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Yo, it's been a while....

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So apparently I wasn't just right back and it's been 5 months since I blogged. Oh how time flies.

Anyway, updates to the blog platform are still taking place. Over the past few months we've been working pretty hard to update the performance of the MSDN and TechNet blogs. We'll see even more performance fixes continuing to be deployed over the coming months and we continue to push the scale of this platform.

I want to give a big shout-out to Telligent (https://www.telligent.com) who are the major force behind our blogging platform - many of their staff have worked many hours recently to ensure these blogs are up, stable and fully featured for our blog writers and blog readers.

Besides perf and bug fixes, we've been preparing some new features for y'all. First up is localization of the core UI elements. Initially we'll be rolling out German, Spanish and Japanese. We'll add more languages as time and priorities permits. We'll be tracking to see just how many people are actually viewing the site in localized UI modes as well. You'll get the localized UI if your browser is set to use one of the supported languages...

I'll post about other features as we get closer to deploying them. We are also working on what's to come in 2011 so hopefully we can share some of that in the new year (things like aggregated RSS for groups of blogs, filtering by language of blogs, RSS feed improvements, merging user profiles and membership with the rest of the MSDN/TechNet sites, activity tracking etc.). If you have feature requests, please use the site feedback link on the site home page and let us know!

Thanks!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 01, 2010
    Are those RSS feed improvements going to include returning the complete set of comments in the comment feeds for individual posts, as was done before the update?  The current 25 is better than the original 15, but there are still times when I don't get to reading the comments before there are 25 posted.

  • Anonymous
    December 01, 2010
    The comment feeds will become separate per post instead of across all the posts in one feed. However the 25 is currently a site wide settings for posts and comments in RSS feeds. I'll see what we can do though...

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2010
    Following up on the CSS printing issue that I reported at blogs.msdn.com/.../june-update-coming-tuesday-afternoon.aspx , this still doesn't seem to be fixed? (text on the right is still cut off) The comments aren't hidden anymore when printing - that's good. However, it would be even better if it was possible to print out the comments as one long list again. 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
    December 06, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2010
    @Tom - hyperlinks to comments should be back soon though each blogger has to do some work to enable the new control. The user profile improvements we have planned for early 2011 will help with linking the profiles together. However until then, the profiles between MSDN and TechNet blogs are different. Use the contact form to directly contact me and I can get your password reset. The activity feeds for a user right now have been rolled back to just blog posts being published. And it's up to an individual blogger if they want to show that. When we complete the profile work, we'll also incorporate activities into the central MSDN/TechNet profile/activities so all activities will show up as expected.

  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2010
    "The comment feeds will become separate per post instead of across all the posts in one feed." I'm not sure what this means.  There is already a comment feed per post, and has been for years. "However the 25 is currently a site wide settings for posts and comments in RSS feeds. I'll see what we can do though..." Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2010
    The link to the RSS feed above these comments is for the whole blog, not just this post. Yep, there is a link in the RSS discovery menu but it's surprising how undiscoverable that is ;-)

  • Anonymous
    December 08, 2010
    Changing the scale to 95% in Print Preview helps, but that's just a workaround, and it reduces readability. Why not just apply the CSS fix that I suggested earlier?

  • Anonymous
    December 08, 2010
    Oh, you mean you're changing a link on the site itself.  I see.  I get to the comments feeds in my RSS reader directly from the individual post entries, so I didn't realize that there was a link there to the overall comments feed.

  • Anonymous
    December 08, 2010
    @Tim - we can certainly look at add the CSS fix. Just wanted to give you something now ;-)