Sara Williams' blog

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MSDN Speaks...

Chris Sells is graciously helping me set up a blog.   Isn't he nice?

I've been deliberating about setting up a blog for a few weeks.  Do I really have much to say?  I mean, my lunch is as interesting as the next guy's, but really... 

I work on MSDN at Microsoft.   As you may know, we recently launched a new home page, RSS feeds, and a slew of new developer centers.  I wrote a letter describing what we've done, and how we made some of the design decisions.  I included my email address, and encouraged folks to tell me what they thought about our work.   I was pleasantly surprised by the feedback and great suggestions I got.  I was even more surprised to see people blogging about it.  That tipped the scales for me...

So, my question of the day is... What other RSS feeds would you want to see from MSDN?

Published Wednesday, April 30, 2003 8:51 PM by SaraWilliams

Comments

 

Duncan Mackenzie said:

Wow, you've joined the blogging space... I guess that means you'll be reading more blogs now... hmm... I'll have to be careful with my posts :)
April 30, 2003 9:12 PM
 

HumanCompiler said:

Glad to see you blogging and look forward to reading more in the future! :) To answer your question, I'd like to see an RSS feed devoted just to the upcoming MSDN Chats. Seems like I always forget to see which ones are coming up, but I'm sure I'd see it if it was in my aggregator.
April 30, 2003 9:20 PM
 

Jeff Lewis said:

Knowledge base articles (specifically for bug fixes or work-arounds for VS.NET)
April 30, 2003 9:23 PM
 

Kirk Allen Evans said:

I concur with the previous sentiment: MSDN chats would be great. I would also like to see an events feed, as well as new MSDN shipment feeds (ie, this is what makes the April shipment worth installing and browsing through). I would also like to see Ask Dr. Gui feeds, and GotDotNet.com feeds for recent workspace additions. A really cool project for someone really ambitious would be to enable the GotDotNet.com and ASP.NET forums with the RSS comment API, allowing browsing, commenting, and responding to the GotDotNet.com and ASP.NET forums from SharpReader and IBlogThis.
April 30, 2003 9:28 PM
 

Mike Sax said:

Great to see you blogging, Sara! Answer to your question of the day: I'd love to see RSS feeds with new knowledge base articles, based on my own selection criteria (for example: all KB articles related to VS.NET).
April 30, 2003 9:30 PM
 

Dare Obasanjo said:

Feeds about XML content such as a feed for http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml
April 30, 2003 9:34 PM
 

Julie Lerman said:

Welcome Sara. Always nice to see another gal around the blog space! I have been hoping for WebCasts to show up for a while as web services and now am ready for rss instead. I pestered Kevin Briody for a while - as he had mostly been my basic MSDN contact. I was manually hunting through the webcasts and adding relevant ones onto my user group's website, but gave up. As you folks did with msdn- an overall rss would be good and then categories (eg: developer web casts, architecture) as separate feeds. I have incorporated some of the the msdn rss feeds onto our site, Vermont .NET User Group (www.vtdotnet.org) already, if you want to see them in action.
April 30, 2003 9:36 PM
 

Mike Amundsen said:

welcome to the 'blogosphere!' on the rss stuff. think about any email feeds you do from MSDN now. they are all contenders for rss feeds. also good contenders for rss feeds (imho) are the msdn online content such as the main page, feeds from each of the columns, and feeds from the interest groups (vb, c#, asp.net, architecture, etc.).
April 30, 2003 9:41 PM
 

Jeff Julian said:

I love the new site and the feeds, but where is the content. It seems harder to find any articles. The c# feed that is on my front page at http://www.jjulian.com hasn't changed since the first day you released the new layout. Are you short on authors?
April 30, 2003 10:00 PM
 

Tomas Restrepo said:

Welcome Sara! It's great to see so many great people making it out to the community. P.S: Sorry for giving you so much flak for msdn :)
April 30, 2003 10:04 PM
 

Fabio Vazquez said:

Hi Sara! Congratulations for you blog! I really would like to see a RSS feed about Visual FoxPro, the language I use and love! Microsoft has great people now involved with .NET which came from the FoxPro world, such as Eric Rudder, Y Alan Griver and Robert Green (to name a few). It would be very nice to see VFP content comming from this great initiative from Microsoft. From your new Brazilian reader!
April 30, 2003 10:35 PM
 

Nino Benvenuti said:

Hello Sara. =) I concur with all of the suggestions above for RSS feeds, and would like to add a request for a feed (er, feeds) from the SmartDevices Dev Community (http://smartdevices.microsoftdev.com/) for things like news articles and FAQ items.
April 30, 2003 10:52 PM
 

Adam Hill said:

I would like: Knowledge Base, Hotfixes (the kind you have to call PSS to get) organized by App or Subsystem. Chats, Webcasts adam...
April 30, 2003 11:55 PM
 

Sam Gentile said:

Well, hey there stranger-) Shawn Morrisey had told me you moved over to MSDN. This is good news for MSDN. I'm still rembering all your help to me (and my company) during .NET Beta 1 and the EAP. I also remember the StarBucks you took me to in some building on campus years ago. Anyhow, its great to see you and Adam, and the voices of .NET enter the blogsphere.
April 30, 2003 11:57 PM
 

Deepak Sharma said:

Welcome. While everyone is at it, I would like to see the following feeds: Customizable KB feeds Hot Fixes/Service Pack Feeds Customizable Download Feeds
May 1, 2003 12:17 AM
 

Scott Hanselman said:

Congrats on the blog! Stick with it and reap the rewards!
May 1, 2003 1:26 AM
 

Anil John said:

Welcome Sara. RE: RSS feeds, I would like to see the following: - MSDN Security Topics feed (http://msdn.microsoft.com/security/) - MSDN Columns feed (http://msdn.microsoft.com/columns/)
May 1, 2003 5:23 AM
 

Gwyn said:

Nice one Sara! Yeah! Let's party! MSDN RSS feeds! Excellent! I wasn't aware they were available. I agree with everything others request. The most useful to me would MSDN Chats. Probably not in your area, but I'd love an RSS feed to Microsoft presspass news items. Perhaps you can encourage them and show them the light? ;-) Anyway, I've also been deliberating whether to start a blog recently and so decided to set one up last week. I'll be covering WMI, MMC, Event Tracing, and other development stuff... related to my book.
May 1, 2003 6:20 AM
 

Torsten Rendelmann said:

A feed on important security updates would be very nice.
May 1, 2003 9:42 AM
 

Anita Rowland said:

Ahoy Sara! The main idea is to keep posting. Good luck!
May 1, 2003 9:47 AM
 

Dennis Allio said:

I think the MSDN Just Published feed is great!
May 1, 2003 10:16 AM
 

Ken Purcell said:

The most useful feeds are Msft Bloggers then the MSDN Just Published and finally the MSDN .NET feeds athough the feeds often doesn't match the page itself. Otherwise welcome!
May 1, 2003 10:40 AM
 

Lubos said:

Welcome, Sarah! I have to agree with the others, the feeds are a great idea! The just published feed is my personal fave!
May 1, 2003 11:23 AM
 

esmith said:

Welcome to blogging!! If you need any tips just let me know! I'll tell you what tipped the scales for me! ME!! Since I've started blogging guess who has put on some lbs??? Oh my! Anyway, I'm sure we'll all enjoy your musings and rants! I love that title and wish I had thought of it!
May 1, 2003 11:29 AM
 

esmith said:

When you put the thing over my name shouldn't my blog address show up? Is this thing working Sara? Please ask that nice Chris Sells to look into it! Thank you! :)
May 1, 2003 11:31 AM
 

ralph poole said:

Welcome, I am looking forward to seeing what your having for lunch. Good luck with your blog. Great first post. You have a future in micropublishing.
May 1, 2003 11:41 AM
 

Danny Ayers said:

A place MSDN could really take the lead is in supplying a RSS 1.0 feed of Knowledge Base material marked up with additional RDF metadata relating to categories, bug IDs etc etc. It could be the first public knowledgebase of the Semantic Web. Great to see you in blogland! Danny.
May 1, 2003 11:43 AM
 

Tommy Williams said:

Ellen Smith: You left off the "http://" part of your URL, so it appears to the browser as a relative link to this page. This version of BlogX does not try to correct the URL you enter in the "Homepage" box.
May 1, 2003 11:49 AM
 

steven vore said:

Hey there, and welcome to the fun of weblogging. my suggestion (which, admittedly, may already exist; if so I've just missed it so far): a feed that brings us a listing of new multimedia items (http://msdn.microsoft.com/showsandwebcasts/). Don't try to deliver the shows themself via rss (though I'm sure somebody will want that), just a list of what's being presented and a pointer to the show. thanks. (btw: esmith, if you prefix your url with the protocol designator (http://) rather than just entering www.... then things will look right here in comment-land)
May 1, 2003 11:49 AM
 

steven vore said:

heh. Tommy, I owe you a beer. ;-)
May 1, 2003 11:50 AM
 

John Tobler said:

Welcome to the blogging community. I am one of those MSDN users out here who remembers the old days before MSDN. No longer can any of us complain about the lack of documentation from Microsoft. Thanks for the recent MSDN RSS feeds -- those are a big deal for the RSS enabled. The thing to remember is that not only is blogging fun but it connects you and your team with a *lot* of good people!
May 1, 2003 12:22 PM
 

frank said:

More importantly, make msdn search be as useful as google search, currently I'd say msdn search is practically useless for actually finding something you are interested in as compared to google. (although the security feed mentioned by somebody above is a definite must)
May 1, 2003 2:35 PM
 

Darren Barefoot said:

Good luck with the blogging. Nice to see the corporate RSS feeds. My company's recently introduced them as well, and I think we'll see a lot of corporations adopting them in short order.
May 1, 2003 2:38 PM
 

Anonymous said:

I'd like to see a feed of the sweaters Ballmer wears - they always make me laugh.
May 1, 2003 4:49 PM
 

esmith said:

Well thanks very much! I should have known there was another rule! That's it for me! :)
May 1, 2003 11:13 PM
 

Isaac said:

I'm still wondering if MS can realize the nature of blogging, it's openess, grassroots and free, unless someday Bill Gates has his open blog.
May 1, 2003 11:36 PM
 

Mike Gunderloy said:

Seems like the end result of asking is that everyone will want a feed of their favorite author or area or topic. The obvious answer is to let us create our own feeds by registering key terms to get custom feeds. Of course, I'm not the one who has to pay for development or bandwidth to make that happen. I'm also a bit concerned that the "recent articles" web page and the "what's new" RSS feed are not synchronized. It seems like there must be manual processes involved. If producing the RSS feeds requires any manual intervention, then I'd rather see MSDN take the time to automate the process BEFORE introducing any more new feeds.
May 2, 2003 12:04 PM
 

steven said:

with all the employees coming out of the woodwork, maybe we need a feed just to keep track of 'new Microsoft weblogs' :-)
May 2, 2003 3:40 PM
 

Alexander Minza said:

Some questions that I think would be interesting not only for me ;-) - Who was the first evere blogger at Microsoft? - Who started this blogging "madness" at Microsoft, or this is just a part of the global blogging maddness?
May 3, 2003 12:29 PM
 

Jason Mauss said:

I remember one of the first ever blogs I kept on reading was the blog Jeff Prosise made for his "Programming Microsoft.NET" book writing experience.
May 4, 2003 10:06 PM
 

Troy said:

I know now where you live and where you blog, you can't hide!
May 7, 2003 2:03 PM
 

Ben said:

I've already been blogging when I joind MS in 2001 (obvioulsy the blog is long gone). Although I've been advertising blogs ever since, I'm not sure this blogging thing over in the US is anywhere connected.
May 28, 2003 7:46 PM
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