Section: Blogs

I’m thinking of putting MSN Search onto my site(s)

Jan 20, 2006 1 min.

With their SDK, search results as RSS, and ability to limit searches by site (so you can do queries like MSDN site:duncanmackenzie.net), I think I’ll be able to provide a nice little ‘cross property’ search for my blog and my personal site. Replacing the google search box on my site isn’t a big priority for me, but writing this widget might be useful to other folks as well… but until MSN gets an AdSense like program, Google is likely to own at least a part of my web site real estate 🙂

IIS Admin is a great tool if you do web development on a Windows XP machine

Jan 20, 2006 2 min.

I run Windows Server 2003 as my dev server at work, so I’m used to having the ability to run multiple web sites (main branch on 80, debug build on 88, another project on 8080, etc… ) in fact, I’m not just used to it… I’m spoiled by it. I don’t like developing or debugging in a vroot, when I know the final app will be living at the root. I don’t like using Cassini if the final app will be running in IIS (they are different in many important ways, such as the file types that end up going through the ASP.

Ah the web, it can change so quickly…

Jan 17, 2006 1 min.

Yesterday I posted about the use of the feed icon on Media Center Sandbox and suggested a few changes. Last night, I get an email from Charlie Owen, one of the principals of the sandbox site, and the site is completely updated. Now, I don’t know if I caused any change or if the change was just in the works anyway…. but regardless, I like the new look and the icons look great!

Our book has shipped!!!

Jan 13, 2006 1 min.

I just heard that our book, XBox 360 4 Dummies, has left the printer…. hopefully it will end up on bookshelves near you soon

Last day at MSDN…

Jan 13, 2006 1 min.

Earlier I annouced that I was leaving MSDN, and my last day has arrived. I’m pretty excited about starting with the Channel 9 team next week though, my office here is empty and I’ll be returning my MSDN machines today. Luckily for me, for the purposes of copying my old files over, I already have my new machine from the Channel 9 team, a Tecra M4 tablet PC. This is my first time using a Tablet, so I need to track down all the utilities and apps that will make the most of this cool convertible machine.

Doh! … DOA4

Jan 12, 2006 1 min.

More reason to feel bad about not having a Xbox 360 yet… my brother bought me DOA4 for Christmas, for the 360, and it just arrived yesterday. I haven’t opened it yet, but I put it up on top of the TV and pretended I was playing it, using the most powerful gaming console of them all… my imagination! 🙂

Implicit relationship between search crawler and content providers…

Jan 12, 2006 1 min.

A discussion at work today, along with my earlier post about Phil’s issues with Google and MSN, had me searching like crazy for this comment: “I think they’re also vulnerable to being locked out of sites because they’ve missed the implicit bargain for search engines that my site being crawled results in listing for me. Without any public facing services how do I find out what value I am getting from allowing WebFountain to crawl my site ?

Term Extraction

Jan 10, 2006 1 min.

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).

Cyclical reference, blog style…

Jan 10, 2006 1 min.

Not to cause any form of infinite loop here, but I liked this comment from Betsy in her post about my post… It’s a great fit – Duncan went from content strategy to development at MSDN most recently, and now he’s going to be on the dev team of one of the most evangelical of teams. Nice to know other folks think I made a good decision… not that I need reassuring of course 🙂