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I hate what they've done to blogs.msdn.com

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I have the summaries, the lack of formatting, no pictures, having to visit each page in the browser (thus negating the use of an rss reader), etc.

If you do/don't like the new format let me know and I'll send off the quotes to those in charge to see if anything can be done.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    i second that. i barely even visit the site now.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    I hate it! The short previews are so short that the majority of posts require following a link to decide whether or not the post is of interest.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    I agree with you, Cyrus. If they want to limit bandwidth, they should have used SIMPLE and EFFECTIVE things.

    Like:
    - write the RSS feed to a file. Every x minutes (or every x seconds). The webserver can then reply with a simple HTTP 304, which takes almost no bandwidth.
    - ignore requests from clients which requested the page in the last n minutes: return a 304 and don't redirect.

    It doesn't matter if the rss feed file is written every 20 seconds or every 10 seconds or every second. The user won't notice.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    I'm sure that there are reasons for most of it, and they probably have to do with limiting bandwidth. The previews don't bother me per-se, but I think that they are probably a bit too short. Any bandwith gains that are made by the short previews are lost as soon as someone has to go to a page just because it was chopped off at 500 characters, and it was 501 or 502 chars (I went to a posting that was chopped off because of a single period)

    But than again, there's a lot of nosie out there now, so there may be enough gain for it to be worth it.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    You're not hating deep enough.

    Yes, I hate the change, but what I really hate is that the first serious change to blogs.msdn shows that there has been zero usability analysis done on the site.

    Instead of punishing your readers for making the site succesful, look at why the page is getting so many repeat hits. Sure, it's a fantastic site that does a fantastic job of promoting Microsoft products and technologies, but it's also a really poorly designed page that has to be refreshed often because any posts that scroll off the bottom of the page are gone forever. If you don't refresh often enough, you don't get to see the posts. I personally make sure I hit the page at least three times a day for this very reason. I don't understand the aging of posts on the site, but I do know that I've missed posts before and I don't want that to happen to me.

    Fix the usability problems. Add a "See old posts" button. That will cut way down on refreshes. Add an optional cookie so that users don't need to wade through posts they've already seen. That will make users happy (particularly if it's an optional cookie) AND it will cut way down on your per-refresh bandwidth usage.

    Remember that not all readers use RSS (I'm guessing it's actually a fairly small fraction based on statistics I've seen for other sites). There are still lots of people out there who prefer the old-school browser experience, like your correspondent here.

    And as a general note, bear in mind that bandwidth is infinitely cheaper than goodwill. Blogs.msdn has built up a lot of goodwill, but this change is burning it up at an astounding rate.

    -Don

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    Hate it.

    Seems like a heavy handed way to solve the problem.

    Haven't we learned anything since the Pointcast days?

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    Hate it.

    Hardly vist now.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    I hate the recent changes. The site has gone from being a must-read page to a don't-bother page.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    Personal feeds don't get cut. Let's subscribe to everyone of them ;) j/k

    But I too hate the snippets, without any breaklines... I have to "read more" every time (causing even more Bandwidth for their servers, rss request, page + css + images request)

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    I love it.

    I quite like it that the font for all posts are now the same, my eyes don't adjust too well from reading verdana 10pt and going to 12 pt half way down the page.

    Summaries? Love 'em. No more endless scrolling to find the next post (and some of the posts are just huge), if I like it I'll click through to read it.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    Bandwidth would also be saved if people would start unchecking the "syndicate to main feed" button for offtopic posts that have no business on the main feed. If people want to hear about Jon Doe's dog, they will subscribe to his feed. The feature is there for that very reason. Off-topic posts drive on-topic posts off the page and add to the noise.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004

    It blows chunks bigtime.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    It makes everything look the same. Hard to pick out whats of interest. It was annoying before when people posted extremely long blog entries, but that could have been handled better than truncating to the first four lines of text. Maybe alowing posters to submit both an introduction and a full article.

    Hmm. I just realized that malformed html was probably also a problem. Validate postings agains the w3c validator perhaps?

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    One thing I like: I like that posts are abbreviated on the actual homepage (not talking about the rss feed, here). Sometimes one long post will push SO many other posts off of the homepage for those who actually do browse there, that's a big drag.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    I hate it!

    Back in the good old days I’d refresh blogs.msdn.com every hour or two and skim the latest posts and read in depth anything that caught my eye... now, there is not enough to catch my eye even.

    Yes, back in the good old days I might be hit with a dozen near identical posts related to the release of X or the Y conference, but it was a small price to pay for having so much so easily.

    I also must agree with Don, it is quite bothersome that if you don’t read often enough that old posts just disappear off the end of the page. One can easily view old blog posts of individual posters, why not of the entire site?

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    In some ways I like the change. In the past, I had to scroll down some very long entries that didn't interest me to get to the next entry in the RSS reader I use. However, I do believe that the summaries are short. Perhaps instead of the first 4 lines, take the first 7-8 lines.

    Also, for blogs.msdn.com, perhaps coloring every other post entry (changing the background) might help people distinguish between the entries on this page.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    Eric: Sounds bigotted to me. :-/

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    Thanks all. Keep it coming. I'll aggregate it at the end of the week and send this off to the powers that be.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    Not worth viewing it now... :-(

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    I read the RSS feed offline on a PocketPC. Now with the feed only has summaries of each article it makes offline reading very frustrating.

    I don't mind what you do to the web page but can the RSS feed continue to contain each article on full.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    I hate it. blogs.msdn.com is not very useful anymore.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    I don't like it.
    It might be a good idea to use even more channels ( MS / non MS ) is now available.

    But it might be better to use things like
    Personal
    ASP.NET
    Windows Forms
    General .NET
    Windows
    Office
    SQL server
    VS.NET
    Other MS products
    General MS


  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    Ohh and then force the person who has the blog to choose a channel.

    No channel = not syndicated on main feed.

  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2004
    http://blogs.msdn.com/yosit/archive/2004/09/08/226826.aspx

    Brought up on several threads. I do wish they would fix it I hate it very very much

  • Anonymous
    September 13, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 13, 2004
    When I first started reading blogs.msdn.com I was just using the webpage. Then I started using SAGE to read it (via rss) ...

    That was fine until the article count in the main feed was cut to 25, since SAGE doesn't keep history...

    Now I using RSS Bandit, and it does keep history and seems fairly nice.

    I don't need to see every story the second it comes in, so I'd be happy with a fairly long refresh of the feed, except that if there is a flurry of blog entries, there's the possibility I'll miss some unless I keep the refresh interval lower. If the mainfeed (or possibly more than one to offer different guarantees based on desired refresh period) had the greater of say 25 entries or 12 hours worth I could set it to refresh twice a day and never anything... In fact, with a time window guarantee, there really isn't a reason for a minimum number of entries -- if the site is quiet save the bandwidth

    On the other hand, having some history for the main feed for those using the web would be handy, eg buttons for all of todays entries, yesterday and say a button a day for up to a week back?

  • Anonymous
    September 13, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 13, 2004
    Dr.Pizza: I've forwarded that to some people who can hopefully take care of this.

  • Anonymous
    September 14, 2004
    Any more feedback? I'm goign to be sending this information off soon. Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2004
    I hate the recent changes. RSS feed of blogs.msdn.com was one of my favorites and now, well, I can barely stand to read it....

    I prefer to scroll a lot to get the information than have to go to another location (ie, rdirectly to the entry) to see past what a computer has decided is the "correct" amount of information to show in a summary.

    -jbl

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