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MSDN and TechNet Blog Migration - Friday Update

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Now where was I? Oh yeah, that's right, deploying the final bits!

Today has been a great day. We began around 9:30am bringing online the migrated data and moving the migrated files into position. We also deployed the final web bits, updated our backend services, confirmed analytics was still in good shape and finally kicked off the search indexing.

After that we finalized site configuration settings, enabled our spam filters, turned on Windows Live ID, and did a light test pass across the site to ensure everything was in it's expected place. I use expected and not right because like in all software there are quirks and bugs. We'll fix 'em but at this point it's just as important to know where they are...

From there it was time to share the good news with the bloggers. They now have Saturday and Sunday to import their blog designs and complete any other work before we flip the sites over on Monday.

It's been quite a journey from when I joined this project (an eternity ago on December 16th 2009) and now our first real upgrade in 5 years is almost done. I'm super looking forward to moving on to monthly sprints and shipping incrementally the features our bloggers and you, our readers are already requesting.

Have a great weekend and we'll see you on the flip side!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2010
    I found 2069 validation errors and 24 warnings when checking the new IE blog page on W3C. I thought the markup was to be improved in this upgrade ?

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2010
    I find it anoying that the comment icon is not clickable and thus there seems no longer a direct click to a artikels comments section anymore. In IE6 the post button looks buggy (but I do not care as I think IE6 support should be less)

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2010
    hAl - the number next to the comment icon is clickable however, and gives you a direct link to the comments. Who knows why the icon isn't. I think the IEBlog theme was just ported over (with new bits added), and not written from the ground up. It is pretty old and crusty, and reflects quite poorly on IE if you ask me. The theme here looks 10 times better; most of the validation errors have to do with unencoded URLs, and an obvious bug where an ASP.NET template control (CSControl - Community Server still?) is missing a runat="server" attribute, and hence the markup is being sent to the client instead.

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2010
    Only at Microsoft is it considered a good idea to freeze the software for five years, and then change everything all at once. So now blogs have a squillion RSS feeds, not all of them relevant, and certainly not with the important ones at the top. The blogs are waaaaay slower than they used to be, all the urls have changed (again, of course. Seems to be an annual occurrence for everything Microsoft -- you know the entire point about urls is that they're supposed to stick around? They're supposed to identify resources), buggy commenting that (by default? Seems to be the case on most blogs now, although not this one) requires us to log in to a Live ID account which is ridiculously complicated to create and which no one really cares about. (I've got 5 or so of them, for different Microsoft services, I wish I didn't have a single one) If you really want to identify commenters, how about something standard (and easy to use)? Isn't it about time Microsoft starts using OpenID? Oh well, at least the blogs no longer look like something from 1995. Good job on that.

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2010
    The old site aggregrated all blog posts on the main page and I can scroll through all past posts. Where's the equivalent in the new site? This is how I mainly read the blogs on this site - scanning excerpts through all the past posts and reading the ones I'm most interested.  I prefer to browse rather than search and subscribe.

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2010
    @Sam "the number next to the comment icon is clickable however" No it is not. Not on the main blog page at least.   It is only clickable when you are already clicked tyrough to the artikel

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2010
    Wow, clicking the post button twice (on slow response) resulting in double posts. How old school.

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2010
    @jad Live ID supports Open ID. So your 5 Live ID accounts are already Open ID accounts.

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2010
    wow, you froze all blogs, and all comments, for over a week.... for this? I hope someone gets fired.  You'd think MS could afford better.

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    The extra b in the URL is broken.

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    Why was my comment removed on the lack of links to the comments at te bottom of longer article on the frontpage of a blog?

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    Might be just me, but I can't seem to subscribe to the "Ask The Performance Team" (askperf) blog RSS feed.  The feeds for ntdebugging and Tess still seem to work, though.

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    "The old site aggregrated all blog posts on the main page and I can scroll through all past posts. Where's the equivalent in the new site? This is how I mainly read the blogs on this site - scanning excerpts through all the past posts and reading the ones I'm most interested.  I prefer to browse rather than search and subscribe. " I second this.  The new site is pretty much unsusable now and I have no way of discovering new interesting posts or blogs.

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    what's the extra /b/ good for? looks awful...

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    We are working on restoring the blog post roll to the home page. The /b/ is due the new platform. It does more than just blogs for us. I'll explain in a couple of days in the help section.

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    The RSS feed of all the MSDN blogs have stopped working with yahoo pipes. Guess this is intentional :)

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    Ugh...double post. Why can't the page change/acknowledge when a comment is submitted?

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    The blogs should be running quite a lot faster tonight. We've been working to stabilize them through the past 36 hours...

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    "The /b/ is due the new platform. It does more than just blogs for us. I'll explain in a couple of days in the help section." It would be better to get rid of it. . . It is after all blogs.msdn.com, if you're not hosting a blog on the domain you're doing something wrong.

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 26, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 26, 2010
    The second post from Gerard Talbot here on the IE team blog blogs.msdn.com/.../blog-comments-back-up.aspx speak volumes. And this splitting up of a few comments over multiple pages is just plain ANOYING !!

  • Anonymous
    May 27, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 28, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 28, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 28, 2010
    ...Found it in blogs.msdn.com/.../base.css : a:link, a:visited, a:active { outline: none; color: #06d; text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; } a:hover { outline: none; text-decoration: underline; } Please remove the "outline: none" rules so the site is once again accessible to keyboard users.

  • Anonymous
    May 28, 2010
    Technet blog seems to be working better than msdn blog (!)  At least the recent blog posts section is functional and located where I prefer it...under the welcome section.  I also like the button links for letting me go back through the "recent"  posts to the not so "recent" ones. Personally, I don't get that much out of "Recent Site Activity"...is there a way to either collapse it or opt-out? BTW, want an quick, easy to implement and useful feature?  Put a link to blogs.technet.com on the top of blogs.msdn.com and vice-versa...

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2010
    suggestions 1 remove the extra b from the URL. It is redundant, looks ugly, and has no technical reason for doing so, blogs.msdn.com should be used for blogs and nothing else. 2 link the comment number to the comments section on the news page of the blog 3 make sure that all themes validate the W3C standard 4 after submitting a post, the page is sometimes reloaded without any sucess/error message (looks like that some internal timeout exceeded but no message is displayed)

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2010
    5 add a duplicate detection

  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2010
    It has become very quiet on this blog after the recent critisims here

  • Anonymous
    June 01, 2010
    It's become quiet because we are working to restore the blog post list roll and improve performance of the site. We are still reading the feedback and working to actually fix the issues, not just provide lip service to them...

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2010
    The rolling blog post list has been restored. You can find it linked from the home page.