Robert McLaws: FunWithCoding.NET

Public Shared Function BrainDump(ByVal dotNet As String) As [Value]

News

<script type="text/javascript"><!-- google_ad_client = "pub-4330602465258980"; google_hints = "ASP.NET, VB.NET, C#, C#.NET, WindowsForms, .NET Framework, VS2005, Visual Studio, XAML, WinFX, Windows Workflow, WPF, WCF, Atlas, NetFX3, Visual Studio Orcas"; google_ad_width = 120; google_ad_height = 240; google_ad_format = "120x240_as"; google_ad_type = "text_image"; google_ad_channel ="4997399242"; google_color_border = "B6C9E7"; google_color_bg = "EFEFEF"; google_color_link = "0000FF"; google_color_text = "000000"; google_color_url = "002C99"; //--></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script>
<!--
-->

You should feel free to challenge me, disagree with me, or tell me I'm completely nuts in the comments section of each blog entry, but I reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason whatsoever. That said, I will most likely only delete abusive, profane, rude, or annonymous comments, so keep it polite, please.

Blogroll

Cool .NET Articles

My .NET Tools

My Builder.com Articles

My MSKB Articles

Changes On This Site

Scott pushed new changes to weblogs.asp.net sometime earlier this week. I hate very strongly dislike them. I don't hate them because the posts are shorter. I don't hate them because they make you click through to the posts. I hate very strongly dislike them for 3 reasons:

  1. No more blog list on the home page. I liked it much better when it was grouped by number of posts. Then, you didn't go to the bottom of the list, because nobody cares about someone who posts 3x and then loses interest.
  2. RSS feed truncation. What's the point in having a feed if you're not going to syndicate the whole thing? I thought there was an optional feature that could be used to do this... why am I being forced to do it if I don't want to? Why is it being forced on my readers?
  3. It doesn't solve the real problem.

So what is the real problem? The problem is, there are too many people blogging here. The question I have is, why on earth are MS people being syndicated in two different uncategorized places? Why do other members of the community have to deal with this crap? Microsoft doesn't like to be called the Borg, but the weblogs.asp.net feed is like being plugged into the Hive Mind. It's a jumbled, disorganized disaster. Microsoft has zero blogging strategy, and it shows.

So, if you're going to shorten the aggregate home page, fine. But you'd go a long way to saving on bandwidth costs if you just moved the Microsoft people to blogs.msdn.com once and for all, and gave weblogs.asp.net back to the community where it belongs.

My point is not so much that I'm bagging on Rob or Scott or anyone else. I'm a huge .Text fan. They're getting a lot of crap right now, and they only kind of deserve it. Some community discussion would have been nice, or some private warning. But my point is that Microsoft as a company has no corporate blog strategy whatsoever, and the community is getting the short end of the stick because of it. Something has to be done, and it's not just ScottW and Rob's problem. It's Bill and Steve's problem.

Posted: Sep 09 2004, 05:09 PM by interscape | with 5 comment(s)

Comments

Robert Scoble said:

The answer is to host on your own server. You'll note where my blog is hosted. Group blogs will always suffer from these kinds of things. The downside of that is that you don't get as much traffic as quickly. But, it's more sustainable.
# September 9, 2004 5:13 PM

josh ledgard said:

I couldn't aggree more. If we had better catagorization on the site then people would only subscribe to the stuff that interests them. Hell, if we had good catagories then I wouldn't even offer the "Everything" feed. I think we would save a bunch that way from people only subscribing to things they care about. There are people internally that also have the same concerns. That said...

Hopefully this is a short term solution to a short term bandwidth cost issue and longer term we can be more stratigic about it.
# September 9, 2004 5:16 PM

Dave Burke said:

I always enjoy how you speak your mind, Robert. I agree with you.
# September 9, 2004 5:58 PM

MartinJ said:

The problem is that blogs.mdsn.com just points to weblogs.asp.net. They're just doing a bit of trickery to make it look like it's coming from a different site. Do an NSLOOKUP on both names, they point to the same IP address.

Remember the blogs on gotdotnet? They were migrated to weblogs.asp.net.
# September 9, 2004 8:46 PM

Bob Wyman said:

If you want to find all the posts from weblogs.asp.net, just come to PubSub.com and create a subscription for "SOURCE:weblogs.asp.net". If you want to limit to only those posts that talk about "Visual Basic" try a subscription like this: "SOURCE:weblogs.asp.net AND ("Visual Basic" or VB)". You don't need to read the abbreviated aggregate feed to get access to all this stuff -- PubSub.com reads all the feeds and can put them together for you.

Also, consider optimizing even more by using the PubSub Sidebar (IE Explorer Bar) that uses "Atom over XMPP PubSub" push technology to notify you of new postings the moment we discover them. See: http://pubsub.com/download . Also, check out: http://pubsub.com/developers if you want to build PubSub support into your own aggregator.

bob wyman
# September 10, 2004 2:19 PM