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I opened SharpReader this morning and discovered that http://weblogs.asp.net is no longer giving full text feeds via RSS. This is stupid for so many reasons. These are the first to come to mind:
- This is going to increase Microsoft's traffic costs - instead of downloading a page of text/HTML to read a post, people using RSS aggregators will now need to download the poster's entire blog site (images, stylesheets, navigation etc)
- People who download a few days of posts before going offline will no longer be able to do this (or they'll only be able to read the first paragraph anyway). When I'm travelling I like to download as many posts as possible, so I can sit on the airplane catching up my weblog reading.
- It is a pain in the ass to have to click a link out of your RSS aggregator just to read the rest of an interesting post (because reading long posts is now less convenient, I'm only going to invest time in the ones that I'm sure will be interesting).
- A less tangible factor is the impact this has on the community that has grown at http://weblogs.asp.net. This change makes the community feel more like the commercial non-full text news services that I refuse to subscribe to
- It wasn't announced (or at least I haven't been able to find any announcement)
- Scoble will now have to unsubscribe from his weblogs.asp.net subscription, at least if he follows his own rules (http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/06/12.html#a7750)
I'm cleaning out my RSS feeds. Things that'll get feeds removed:
1) If I haven't read you for months.
2) If you don't publish full content feeds.
3) If you haven't published for months.
Scoble - if you are reading this, I hope you'll blog about this change to the community. A few words from you might convince ScottW to reverse the change.
Meanwhile, I'm going to step up development efforts for my own blogging / CMS engine that will be hosted at my new site (http://alex.aspxconnection.com). Which will have full text feeds, I promise. There's nothing there yet though so don't click the link. :-)
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From http://weblogs.asp.net/Varad/archive/2004/09/04/225561.aspx
Google is beta-testing its email services, before finally releasing it as a product to all public... they want a consistent increase in load on their servers...
How incredible. I thought the "invite" scheme was a very clever viral marketing effort, that has by all accounts been very successful. I am a "the glass is half empty" sort of person, so Varad's view seems a bit naive to me.
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A while ago, Scoble admonished me for thinking about getting a laptop instead of a tablet. One of his major arguments was that tablets are much easier to use in airplanes. Sitting in economy on a Virgin Blue 737-700 as I write this, I’m beginning to see his point. I ended up getting the massive Dell Inspiron 8600 with the 15.4” screen, which makes the position I’m sitting in typing this even more awkward!
Question - when I first powered up my machine on the plane, its powerful wireless antenna started searching for a network - is there any research as to the effects this could have on the navigation of the aircraft? Because when I head back to Melbourne on Monday morning it would be great if I could use the 802.11 signals to redirect the plane to Broome (I'm totally sick of the Melbourne winter).
I had a quick look at MSN Music's Beta site - very impressive. Great work Microsoft! It's good to see some dog-fooding (another Microsoft invented verb) happen. It seems that the whole site was developed in ASP.Net.
In stark contrast, I use Explore.MS for the SPLA program (another Microsoft site written in ASP.Net) and it is atrocious. The UI design is beyond help and the page flow is insane. It took me about a week to convince it to generate a SPLA price list. I'd love to have some serious words with whoever designed/developed it!
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If you think that my blog seems to primarily devoted to whinging then... well spotted.
Today's second gripe is about a feature in the .Net Framework 1.1 that causes the following exception to be thrown at random times of high load:
System.Web.HttpUnhandledException: Exception of type System.Web.HttpUnhandledException was thrown.
---> System.InvalidOperationException: There is already an open DataReader associated with this Connection
which must be closed first. at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ValidateCommand(String method, Boolean executing
at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior cmdBehavior, RunBehavior runBehavior, Boolean returnStream)
at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior behavior
It apparently occurs because of a thread locking issue in the Framework data access page (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;319345) that hasn't been fixed in the latest service pack (judging by http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=867460).
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Welcome to another chapter in the long "Microsoft thinks its customers are idiots" book.
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=278657 (Terminal Services Cannot Be Manipulated)
It is not possible to restart the Terminal Services service when it crashes, as it inevitably does. I'll have to reboot the machine, a live server with hundreds of sites on it, in order to get Terminal Services (Remote Administration mode) to come back to life.
The KB article above lists this behaviour as "By design".
Does anyone know a hack around this? Or the twisted Microsoft reasoning behind this decision?