Duncan Mackenzie .NET

My team builds a fair number of community sites including Channel 8 (for Students), TechNet Edge (for IT Pros), Channel 10 (for enthusiasts, power […]

Saw this today (it is over a year old though) on Roger Hartford's blog; […]

My twitter app uses a web service hosted on my site to get all the necessary Xbox Live info.... way more than the twitter app actually uses. This is a SOAP API, located here: […]

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. […]

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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.

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. […]

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.

I was browsing on www.xamlog.com and I found this tutorial on "Reflection using Visual Brush and Opacity Mask", which shows you how to produce this effect: with very little code/markup.   Hmm... now that I finally have Vista up and running, it might be worth giving it a try. […]

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

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). […]

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 ha […]

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 […]

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 so […]

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 a […]

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 […]

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 f […]

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 […]

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 o […]

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. […]

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 vers […]

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, […]

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 downloada […]

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 mig […]

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. […]

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 […]

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& […]

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

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I had written a new system for producing MSDN's RSS feeds, and those feeds are now live at the same URLs as the previous versions. You might get some duplicates in your aggregators, (since these are new feeds but with some overlap of items from the old feeds) but […]

... and it is almost ready to ship.... […]