Section: Blogs

Immediate Action Feeds

Dec 17, 2005 2 min.

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.

I’m making a change… (a rambling post that contains some nuggets of information)

Dec 17, 2005 3 min.

I’ve recently accepted a job with the Channel 9 team (working for Jeff and working with Adam, Erik, Robert, and Charles), and … because I’m mostly a one-job kind of guy, that means I have to stop working at MSDN. So, come January 16th, I’ll be over in a new office at Channel 9, probably not coding anything yet as it always take a few days to get ramped up, connected to the right source trees, etc…

Beta versions of the MSDN home page now available…

Dec 15, 2005 1 min.

I’ve been working (as part of a large team!) on the new platform for MSDN, which is up and running at http://msdn2.microsoft.com… and now you can see prototype versions of the MSDN home page ontop of that same platform. Check it out here [http://beta.msdn.microsoft.com/default.aspx]. The new home page demonstrates some of the personalization/profile features that will end up on the final MSDN site in the near future.

application/rss+xml vs. text/xml

Dec 12, 2005 2 min.

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).

Is my site broken in IE7?

Dec 9, 2005 1 min.

Matthew mentions in response to an earlier post that my site might be broken for people using the IE 7 Beta … I don’t have IE 7 installed, because I thought I should really be testing any of my work projects in IE 6 (along with Firefox and Opera), but if anyone else has it on their machine, could you let me know if you run into any problems? Contact me through the blog, or email IE7Issues@duncanmackenzie.

Christmas pictures

Dec 8, 2005 1 min.

Just had some photos taken, (I even splurged for the reproduction rights on them, so I can get prints via Ofoto or wherever), there might be photos with me in them, but the kids are cuter

More on that RSS editor…

Dec 8, 2005 1 min.

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….