Section: Blogs

Search Engine Optimization Tweaks over the long weekend

Nov 25, 2007 3 min.

My team builds a fair number of community sites including Channel 8 (for Students), TechNet Edge (for IT Pros), Channel 10 (for enthusiasts, power users and gamers), Mix Online (for web developers and designers) and the original site… Channel 9 (aimed mostly at developers) … and we’ve recently starting putting out sites on a new code base. One of the changes in that new code base was a move to an AJAX style interface for viewing lists of posts on the page.

Thanksgiving day… and I’m surprisingly short on things to do…

Nov 23, 2007 1 min.

Lots of plans for the weekend, lights to put up, some yard work… but today, my daughter is napping, my son is keeping himself very busy with a new remote control car that has a built in video camera (he is chasing the kitten around the family room)… I’m not quite ‘free’ enough to put in Mass Effect and try it out, but that will come later!

Picked up Mass Effect today… built XML site maps instead of playing it :(

Nov 22, 2007 1 min.

I’m very excited about it… really! I just got distracted on http://sitemaps.org and ended up building a site map for this site… real brute force, just grabbed all the blog entries and tags and output the appropriate absolute paths into some objects that I then wrote out into an XML document. Same method wouldn’t work on Channel 9 though, it has too many entries, so I’ll need to move to a site map index with multiple sub site maps… now I just have to figure out how to divide the entries up (by tag, by type of content, by date?

Ice Cube talking about Silverlight…

Nov 22, 2007 1 min.

and the Group Manager of Platform Evangelism at Adobe feels the need to comment about it. Let me summarize. Ice Cube is involved in an Internet video project and has chosen to use Silverlight, and you can watch an interview with him about it in Silverlight. (on a side note, I decided not to include the video into my post, even though the instructions to do so are right there in the original blog entry, because it is set to auto-start when someone visits the page and I think that is just downright rude 🙂 )

More Xbox Dad articles, Viva Piñata Party Animals and Xbox Live

Nov 21, 2007 1 min.

I’ve obviously been busy, I never even posted a link to these articles here… I’ve written two new Xbox Dad article in the past few weeks, one all about Xbox Live (to coincide with the Xbox Live is Five event going on) and one that I wrote this week about Viva Piñata Party Animals. Viva Piñata Party is a great game, the ‘party’ nature of it means that it is quick to get started, even for non-gamers, and the quick little matches means that you can pick it up and play even if you only have a little bit of time available.

Anyone have contacts with TVTonic?

Nov 19, 2007 1 min.

One of their users emailed us to comment on our video quality… essentially pointing out that it sucked when viewed through their TV using TV Tonic. Well I was puzzled because, while we don’t ship out DVD quality video, our high quality download is quite good for a podcast. Turns out though, after installing TV Tonic and picking on10.net out of their catalog, that the feed they have in their system is our 512kbps WMV feed… which is certainly not the best quality around, around 430kbps for video and 320×240… fine for display on our site, but not the hottest around… instead they should be using our WMV (high quality) feed (2500 kbps, 640 x 480), but I have no idea how to tell them about it.

The new Zune software rocks!

Nov 19, 2007 1 min.

Great UI, podcast support, music video downloads… and a firmware that works on my ‘original’ Zune. and look at the great member info page!

New Xbox Dad column: My take on the Bee Movie Game

Oct 28, 2007 1 min.

If you or your kids are all excited about the upcoming Bee Movie with Jerry Seinfeld, then you should definitely check out my latest article on Xbox.com. Along with the movie, an Xbox 360 game is also on its way…. and a demo is already up on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Not the most representative demo (more on that in the article!), but still fun and the game promises even more.