Content tagged with [blogging] on DuncanMackenzie.net

The code for my blog site is now available on codeplex.com

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 05:56:00 GMT

For anyone who is interested in using the code behind this site for their own blog, or who just finds reading code to be a fun pastime, you can go to http://www.codeplex.com/oxite to check it out. Of course, there are other blog engines up there, including blog engine .NET (which appears to be very highly supported and recommended by many folks), if you are in the market for some free blogging code.

Tracking RSS Feed Statistics

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 07:58:00 GMT

A few of my friends and co-workers have jumped on the FeedBurner bandwagon, and I've been pretty impressed with the stats they've been gathering. I'm not willing to send my readers off to someone else's service though (even though there are some reasonably safe ways to do that), so I started to think about how best to gather similar info myself. One idea would be to ship the IIS logs from my site back to my PC on a regular basis and run them through a LogParser script that would figure out all the stats for me... but that seems like a rather manual (or difficult to automate) and data transfer intensive method.

Instead, what I decided to do was to log every feed requests into a table on my SQL Server (actual SQL updates occur at regular intervals, not on every feed request). I log the feed URL being requested, the user agent of the requester, the IP Address of the requester, the number of subscribers represented by the user agent string (Google's feed reader, amongst others, indicates the # of subscribers in the user agent string) and the date/time they made the request.

What happens next is currently a manual process, but I'm working on making it automatic...

For a given 24-hour period:

I sum up the number of requests by user agent/IP address combo
I filter down to user agent/IP address combos that made more than one request to the same feed during that time period... this is intended to distinguish between a manual user visit and an RSS aggregator. (of course, if an RSS aggregator is set to be very polite and only hit my site once per day, then this will cut those #s out of the list)
I sum up the average subscriber # for all useragent/IP address combos ... to avoid counting any single aggregator user more than once and also to accommodate any fluctuation in web aggregator subscriber counts throughout the day.

This produces a final # that I believe is roughly accurate... 792 (for the past 24 hours) across all of my feeds (mostly either the main feed or the Visual Basic feed).

About half of the requests (244 total) filtered out because they made only one request in 24 hours do appear to be aggregators (looking at user agent strings) so that would add 120 or so to this #, but in the interest of not inflating the numbers, I think I'll stick with the calculations I've worked out so far. My other worry is that some of the web-based aggregators might be producing some duplicate values due to multiple source IP addresses, probably as a result of having aggregation code running on multiple nodes of a web farm.

Has anyone else tried to implement their own FeedBurner-style stats? Any thoughts on my logic so far?

The Channel 9/Channel 10 team is hiring

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:16:00 GMT

Hey folks, I work as the dev lead for Channel 9, Channel 10, Mix Online and other sites. We build community sites for Microsoft using video, audio and text blogging and we build them using the latest .NET technologies. If you are into web development, if you have a passion for design and user experience, and if you really rock at AJAX, Javascript, CSS, C# and ASP.NET .... then this is the job for you :)

The Developer and Platform Evangelism Team is hiring a software design engineer to join the team that builds and extends Channel 9, Channel 10 and more. Our sites build a two way interaction between our customers and Microsoft using video as the primary communication tool. In the past several years we have built several additional sites and our network has grown in both traffic and content, and as a result we are looking for an additional Software Design Engineer to join the team. We are looking for someone who lives and breathes HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX and ASP.NET. The ideal candidate will have skills in all those technologies combined with a passion for design and user experience.

Do you like to ship, takes chances and effect change? Do you want to build cool sites that use Silverlight and Atlas to deliver a great user experience? Then come join our group where you'll find a small dynamic team of folks and you'll swear you are part of startup.
Experience in HTML/CSS, ASP.NET and C# is required and experience with AJAX, SQL, Scrum and Test-Driven Development is highly desired. Experience with Silverlight and/or WPF is not required but it would be great to have.

If you are interested and you meet the requirements, go to the official job listing on the Microsoft careers site and submit your resume!

Connect your Xbox 360 Gamertag to Twitter

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 11 May 2007 17:58:00 GMT

UPDATE: I've updated this application since the original version, addressing most of the 'known issues' listed below

hey folks, the first version of my xbox to twitter app is done (at least done enough to share!) ...

Install the .NET Framework 2.0 (if you don't have it)
Install the app
Run it (from the "Duncan Mackenzie" folder in your Start Menu)
Right click the little 'twitter' icon on your notification area, pick Settings ... enter in your

Twitter Email Address
Twitter Screen Name
Twitter Password
Gamertag
check "Updates Enabled"
Click OK to save these settings...

Now fire up your Xbox 360 and updates will be sent to Twitter every few minutes (if you are online and your status has changed)
Come back here to post any feedback/problems!

Known Issues:

'status has changed' is a bit too sensitive now... if you are playing Crackdown and you go from running to driving then your status on Xbox Live actually changes (from "Running around" to "Driving around") and the app will post an update ... I'm planning to add an option to 'only post when the game changes, not the status'
Time delay, Xbox.com's data and my app are all using various forms of caching... so if you put in a game it may be 10-15 minutes before the app notices and posts an update ... also if you put one in, then stop playing a minute later... you may never see an update
The app checks status every 5 minutes, I can make that configurable in the future (but probably limited to no more often than 5 minutes... I'll let you make it less often though)
Format of the update: Currently it is "playing <game title> (<additional info>)" ... and if you are into config files and user specific isolated storage you can change that... I'll make it part of the settings in a future release.
You have to leave it running on a logged in machine to work... yep... I have a web based version but I thought people might be worried about giving me their userid/password for twitter so for now I thought I'd start with this local version.

Security concerns? Yes, you have to enter in your Twitter credentials. Those are stored in plain text on the hard drive... but it is on your hard drive only ... I never send your Twitter Credentials up to my site, although I do send them as credentials to Twitter when I call the Twitter APIs. Worried I might be sending to my site? Run a HTTP Trace if you'd like (Fiddler), you'll see calls to the Twitter API and calls to a web service on my site to get your gamertag info... nothing else.

Cool gadget using sparklines to show your RSS stats from Feedburner

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 07 May 2007 06:30:00 GMT

A friend of mine has written this google gadget in true mashup style... it uses an API from Feedburner, a service to produce the graphics, and works async to update itself right in the browser ... and produces a sweet little graphic about your current # of subscribers.

Trackbacks and URL matching

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:35:00 GMT

I recently noticed a bug in the trackback code on Channel 10, some sites were failing to send us trackbacks, even though we were receiving trackbacks from other sources and those sites were happily trackbacking (I'm just annoying the spell checker today) other blogs.

Turns out the problem appears to be in our RDF block on our blog pages. On a page like this, the RDF block contains the following element:

dc:identifier="http://on10.net/Blogs/tina/exclusive-video-first-look-at-the-xbox-elite/"

This uses the permalink URL that we provide for this page, but of course there are several other urls that work to get to the same resource including

http://on10.net/Blogs/tina/exclusive-video-first-look-at-the-xbox-elite/default.aspx,
http://www.on10.net/Blogs/tina/exclusive-video-first-look-at-the-xbox-elite/ and
http://www.on10.net/Blogs/tina/exclusive-video-first-look-at-the-xbox-elite/default.aspx

When a client, some other blog or blog posting software, goes to auto-discover our trackback URL they try to match the dc:identifier to whatever url they used in their post. So, if they didn't use the one we've chosen for our dc:identifier, then they don't find our trackback info, they don't send the trackback, and we don't get the trackback.

This sucks, but what is the right way to handle it? Add four distinct RDF blocks? Or is there some way to include all four URLs in the one RDF block?

Kent Sharkey's been a busy guy

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 06:13:00 GMT

Kent's blog is back online and in one of his recent posts he updates us on all the projects he's been working since he left Microsoft (where we were both working at MSDN as content strategists)... tons of cool stuff, definitely worth reading through and following some links.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007 #

What has been occupying my time

It's been about a nice round 17 months (give or take) since I left Microsoft. Since then, Microsoft shipped some software, people have argued, and the world continues its revolution, rotation and other movements.
I know all of you were wondering, "What's Kent up to?", so here is some of what I've been up to since I left.

Kent Sharkey's Blog (home page)

Have you created an Avatar on Gravatar?

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 17:00:00 GMT

Some people have great ideas, like Tom Werner's Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) site... a single place on the web to upload an avatar that any blog software can then retrieve using a fairly easily constructed URL. Neat stuff, I think I'll add it to my site.

Categories vs. Tags in Blogs and Blog Editors

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 15:48:00 GMT

I've been pondering categories vs. tags in blogs, in my sites (such as http://on10.net) we've completely done away with the concept of categories as distinct entities from tags, which works fine on the site but is causing me a bit of a headache when I look at blog editing and blog editing APIs.

I've enabled the metaweblogapi on my sites so that standard blog editing tools like performancing, windows live writer, etc... can be used by our staff to post entries, and I've used the 'categories' area of that API to represent tags.

This has caused me two issues:

First, there are many more tags on most sites than there would be categories, so editing tools don't always provide the most useful UI for selecting tags.

Second, categories are fairly static, but tags are continually being added... and most blogging software doesn't provide a mechanism for adding to your list of categories.

I'm looking for thoughts, ideas, arguments... anything to help me figure out what the best way is to handle this move from categories to tags while still supporting the standard API mechanisms.

OPML for the on10.net team

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 20:13:00 GMT

I've created a quick and simple list of the 10 team's various blog feeds... so if you'd like to follow along with their personal musings (including mine) then you can grab the OPML file here.

Thanks to AvidX for my cool blog banner

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 22:00:00 GMT

Now that the site appears to be stable, I wanted to mention that my ultra-cool green banner was done for me by Chris from 360Style.net. If you haven't seen his site yet, check it out... my desktop wallpaper is always one of Chris's images

Windows Live Writer is a spammer!!

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 17:16:00 GMT

I think we have a real design flaw here... one of those 'neat ideas on your dev box' that maybe shouldn't have really been implemented.

Check out this Technorati search for Temporary Post Used For Style Detection to see what I'm talking about. It isn't even something I get a choice about (every time I go to a different machine and configure my blog, I get a test post...).

For more on the Window Live Writer, check out this video on on10.net :)

Pageviews are Obsolete

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 17:10:00 GMT

For quite some time I've thought Pageviews were a mostly useless number to be tracking for any web site. This was very clear at MSDN, where such stats are tracked very carefully... spreadsheets are created... charts are made... and yet, none of us really believed in the Pageview #s. Instead we used to focus more on unique visitors or an odd calculated value we called unique page views (not everyone's definition of that # is the same, but suffice it to say that is an attempt to more accurately represent real site visits by real people).

RSS is one reason why PageViews are useless, site design considerations are another (if high page views are a goal, then reducing the # of clicks for a user to get from your home page to an article becomes a bad thing... when it should a wonderful thing).

I found a great article today, via Alex Barnett's deli.cio.us links, on this exact topic.

How embarrassing, comments were broken on my new blog for over a day!

Duncan Mackenzie — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 08:00:00 GMT

Fixed now though... sorry to anyone who posted a comment (and received a nice "your comment was posted!") ... it was lost into the magical ether.

Spam is out of control on my blog

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 18:31:00 GMT

Not that it affects you, the reader, all that much... but I'm getting around 9000 spam comments a day now. It is crazy. I'd add code to avoid them, but I'm just finishing up a move to some new blog software that Adam and I wrote (you can see it running on Adam's site already) and I don't really want to spend any more time in the .Text code base...

Ok, cool plug-ins for Windows Live Writer cropping up all over

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 04:07:00 GMT

If you are a dev, then this code formatting plug-in is probably the coolest thing out there... I'm still ranking Tim's Flickr plug-in as #1 at the moment, at least my slightly customized version that is, but if you'd like a list of several available plug-ins then this spaces entry is a good place to check out. Of course, if you have no idea what Windows Live Writer is... check out this video from on10.net :)

The on10/Channel 9 Dev team have another dev focused video up

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:38:00 GMT

I even got to be the 'preview' image! Check this out to hear a bit more about our design and implementation of on10.net, and for some more info on our plans around on10.net going forward and for moving Channel 9 on to this new code base.

Windows Live Writer

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 15:30:00 GMT

on10.net has a good interview up about the new blogging tool from the Windows Live team. What's cool about this app? For a developer, there is tons to be excited about, including a very easy to use SDK (wrote some plug-in code last night, super easy) and it ships with a bunch of .NET assemblies that I'm about to go spelunking through...

Well, that was a bit of a surprise

Duncan Mackenzie — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 05:56:00 GMT

One of my teammates just left the team ... glad he cleared up some of the rumours as quickly as he did... it was a bit sad how quickly people came up with a list of Microsoft-bashing comments. Anyway, I wonder who is getting his new camera :)

A microphone made with podcasting in mind?

Duncan Mackenzie — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 19:25:00 GMT

I just found this article about a series of Heil microphones that work great for podcasting, although I'm sure they were made with any vocal application in mind... detailed info in the post, although I thought it was odd that I had to scroll all the way down to find the one single link to the actual microphone(s) being discussed.

on10.net's tagging gets a little bit more 'connected'

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 23:48:00 GMT

Erik extended our tag pages on on10.net a bit, check out the full details here as part of our on10.net news blog.

Found some pre-existing source code to send test pingbacks

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 15:56:00 GMT

I wrote my own for Trackbacks, which I used to incorporate trackbacks into http://on10.net, but Geoff provides one on his blog (that doesn't appear to support comments, but does support trackbacks, so I thought I had better blog about it to thank him) that does both.

Silly me, I hadn't built pingback support into on10.net, thinking that Trackbacks would handle most cases... but it turns out that many sites (including wordpress) only send pingbacks... oh well, at least it will be there after our next sprint.

Korby speculates on the marketing strategy behind 10's quiet launch

Duncan Mackenzie — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 02:50:00 GMT

Personally, I always hated it when people in various product groups at Microsoft would ask me to blog about a specific launch or event... because if I decided to do it, my blog post would go up into a sea of similar posts all appearing within a few hours of each other on blogs.msdn.com. How does that make you, the reader, feel? Like you are having information pushed at you through a channel that is normally about technical matters. Now, if one blogger does that, that seems fine... they are involved in the product or event and they are excited about it... why shouldn't they blog about it? But when 50 people do it, you can expect that someone behind the scenes decided that the power of blogs was too cheap and easy not to try and use it to promote their wares.

So, back to the point.... why didn't we annouce http://on10.net more widely inside Microsoft? Why didn't we send an email to all the top bloggers asking them to talk about it? Because they would have.... and that would have been slimy. Now, if we put the show up and those same bloggers find it on their own (via links from people like Scoble, who is on the on10.net team and works on show ideas with the rest of us) ... like it... and then decide to talk about it. Well, that is natural and that is fine with me. It might be a slower way to spread info, but in the end you won't end up 'spamming' a few thousand people who don't care, you will hopefully end up speaking only to those people who will want to visit the site. Even now, with the site completely public and launched, I'm scared to send an annoucement to too many people inside the company at once... for fear that a large number of them would decide to tell someone else. Too much noise about something from a single source smells like a scam... even if it isn't.

Learn a bit about how on10.net was made

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 17:11:00 GMT

Interview with the dev team (including me) is up on Channel 9

Odd Language element in MSN Spaces feeds?

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 07:37:00 GMT

Perhaps a little bug left over from when they first launched in Japan, but the MSN Spaces feeds seem to specify a language code for at least one english language feed (Brian's)... but it does return en-US for some others. Hmm... it also seems to specify en-US for some feeds that are quite obviously not... perhaps choosing your language is a per-blog setting that people aren't aware of? I'm not sure if it matters all that much, other than to blog indexers, if the character set and encoding is correct, the lanugage element isn't really important to aggregators or browsers, but since it changes from feed to feed it must be based on some sort of per-blog or per-user setting.

Term Extraction

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 13:51:00 GMT

I was playing around with Yahoo's term extraction service, as a possible path to tagging (this is the same service used behind TagCloud.com, for example), and I created this C# class libary with a sample app written in Windows Forms.

Code is available for download here: Term Extraction (ZIP).

Have you tried my RSS editor? Comments?

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 05:50:00 GMT

Ok, so I'm fishing for comments... not compliments at least, but I'm still fishing... I've seen a fair bit of traffic to the install point but not a single email or blog comment about this app... go ahead fire away (and yes, I know that it doesn't do Atom feeds... yet).

Updated my personal site to use the Firefox/IE7 feed icons...

Duncan Mackenzie — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 03:14:00 GMT

As per the blog entry "Feed icons" and using icons pulled from the new feedicons site. Hopefully MSDN will follow suit as well, which would probably be pretty easy... it looks like they are mostly linking every instance of the 'old' RSS icon to the same graphic. I'll suggest it and we'll see what happens.

Added some additional info to each post from my blog, a "bookmark this with Del.icio.us" link and the oh-so-trendy 'tags'

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 17:13:00 GMT

Check out a single entry view on my site to see the new additions

Immediate Action Feeds

Duncan Mackenzie — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 08:27:00 GMT

Kent pointed me to this article on xml.com, talking about the benefits of having direct actions available as links in your feeds. This is a good idea, but it is a good idea for any HTML content. If you are going to have a link at the bottom of a MSDN page saying "give us feedback", it would be best to either make sure that link takes the user directly to a form to enter feedback or instead to let them enter their feedback right there on the page. Good stuff all around, but in the context of feeds I have a problem with the way it is implemented.

The suggestion in the article, and it works just fine, is to just add these immediate action links into the body of your feed item. This will seem like a meaningless distinction to some, but to me that is not the best way to go. The links are about the content of the post; they themselves are not the content, so they don't belong in the content.

Having them in the markup of the post means that every feed producer will put their 'actions' wherever they want them, and you can bet it won't be in any consistent fashion. Instead, what I would like to see is a list of 'actions' as a separate part of the feed item. Then the software that is displaying the feed could implement a common method of displaying the list of actions associated with a specific item. In one application this might be a right-click menu option, while in another it could be a sidebar along side the post.... but because the actions are clearly separated from the content it opens up the possibility of displaying them in whatever fashion the application author believes will be most usable.

So, instead of this

<item>
 <title>New Album out by GreenDay</title>
 <description>
 Cool new album hits stores today.... <a href="...">buy it</a>
 </description>
 <link>http://www.musicsite.com/newalbumout.aspx</link>
 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.musicsite.com/newalbumout.aspx</guid>
 <pubDate>Tue, 25 Oct 2005 22:54:16 GMT</pubDate>
</item>

We would have this...

<item>
 <title>New Album out by GreenDay</title>
 <description>
 Cool new album hits stores today....
 </description>
 <link>http://www.musicsite.com/newalbumout.aspx</link>
 <ia:actions>
 <ia:action name="Buy It">
 http://www.musicsite.com/buy.aspx?id=greenday
 </ia:action>
 </ia:actions>
 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.musicsite.com/newalbumout.aspx</guid>
 <pubDate>Tue, 25 Oct 2005 22:54:16 GMT</pubDate>
</item>

Now it is easy to add additional actions without any change to the content

<ia:actions>
 <ia:action name="Buy It">
 http://www.musicsite.com/buy.aspx?id=greenday
 </ia:action>
 <ia:action name="Email this Post">
 http://www.musicsite.com/email.aspx?id=greenday
 </ia:action>
 </ia:actions>

application/rss+xml vs. text/xml

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:03:00 GMT

I've been working on some feed support in MSDN's new online platform (a beta of which is running http://msdn2.microsoft.com) and I had to decide what content-type to use when outputting a RSS feed. I knew this was a contentious issue in the past, but I thought it might have been resolved so I did some browsing of specs and discussions and ended up with the following links:

A discussion on Sam Ruby's blog around content-type (the comments are the interesting part)
This post by Dave Winer

I'm sure I could find more, but it appears this was never really resolved... using application/xml seems the most 'proper', but the concern is that some browsers don't know how to handle it ... so the other choice is text/xml (specifically text/xml; charset=utf-8 or else the charset will default to US-ASCII). Hmm... which to choose? Even our own sites have multiple implementations:

The main MSDN feed is application/xml
while the MSDN Magazine's (which is dynamically generated using ASP.NET) is output as text/xml; charset=utf-8

Interestingly enough, I found one feed that used application/rss+xml (Sam's RSS 2.0 feed) which I think is probably not the best choice since that content type was never officially registered, and it was the only feed I hit that IE didn't understand (and therefore tried to just download).

I think I will go with "application/xml" which has the best features in my opinion.

It clearly indicates that this is not just text, so it should avoid issues with proxies messing with the characters,
it leaves the character set data in the xml declaration, avoiding a possible conflict if I specify one in the http headers that is different than what the feed specifies,
it displays correctly in IE and Firefox, and
it is consistent with what we are doing today with the MSDN main feed.

Now, what about those in-page links we have? <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="blah" href="rss.xml" /> .... perhaps they should be just "application/xml" as well?

More on that RSS editor...

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 05:28:00 GMT

In the end, MSDN didn't end up needing the RSS editor I wrote, so I've stripped out the features and content specific to their needs and started turning it into a more generic RSS creation tool. If you'd like to see it, as it is, you can run it from a ClickOnce install point here on my site. There are more features coming, and I'm revamping the style and behavior of the category system.... but you can try it out against copies of your own feeds or click File | New Feed to make new ones. Check out the Validate option on the menu, it will send whatever feed you have open to a web service enabled version of the feedvalidator.org system (coded up by Kent Sharkey), allowing you to check the validatity of your RSS without having to publish the file anywhere.

Note: If you have Beta 2 of the .NET Framework installed, the Click Once application will not install or run correctly. In this case, you need to run the VS remove tool (available from here)

Trying to improve the standards compliance of my blog, but the asp:Calendar is getting in my way!

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 05:58:00 GMT

I've been trying to fix some XHTML issues on my blog, but two pieces of technology are thwarting my plans.... first, there is the text editor in .Text (FreeTextBox) which appears to be making the first anchor or image tag in the post uppercase, even though I have its XHTML support enabled... (so my first link is <A href=....>, instead of <a href=...>) and the second is the ASP.NET Calendar (1.1 framework version).

Page with calendar produces 71 errors
Page without calendar produces 13, all due to the first tag as uppercase problem I think

There are enough problems for me to solve around producing valid pages with dynamic content, now I have to either find a replacement calendar or move the whole site up to the 2.0 framework :)

Added category elements to my RSS feed, since I wasn't playing Xbox 360

Duncan Mackenzie — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 09:03:00 GMT

About a year or so back I added <category> elements to the MSDN RSS feeds, which seemed like an obvious addition, but it wasn't until recently that I noticed that my own feeds (coming out of my .Text 0.95 based blogging engine) didn't have categories specified in them at all. Not in the main feed or in the per-blog feeds...

This seemed really odd to me, since much of the UI of the .Text posting page, editing page, and even the blog skins themselves is dedicated to the listing and selecting of categories. Obviously, categories are seen as important information about blog entries, so why not include them in the RSS feeds? Oh well, there is little point in wondering about these sorts of things, not when you have the source, so I added category elements to my main and individual feeds. I haven't added them to the per-category feeds yet, or to the ATOM feeds, but I'll get to those in the near future.

If you haven't looked at the .Text source yourself, you might be wondering why adding these elements to one feed wouldn't have added them to all of the feeds, because all RSS feeds are probably running through the same code path. While this is mostly true, they are running through the same ASP.NET handler and through the same feed generation code, the category-based feeds use a different stored procedure to retrieve their entries than the feeds that I have updated, and I had to make a change to the database query to return the list of categories along with each item. What I ended up doing, (and I'm not sure about the performance of this code but it is so highly cached that I'm not particularly worried about it for this use), was using a Function to retrieve the list of categories as a semi-colon deliminated string given a PostID (note that if you host multiple blogs on your .Text instance that this function should take both a BlogID and a PostID... I'll have to update this for the multi-blog case).

 
 CREATE FUNCTION blog_GetCategoryTitles (@PostID int) RETURNS nvarchar(4000)
 BEGIN
 DECLARE @CategoryList nvarchar(4000)
 SELECT @CategoryList = COALESCE
(@CategoryList + ';', '') +
 blog_LinkCategories.Title
 FROM blog_Content
 LEFT OUTER JOIN blog_Links 
 on blog_Links.PostID = blog_Content.ID
 LEFT OUTER JOIN blog_LinkCategories
 on blog_Links.CategoryID = blog_LinkCategories.CategoryID
 WHERE blog_Content.ID=@PostID AND
 blog_Content.BlogID = blog_Links.BlogID AND
 blog_LinkCategories.Title != ''
 RETURN @CategoryList
 END

thanks to Garth's 2001 article from SQLTeam.com for showing me COALESCE being used for this purpose...

and then modifying the queries that retrieved entries to also return blog_GetCategoryTitles(<PostID>), and then modify the RSS writer to output the categories if any were returned.

Interesting note, I figured the omission of category data from the feeds in .Text was a simple error and that it would have been added along the way to Community Server, but I noticed that the feeds on blogs.msdn.com don't appear to have category data either... is category information not considered useful in feeds?

RSS feed authoring for those without blog software or an enjoyment of typing angle brackets

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 04:56:00 GMT

Blogs and blogging software seem to be everywhere these days, and RSS has been a top buzzword for quite some time, everyone and their dog wants to take advantage of this new trend and technology. The problem is, it isn't a simple process to create and maintain a valid RSS file. If you aren't willing to run a complete blogging system or if you aren't capable of hand-editing XML, then you don't have a lot of options. For most of the folks that will read this blog entry, you probably don't have this problem, producing RSS 2.0 wouldn't be much of an issue for a developer, but there are times when we want less technical folks to be able to author their own feeds without any assistance. At MSDN we started thinking about this very problem ourselves recently when we decided that, in addition to all the feeds that come out of our content systems, there was a need to create some small feeds that didn't necessarily fit into our larger content systems. Handing off the task of feed creation to notepad or Front Page wasn't an appealing thought and that path would probably result in a lot of xml editing errors and invalid feeds.

This problem happened to line up with a sample I had been thinking of though, so I wrote a quick app using VC# Express 2005 to try and help out; a Feed Writer that allows you to create new RSS 2.0 feeds, edit existing ones, and even import entries from one feed to another. I stuck to a tried and true UI structure, tree along the left side then entry fields on the right:

This app has been developed without the general user in mind, MSDN/TechNet were the targets and because of that there are some fields in this UI that are only relevant to the needs of those groups. For example, the list of attributes you can see on the lower-right is specific to the needs of MSDN and TechNet, who need to markup the feed entries with the appropriate choices. The "Type" and "HeadlineImage" fields are also specific to MSDN feeds, I'm planning to adapt it to work with 'standard' RSS 2.0 items and the category element to make it more general purpose, but for now I thought I'd show you the version I already have running.

In a rather backwards fashion, I'm going to finish up this as a sample and write the article, now that I've finished the actual practical version of the same system... but it will all work out in the end.

Moved my .Text blog from Atom 0.3 to Atom 1.0

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 04:11:00 GMT

I only recently noticed that my blog software (.Text 0.95) had atom support built in, so I added a button to my main page, and then I noticed it was Atom 0.3. Since 0.3 was recently deprecated, I updated the Atom generating code to output 1.0 instead and voila;

Much thanks to rakaz's great guide on moving from 0.3 to 1.0, which enabled me to update my code with almost no knowledge of Atom 0.3 or 1.0 :)

Put my new Xbox Live gamertag onto my blog, in all it's iframe glory...

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 13:12:00 GMT

Check it out at http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net/duncanma, and go make your own at http://www.xbox.com

Have you heard about SoloSub?

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 02:57:00 GMT

I was considering adding one (or more) of the many aggregator-buttons (subscribe to this feed in newsgator, add this feed to your MSN start page, etc.) when I found this, one button that handles all of the most popular aggregators through a single link.

Check out http://solosub.com for more info...

Added Atom support to the FlairMaker... my version at least

Duncan Mackenzie — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 05:19:00 GMT

Nick, from "The Coding Monkey" mentioned that he would like to see Atom support in the FlairMaker, so ... having no real reason not to, and having an extra 15 minutes after the kids went to sleep before I started cleaning up the house, I added it...

Of course, I've just added this to my forked version of Kent's original code... so any feature I add that he likes will need to manually added into his version... bad software development practice, but hey we're just playing around here so you should be expecting too much.

Update: I also modified the code to pull the blog's title from the feed (Atom or RSS) and stick it at the bottom. Not that useful of a feature for the Coding 4 Fun version, since it is always pointing at the same feed... but useful for mine if people want to use it for their own feeds

After some discussions with Sam Ruby and others on the FeedValidator mailing list, the MSDN RSS feed validates as is...

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 02:39:00 GMT

In an earlier post, I discussed the fact that the MSDN feeds were failing to validate due to a MIME type that included parameters (charset in this case, like 'text/html ;charset=utf-8'), but I also posted a query about this issue into the listserv for FeedValidator.org. Sam mentioned it on his blog, and then went ahead and updated the validator to recognize a MIME type with parameter as valid.

In the meantime, I updated the MSDN generator to strip out the parameters :), but I still think they are technically valid so I'm glad the feed validates as it is today (with params) and as it will exist in the near future with the MIME types stripped down to just type/subtype.

A bug in my RSS generator, but is it really invalid?

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 04:36:00 GMT

The RSS generator for MSDN, creator of this feed, and many more ... has a small problem. Way upstream, when various people inside the company enter information about an upcoming headline, they have the ability to specify a URL to a download. The intent was for this to be a URL to an actual downloadable file, so when I generate an RSS item from that headline entry, I take that URL and turn it into an enclosure entry in the RSS file.

    <item>


      <title>Read about Atlas - Ajax for ASP.NET</title>


      <description>ASP.NET "Atlas" is a package of 

new Web development technologies that integrates an extensive set of 

client script libraries with the rich, server-based development 

platform of ASP.NET 2.0. </description>


      <link>http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/future/</link>


      <dc:creator>Microsoft Corporation</dc:creator>


      <category domain="msdndomain:ContentType">Link</category>


      <category domain="msdndomain:Audience">Developers</category>


      <category domain="msdndomain:Hardware">CPU</category>


      <category domain="msdndomain:Operating Systems">Windows</category>


      <category domain="msdndomain:Subject">Web development</category>


      <msdn:headlineImage />


      <msdn:headlineIcon>http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdn-
online/shared/graphics/icons/offsite.gif</msdn:headlineIcon>


      <msdn:contentType>Link</msdn:contentType>


      <msdn:simpleDate>Sep 19</msdn:simpleDate>


      <enclosure url="

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=52384" 
length="17437" 
type="text/html; charset=utf-8" />


      <guid isPermaLink="false">Titan_2519</guid>


      <pubDate>Mon, 19 Sep 2005 18:20:40 GMT</pubDate>


    </item>

This generally works fine, I make a HEAD request with that URL which gives me back the MIME type and the Content Length, both of which are needed for the enclosure element in the RSS item. Sometimes though, people put in a URL to the download's landing page, not the download itself. There are good reasons for this, as the download page often contains useful information and/or multiple localized versions of the download, but it was not what I expected. In this case, I put the enclosure in with the MIME type I get back from that URL, which ends up being 'text/html' and with a byte size that reflects the size of the landing page.

This wasn't really what I wanted to happen, so I need to figure out a solution at my end, but what I noticed today and what has me a little puzzled is that at least two different validators (here and here) report these types of entries as validation errors. The error they specify is that text/html is not a valid MIME type.... but, according to the RFC(s) (see 4.1.2 of this RFC) and other sources, it most certainly is a valid type. So, is there a hidden rule in RSS that enclosures have to fall within some special subset of MIME types, or are both of these validators broken? Sure, in this case it wasn't really what I wanted, but what if I really did have a text/html document for you to download?

Long overdue, but here is the source for the "blog copier"

Duncan Mackenzie — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 06:32:00 GMT

In my first post on this site, I mentioned an application that I wrote to copy blog posts from one .Text server to another. Overall, I didn't think the application had any real use after the web service I used was removed from the weblogs.asp.net servers, but I'm posting it anyway for anyone who might find it useful.

Source here: http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/Samples/#blogcopy

Just pulled down the CS 1.0 source... now to start working on a migration plan

Duncan Mackenzie — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 03:38:00 GMT

Currently I'm running .Text .94 + a bunch of private modifications and some version of CS:Forums + a bunch of private modifications... so now that CS 1.0's source is out, I want to incorporate my mods into the combined package and then migrate my data and get my site up and running on the new stuff. As cool as that is, and while I'm sure it has excellent tools/scripts for upgrading, I'm not looking forward to it. It was hard enough to get my site set up now, with blogs.duncanmackenzie.net running as its own app domain and then trying to make the Forums code work when the application started at the root not at /Forums. Anyway, suffice it to say I don't expect to upgrade right away, but maybe I'll have a copy of the site upgraded and sitting on my dev box within the next week....

Anyone else gone through the upgrade/migration and have any thoughts or comments?

Community Server 1.0 Released

Duncan Mackenzie — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 16:10:00 GMT

Telligent Systems, the company founded by former Microsoftie (and ASP.NET whiz kid) Rob Howard, has finally released Community Server 1.0. Community Server combines the functionality of forums (based on the ASP.NET forums engine Rob worked on while at Microsoft), blogs (based on the very popular .Text engine created by Scott Watermasysk, who now works for Telligent), and photo gallery (based on nGallery, created by Jason Alexander, who's also one of the brains at Telligent).

Congrats to the Telligent team...I'm looking forward to trying out CS 1.0 for my personal blog, which is currently running on an older version of .Text.

from G. Andrew Duthie's blog....

Added support for the rel="nofollow" attribute to my .Text installation...

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 07:28:00 GMT

Google and various blog software vendors recently announced a method to deter comment spam by reducing its benefit to the spammer... it sounds like a pretty good idea, so I updated my installation of .Text to use this new attribute in the comment section by adding just a single line within comments.cs: namelink.Attributes["rel"] = "nofollow"; ... now, let's just hope it works ;)

I think I might enhance this a bit later, adding the idea of approved comments that don't get this attribute for their links, since I see no reason why a non-spammer's comment shouldn't give them google-juice. That feature is likely a ways into the future, but you never know.

Halo 2 Stats via RSS... an interesting idea that I think could be improved

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 23 Nov 2004 04:31:00 GMT

I like that Bungie is exposing your stats as RSS (see mine here), but it would be cooler if they had added some additional elements and attributes to the feed to describe the games in a more usable format, rather than just in HTML... instead of;

				
						<item>
						

				 <title>Rumble Pit: Oddball on Ascension</title>
 <link>http://www.bungie.net/stats/gamestats.aspx?gameid=8132172&player=Festive Turkey</link>
 <pubDate>Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:45:07 GMT</pubDate>
 <guid>http://www.bungie.net/stats/gamestats.aspx?gameid=8132172&player=Festive Turkey</guid>
 <description>
 Game played at Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:45:07 GMT<br/><br/>Playlist: Rumble Pit<br/>Oddball on Ascension<br/><br/> 
 <b>Gamertag (Team): Score, Kills, Deaths, Assists</b> 
 <br/>l obvious l (1): 59, 14, 9, 5<br/>ScottyAK (0): 52, 16, 10, 6<br/>
 BK Assassin (2): 29, 6, 9, 1<br/>MAXODeeZ (3): 18, 7, 12, 4<br/>
 BattlingWheel (4): 15, 10, 13, 5<br/>Festive Turkey (5): 6, 5, 11, 5<br/>
 snackasaurus (6): 0, 6, 7, 6<br/>LionWrath716 (7): 0, 1, 0, 0<br/> 
 </description>
</item>

they could add a namespace reference for Halo or Bungie.... and end up with...

<item>
 <title>Rumble Pit: Oddball on Ascension</title>
 <link>http://www.bungie.net/stats/gamestats.aspx?gameid=8132172&player=Festive Turkey</link>
 <pubDate>Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:45:07 GMT</pubDate>
 <guid>http://www.bungie.net/stats/gamestats.aspx?gameid=8132172&player=Festive Turkey</guid>
 <description>
 Game played at Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:45:07 GMT<br/><br/>Playlist: Rumble Pit<br/>Oddball on Ascension<br/><br/> 
 <b>Gamertag (Team): Score, Kills, Deaths, Assists</b> 
 <br/>l obvious l (1): 59, 14, 9, 5<br/>ScottyAK (0): 52, 16, 10, 6<br/>
 BK Assassin (2): 29, 6, 9, 1<br/>MAXODeeZ (3): 18, 7, 12, 4<br/>
 BattlingWheel (4): 15, 10, 13, 5<br/>Festive Turkey (5): 6, 5, 11, 5<br/>
 snackasaurus (6): 0, 6, 7, 6<br/>LionWrath716 (7): 0, 1, 0, 0<br/> 
 </description>
 <bungie:game>
    <bungie:datePlayed>Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:45:07 GMT</bungie:datePlayed>
    <bungie:playlist>Playlist: Rumble Pit</bungieplaylist>
    <bungie:variant>Oddball</bungie:variant>
    <bungie:map>Ascension</bungie:map>
    <bungie:players>
       <bungie:player>
          <bungie:gamertag>Festive Turkey</bungie:gamertag>
          <bungie:score>6</bungie:score>
          <bungie:kills>5</bungie:kills>
          <bungie:deaths>11</bungie:deaths>
          <bungie:assists>5</bungie:assists>
       </bungie:player>
    </bungie:players>
 </bungie:game>
</item>

still valid RSS 2.0, still works in aggregators, but suddenly useful to anyone wanting to consume this information for more than just directly viewing it...

Added an RSS feed to the site for my articles...

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 21:16:00 GMT

I guess I could have just added a category to my blog, but this works... http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/articles/rss.xml

I've been working on a new RSS generation system for MSDN for the past little while

Duncan Mackenzie — Mon, 27 Sep 2004 04:19:00 GMT

... and it is almost ready to ship....

The new system will result in a few changes to the MSDN feeds, the most notable of which is that our feeds will no longer reflect a certain time span (they currently contain all of the appropiately attributed items from the past 30 days), but will instead contain a certain # of items. They also have a bit more data in them, including the author of the article (in the dc:creator element) and a collection of category elements containing all of the attribution that we have applied to that article in our back end system.

If you check out a sample feed, available here, you'll see the changes described above along with one other new 'feature'. We will have a stylesheet added to the top of the feeds, which is primarily targetted at folks who do not already use RSS feeds. When people in the past have seen our RSS buttons on the various MSDN sites, clicking on that button showed them the raw XML... with no real context or explanation of what they were being shown. This new format, using the style sheet, should help improve the experience for those customers.

Please let me know what you think about these changes (feel free to post your thoughts in the feedback section of this post), they aren't released yet so this is the time when I need to hear any and all feedback you have!!

Update: Luc Cluitmans noticed that the feed was not displaying correctly in Firefox... but I believe I've fixed that problem now, please let me know if you still notice problems with the display. I get only text in Opera, but I think that is due to the fact that XSLT is not supported by Opera... let me know if I'm wrong on that one...

Deleting database tables, a great web host and a reactive software vendor...

Duncan Mackenzie — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 05:46:00 GMT

In a previous post, I mentioned that a flaw in the installation routines for telligent's forum system resulted in the deletion of a fairly important set of data... well, after posting that, a few things happened that impressed me...

My web host, easerve, contacted me and let me know they had daily backups of my data available... and once I told them the date/time at which I blew away my data, they'd provide the appropriate backup file... (which they did, and I'm rocking along now with my old data back...) ... yet another great bit of customer service from easerve...
Rob Howard and Jason Alexander, both from telligent responded with both 'sorry' and 'we'll fix our scripts'... a very quick response considering I didn't even email them about it...

Overall, my annoying little incident resulted in a great response from two different groups... very nice.

That blog moving tool...

Duncan Mackenzie — Sat, 28 Aug 2004 09:50:00 GMT

A few people asked about the code for that tool described in my first post on this new site, and I just wanted to reassure anyone who was interested that I would be posting the code soon... I actually ran into a couple of minor bugs in the transfer that I'd like to fix (or at least document) before I put up the code..

Ran into my first blog hosting bug... that was fast...

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 19:38:00 GMT

Within a few hours of being up, I ran into this issue... odd, since it doesn't appear to be affecting very many folks...

.Text Threading Bug
...If you are one of the 7 regular readers here you might have noticed some problems over the last few weeks. Every so often .Text would display an error page with the message: “Value cannot be null. Parameter name: value”. Once the error happened it would stick around until the application restarted. Unfortunately, the error was appearing everyday. After asking around on some of the boards to no avail I did some sleuthing...

First post on the new site...

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 18:03:00 GMT

Last night, I wrote up a little Visual Basic .NET app that uses the .Text web services and moved all my categories and posts to a new .Text server...

From this point on, I plan to post only to the new site, assuming it is all working as expected!