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The June Blog Platform Update…

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Just a quick post to let folks know we are working on our next update. Some of the fixes are targeted at just the blog writers but we wanted to address some of the immediate feedback we got after doing the upgrade to the blog platform as well.

This is not the complete list, just a few things that come to mind:

  • Search within a Blog will be online.
  • Link color change for read posts in the rolling blog post list.
  • The Microsoft Translation Widget should be available in many more blogs. So for folks who want to translate content, this should be useful.
  • Paging numbers for comments and the rolling blog post list will be made bigger and more finger friendly for mobile viewers.
  • Changing the font size CSS away from a fixed size on the default themes.
  • Changing “Home” in the breadcrumbs to something less confusing (since there are 3 Homes displayed at times, also we’ll be highlighting the blogs tab so you know where you are…)
  • Adding back a few more redirects to RSS and ATOM feeds that got lost. (actually, this is now fixed)
  • Search handling extended characters (actually, this is now fixed)

Here’s a few items of that I’m hearing over and over that we’ll look at addressing in the future:

  • Language selection and filtering for blogs, blog posts and the rolling blog post list.
  • More options and larger page sizes for the rolling blog post list.
  • Default RSS feed on a blog leads to nowhere (we actually hope to have that fixed in the next update…)
  • Extended characters not always rendering correctly in emails.
  • Performance of the blogs. We are always going to be looking at scenarios where we can improve performance.
  • HTML rendering. We’ll keep looking for places we need to fix and fix them over time.

Look for the update by the end of the month things going to plan. Hopefully in July I’ll be able to share more of the FY11 plans for the blogs and be able to get your feedback on our directions.

In the mean time be sure to check out the announcements and releases from Microsoft on Kinect for Xbox 360 and Office 2010 this week!

Thanks,
Sean

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 14, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 14, 2010
    @GregM: Yep, I've seen this feedback come in. The old setting was 25 comments in a feed at a time and yep, I'm hoping to get back to that level in this update!

  • Anonymous
    June 14, 2010
    Did the blog author have control over that setting, because I'm sure that I've read more than 25 comments at a time.

  • Anonymous
    June 15, 2010
    Not that I'm aware of but it is a rolling list so new comments should appear while old comments are removed. I guess it just depends on how often your RSS reader is updating the feed.

  • Anonymous
    June 15, 2010
    Thanks.  I thought it was only updating the feed when I chose to look at the comments, but perhaps it was doing it on every update.

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2010
    Can we please have a comment number in a blog post list clickable? This is usefull if blog home page shows full posts instead of summary. For example IE blogs (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/).

  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2010
    It's clickable in the actual blog post but you're right, it doesn't seem to be clickable in the main home page of a blog. I'll add it to the backlog. Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    June 23, 2010
    I don't know if the updates went out, but I have noticed that I don't get this error as often: "This feed contains errors. Internet Explorer will try updating this feed again later." In addition the two different URLs to get to the main feed look identical. The prefixes are gone, whoo hoo no more "Blog Post:". Keeping my fingers crossed, I know the minute I mention the fact that the error message has gone away it will now start to reappear.

  • Anonymous
    June 23, 2010
    We put a small update out to fix the RSS URLs, yep. The rest of the updates are coming next week. I'll post about that on Monday or Tuesday next week!

  • Anonymous
    June 25, 2010
    Ok I was seeing the minor update that fix the URLs. I will removed the duplicate items on my Favorites Bar (actually I replaced with a link to your blog, so I can be notified of  the updates next week). I will test again some time next week, because I did speak to early. I still have grayed out items and I'm still getting: "This feed contains errors. Internet Explorer will try updating this feed again later."