDST. With the amount of data we need to migrate, it's going to be May 24th around 12pm PDST before everything is back online.

During that time commenting will be turned off across the blogs. All blogs will however remain online and you may see new posts if our bloggers have saved articles with future publishing dates before the cut-off time.

During the migration, I'll post daily updates to this blog incase you're that interested in things ;-)

What’s in the new blogging platform for me?

Sean Jenkin — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:15:00 GMT

Great question… while the majority of changes really impact and affect the blog writers and authors, there are some changes you, the blog reader will see. Let’s get into them…

Home Pages – the home pages have been updated to reflect the current MSDN and TechNet site home pages. Menu’s, graphics, navigation etc. will all be the same.
Home Page Content – Rather than just a rolling list of blog posts (which we’ll still have), you’ll also be offered the ability to search content, search for blogs, view site activity and be connected to the larger MSDN and TechNet sites via cross-promotional events.
RSS / ATOM Feeds – we know our RSS feeds have been slow. Not minutes slow, but hours and occasionally days slow. RSS feeds will now be far more up to date and timely.
More RSS Feeds – not only for the site, or for a blog, or for comments but for blog authors, friends, and community activity.
MSDN and TechNet Blog themes – for the majority of blogs you visit, what you’ll see will also be in line with the MSDN and TechNet site design. Many of our bloggers though have built a custom design and brand over the years so you’ll still see those too.
Integrated Site Search – in the platform today you search using a pop-up Bing window that sometimes gets you what you want. In the new platform, the search is an integrated solution within the platform. One search will let you find content across all the MSDN or TechNet blogs and allow you to then subscribe via RSS to those search results so you can be informed of the content at any time.
Friends, activity and profiles – the profile system has been overhauled. You can now follow other people, track your activity and others and build a community of people in the blog sites.
Captcha – we’ve been criticized for the Captcha on the current site. You’ll find that experience to be much improved on the new platform…
Better content – we are enabling our blog authors to directly embed videos, Silverlight and other dynamic content into their blog posts.
Less HTML hacks – we’ve brought the site up closer to HTML standards and our blog authors can more easily manage the source that is being output.
Built-in Social Syndication – standard on all blog posts will be the ability to share the content to your favorite social sites such as facebook, twitter, digg etc.
Translation Control – we are working to enable machine translation on all blogs so that readers from all countries and languages can keep up with the blogs.
Breadcrumbs – across all blogs there will be breadcrumbs to allow you to navigate up through posts to a blog home and then to the site home overall.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of the overall platform changes. Hopefully these are welcome additions and help make your experience on the blogs a great one!

More information tomorrow!

Thanks
Sean

MSDN and TechNet Blog Platform Upgrades Coming Soon...

Sean Jenkin — Tue, 11 May 2010 00:01:00 GMT

Hi, I'm the PM for the MSDN and TechNet blogs. And in just two weeks from now we are going to be migrating to an entirely new blog platform. Over the next week I'm going to introduce you to that platform.

First though, there are some things you should know.

Between 5/16 and 5/24, you'll probably see a dip in blog posts as blog authors take a break from posting while we bring the new system online and migrate all the old blog posts.
Comments will be disabled between 5/16 @ 8:30pm PDST and 5/24 @ 12pm PDST. Sorry, but it's that or lose all your witty banter :)
We'll finally have home pages and blog themes that look like they belong to Microsoft. Well mostly - bloggers will still be free to customize their designs...
We are switching to Windows Live ID for login. You'll be able to associate your existing blog account to the Windows Live ID account the first time you log in.
Your profile will remain unique to the individual blog platform and from MSDN or TechNet. During the second half of 2010, we'll be integrating those into a single profile system.

And with all that to digest I'll see you tomorrow where we'll talk about the new home page and some of the new features, you as a blog reader can come to expect!

Here's comes the TechNet 2.0 experience...

Sean Jenkin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:06:00 GMT

Check out the new series about the updates coming for TechNet!

http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2010/02/02/technet-2-0-episode-1-core-scenarios-and-branding.aspx

A blog about a purple Image

Sean Jenkin — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:26:00 GMT

Pretty eh? I do motion graphics in my ahem, spare time… this is something I recently put together. It has animation to move the camera and elements around as well…

What’s this got to with the blog? I’m making sure I understand the attachments and image insertion for the current blogging platform so we get it right when we do some upgrades in 2010…

Getting started in the blog world!

Sean Jenkin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:15:00 GMT

So Hi. I'm Sean. I'm the new PM for blogs.msdn.com and blogs.technet.com. I have a ton to learn, a ton to ramp up on, a community to get to know and a lot of things to do. I'll attempt to keep everyone informed on the progress as we move this platform forward!