Omar Shahine's WebLog : Blogging

This blog location

omars — Sat, 21 May 2005 02:34:43 GMT

For a while now (since January 2004) I have been posting both to my personal blog (http://www.shahine.com/omar/) and another blog located at http://blogs.msdn.com/omars/. At the time there were about 140 Microsoft blogs on blogs.msdn.com. I don't actually post things twice, rather dasBlog can crosspost both to this blog and any number of other blogs that support the blogger APIs.

My main motivation for doing this was that I wanted to be part of the Microsoft blogger community. I also used to subscribe to the full blogs.msdn.com rss feed, and pretty much read what everyone there was posting. Finally, I also got a lot of great comments from folks on that blog (I supose because they did not specifically subscribe to my feed, but the blogs.msdn.com feed).

In the past 16 months the blogs.msdn.com site has grown an order of magnitude. I no longer feel like my presence is part of a small community and many of the benefits I have felt by crossposting have been overshadowed by things don't care much for. Particularly the new Community Server product. It's made managing my blog, comments, and feedback much more difficult. So much so that I completely ignore the comments on my msdn blog because I find the product unusable. It takes 20 clicks and postbacks to do simple things. I find myself lost. Additionally, the community on blogs.msdn.com is big enough now that I don't think I need to cross post any longer. Don't get me wrong, I wish Scott and company the best of luck with CS, and the fact that is powers our employee blog property is cool, but it's an experiment that is not something I think I need to be a part of.

And just to be clear. I figure that I cross posted 80% of the content on my personal blog to my msdn blog. Anything technology related got crossposted, some personal rants and such did not.

So, my question is this. Does anyone care or even find it confusing that I even do this? Should I stop crossposting? I'm leaning to just mothballing my msdn blog (leaving all the content there, but no longer cross posting). Do people who subscribe to the msdn one want me to keep posting my tech stuff there? Does anyone even care :-)?

PS - Speaking of Community Server, and blogs.msdn.com, I just noticed that Dare also stopped crossposting from his blog to blogs.msdn.com.

Spaces posting API

omars — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 15:02:00 GMT

Folks have been complaining that there is no posting API for Spaces. Not so fast. There is a very lightweight URL based API you can use to post. See Scott's post below.

Quote [Scott Isaacs]

Blog It! Toolbar Button

My first tip. The BlogIt toolbar button!

Spaces has a special URL that makes it easy to post entries into your blog, http://spaces.msn.com/blogit.aspx. This URL, when supplied with the proper arguments, can pre-populate your blog entry page.

Before I explain the technical details, let me introduce the unofficial Blog It toolbar button. The Blog It toolbar button is a little tool I wrote that allows you to quickly blog any web page. If you see something you want to blog, select some text, and click the Blog It toolbar button. Please visit http://www.siteexperts.com/blogging/blogit.htm to get your own blog it toolbar button. Also, if you have any improvements, please let me know (the button is implemented using basic DHTML so feel free to look under the hoods). Note: The toolbar button only runs in Internet Explorer and is not endorsed nor supported by Microsoft.

Obviously, you will need to create your own MSN Space (I recommend doing that first!)

Technical Details: The blogit.aspx is very simple and is how the blog it buttons below each blog entry work. There are a number of querystring arguments that are mapped directly into your blog. You can specify one or many of these arguments. ?Title=title&Description=Description&Trackback=Trackback&SourceURL=SourceURL

Title: This preopulates the title string of your blog entry page.
Description: This preopulates the body of your blog entry page. (typically the selected text)
SourceURL: This renders above the description in body of your blog entry page (typically the URL of the page being blogged)
Trackback: This prepopulates the trackback field (and pings when posted).

These arguments can either be submitted as a form post or as a standard http get. NOTE: If you are not logged in when blog it is called, you will first be asked to log in (otherwise how would we know where to send you :-).

Code Highlighting and dasBlog 1.6 hotfix

omars — Sat, 08 May 2004 11:35:00 GMT

A while ago I blogged about a new feature of dasBlog: the ability to highlight .NET code. Thanks to Scott Hanselman who let me know that I forgot to add the necessary xml file for the code highlighter to the 1.6 release :-(. As such I've uploaded it to the workspace. I'd rather not rev each and every download up there so this won't be rolled into a release till the next rev or hotfix if there is one.

Steps to install:

Download .zip file and expand
Copy CodeHighlightDefinitions.xml to the ftb folder in your dasBlog root.

The version in 1.6 is actually based on the AylarSolutions.Highlight v2.0 by Thomas Johansen. Thomas even has a cool demo of how you can integrate his work into Free Text Box. However, for dasBlog I chose a different route. You click a button and get a pop-up window where you paste in your code, parse to see the result, and then insert the raw html into the blog post.

Scott Watermasysk is taking a different approach in .Text.

dasBlog 1.6 released

omars — Mon, 03 May 2004 11:08:00 GMT

I've released dasBlog 1.6. You can read the release notes and the new features and bug fixes.

There are many flavors for the the bits on the dasBlog workspace.

In short, there are many bug fixes, Atom 0.3 support, even better Search feature, some new macros, better permission failures, perf enhancements, log file archiving and some others.

Special thanks to all the workspace contributers for all their work!

On another note. I'm not sure I can bear doing another release on GotDotNet. I love GDN for some of my smaller projects, but it took me over 4 hours this weekend to checkout/checkin the entire source as well as upload 5 releases. Using the Windows Forms interface for GDN is like watching a turtle do the 400 meter dash.

Lenn and Jeff are new dasBlog users

omars — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 01:48:00 GMT

Lenn Pryor, who has the unique roll of being Robert Scoble's manager, recently switched to dasBlog. Jeff Sandquist, one of Robert's co-workers also switched over from Radio. He posted a nice How-To on moving from Radio Userland to dasBlog (importing posts, comments etc). It's a little known feature that dasBlog can actually move all your Radio stuff over, as well as continue to upstream your posts to your Radio site (via upstreaming service) as well as map your Radio links to dasBlog links using custom http handlers. Clemens (dasBlog papa), myself and a few others actually moved from Radio to dasBlog using some of these tools.

Referreral spam from John Kerry?

omars — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 01:12:00 GMT

Yep, you guessed it. Seems that John Kerry’s blog is spamming my blog. I can’t think of any other reason this would appear on my Referrer log.