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June Update Coming Tuesday Afternoon

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Folks, just a short post to alert you that the June update for the MSDN and TechNet blogs is coming out on Tuesday afternoon (6/29). There is no expected downtime though if we blip for a few moments be patient… :)

Here are a few of the bigger things you may notice:

  • MSDN Site Theme – with the new UI/UX coming to the https://msdn.microsoft.com web site the MSDN blogs will be updated to match it. You can learn more about the main MSDN site theme changeover here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ff772739.aspx
  • Blog Home Pages – we’ve been listening to the feedback and we’ve created some new home pages. The focus is to help you find new content, popular content and to spotlight what’s happening at Microsoft. This will be an on-going process so keep providing the feedback…
  • Search a single blog – You’ll find two radio buttons on the search widget within a blog. This will allow you to search the contents of just that particular blog or within all the blogs on the site.
  • Font Scaling – All the header and body text has been changed from fixed size to variable based on your DPI and text zoom level.

New MSDN Blogs Home Page   image

 

And some of the smaller ones:

  • Not all blog articles were printing completely
  • The Live ID components were leaving useless HTML in the page.
  • Can’t access the password reset page without being already authenticated.
  • “Home” in breadcrumbs and blog options replaced with more content aware text.
  • Some blogs wouldn’t display the horizontal scrollbar when the content was wider than the browser.
  • Paging numbers were small and not mobile friendly.
  • Rolling blog post list didn’t visibly show which posts you’d visited before.
  • Extended characters weren’t being handled correctly in the social media syndication control.
  • RSS feed was only showing 15 items instead of 25.
  • No watermarking in main search box.
  • No indication in main nav menu that you were in the blogs section of MSDN or TechNet.
  • Default discovered feed in a blog was returning an error.
  • We’ve made it easier for our blog authors to include the Microsoft Translation widget.
  • We’ve made it easier for our blog authors to include code that has syntax highlighting.
  • A number of performance improvements (though that’s been on-going and will continue to be on-going)
  • and a bunch of other things that are for the blog authors only…

 

We are also moving into our FY11 planning at the moment and in July I’ll post some of the main scenarios and large features we are looking at. Will be looking for your feedback at that time to help improve and evolve the blog platforms!

Thanks,
Sean

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 12, 2010
    There seems to be a problem when printing blog posts, both in IE and Firefox: the text on the right is always cut off. I'm definitely not a CSS expert, but after some trial and error, I found that adding the following to blogs.technet.com/.../print.css fixes this: .layout-content {    width:auto !important; } The same will probably have to be added to blogs.technet.com/.../print.css as well. Also, please make it possible to print out the comments again (as one long list). Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    July 13, 2010
    Thanks Tim. We've logged this bug for the printing to be fixed in a future update. Thanks for reporting it. As to the comments as a single long list - each blog owner has control over how many comments are displayed per page, it's not a site wide setting.

  • Anonymous
    July 13, 2010
    But right now, the comments aren't even included when printing, they are hidden by a style in print.css. I don't really mind the splitting over multiple pages when viewing a post, but there should be a way to quickly disable this for printing. Perhaps through a new query string parameter, e.g. "june-update-coming-tuesday-afternoon.aspx?ShowAllComments=true"?

  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2010
    Could I make a suggestion for an improvment for your next round of updates? When you navigate to, for example: blogs.msdn.com/.../seanjenkin when your authentication cookie has expired, the site throws you through a couple of redirects to re-authenticate with Live. If I then click on a link from your blogs front page, for example to this very article (i.e. blogs.msdn.com/.../june-update-coming-tuesday-afternoon.aspx ), if I attempt to hit the back button I get "To display this page, Firefox must send information that will repeat any action....". I suspect that IE will do similar as well. Would it be possible for the blog engine to be tweaked so that when you land back on blogs.msdn.com after the Live authentication, it's via an interstitial page of some description so that navigation "back" in the example I described above would be un-prompted?