14 August 2006 in Blogging & Microsoft | Comments (5)

I’ve always preferred a blend of desktop applications and online content when working with anything that uses the Internet. That’s why I’ve usually made my blog posts using tools to W.Blogger, however recently W.Blogger seems to have disappeared (hence the lack of a link) so I haven’t been able to let people know about what a great tool it was for composing new blog entries offline and then pushing them up to my website.

Thankfully a better tool has become available – Windows Live Writer. Now I was as surprised as anyone that the tool was designed not to only support Live Spaces but also many other blogging platforms (WordPress, DasBlog, Community Server Blogs and more). So I’ve wired it up to compose this entry and I’ll keep testing it out for a while. So far it seems much more slick than W.Blogger and it has considerably better preview/style integration.

Even more exciting is that Microsoft have created an API for the publishing tool to allow developers to create their own plugins (which I assume means new blog providers, extra formatting tools etc). It already has support for everything you would expect – spell checking, category support, post management etc.

Overall this tool looks great for a first beta. I really look forward to seeing what people do to extend the capabilities of it to make it truly great.

Windows Live Writer Website

Download Windows Live Writer

- JD

9 August 2006 in Blogging & Intergen | Comments (0)

Another Intergenite has started blogging recently (including being greedy and starting 2 blogs! ) which is great to see. Jeremy specialises in the content management space and has a special interest in EPiServer. Understandably he has a personal blog and an EPiServer blog.

Jeremy’s Personal Blog
Jeremy’s EPiServer Downunder Blog

- JD

18 July 2006 in Blogging | Comments (0)

Vote for my blog as the best .net blog in New Zealand

I didn’t take part this last year and thought I should give it a whirl since I was automatically included
Cheers and thanks for the vote,

- JD

16 June 2006 in Blogging & Intergen | Comments (2)

Gabriel Smith, a fellow Intergenite is now blogging which is very cool (I’m trying to slowly convince everyone to blog! ).

Gabe is going to be blogging about his soon to be released child and tech stuff as well. If you don’t know Gabe, he’s into HDTV, PVR technology, Coding and general gadgets. Good to have in your RSS reader and always good for providing advice when you’re looking into any of those topics

And for a bit of a Friday funny… the url is http://www.gabelog.net.nz (don’t say it too fast… great marketing if you ask me )

- JD

4 June 2006 in Blogging | Comments (2)

<gripe>

The amount of automated spam that is getting thrown at my blog has become a joke. I’ve received more than 2, 500 spam comments in the last 2 days which strikes me as just incredible. I’ve read that other people have had a sudden surge as well and just thought I’d reiterate the fantastic Akismet service from the creators of WordPress.

Akismet have an interesting graph showing the growth of SPAM in blog comments (I imagine some of the trend is related to their own product uptake though).

Still, my woes don’t seem nearly as bad as Rod’s email spam bomb.

Perhaps there is some opportunity in this space? Sure there is a lot of average spam control mechanisms but there used also be a lot of average search engines until one took up the challenge of making a superb one.

</gripe>

- JD

20 April 2006 in Blogging | Comments (4)

I was reviewing my referral information for my blog today and noticed a few hits from a website called TechTalkBlogs.

The site looks like a pretty clean and after looking under the “Australian Bloggers” I found that they are consuming my feed and allowing people to rate them. Based on the other users on the list that somebody has borrowed Nic’s fantastic NZ .Net Bloggers OPML and imported it into this site.

I couldn’t find out much about the intention of the website (other than to syndicate sites) but it’s an official Microsoft site.

I always love seeing my blog being pimped on the internet

- JD

21 March 2006 in Blogging | Comments (1)

Recently I’ve been reading Geek’s blog quite a bit (the multiple author thing is looking to be a winner) and I was talking in one thread about how I’m looking forward to more content management features that are meant to be coming in the next version of WordPress (the software that powers my blog).

One thing in particular that I wanted was the ability to delay a posting being published. Today I realise that feature is already in WordPress – just set the “Post Timestamp” to a time in the future.

The reason for finding this, unfortunately, was not by my own investigation but due to a bug that cropped up when editing an entry with w.blogger. It set the timestamp to 2 days in the future. It was causing me no end of confusion as to why it wasn’t appearing on the site but was in the admin area. Looks like a bug helped educate me this time

- JD

6 March 2006 in Blogging | Comments (3)

In the weekend I updated the theme for my blog. I’ll hopefully tweak it a wee bit over the next week or two.

Let me know what you think

- JD