1 September 2006 in Microsoft & Tools | Comments (0)

A couple of days ago I was talking to John and he asked how many hits I get to my RSS feed. The truth is, I get heaps, but how many unique readers does that account for? He asked if I divide the number to give an estimate or how did I manage it? I turned him on to FeedBurner.

FeedBurner is a service that you can use for free that “wraps up” your existing RSS/ATOM/Whatever feed into a URL sitting on the FeedBurner domain. For example, recently I updated my RSS feeds to point to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/JDBlog

I was a wee bit reluctant to do this because I like seeing the raw traffic against my server for how many hits the feed is getting. Over time however I realised that because I can’t get any meaningful figures about my blog feed (see the start of this post) I was better off using FeedBurner.

FeedBurner provides the following statistics for free:

• Number of subscribers
• Graph of subscribers over time
• Pie graph of RSS aggregators being used
• Live traffic reports about people hitting your feed
• How many click through from RSS items to your website
• RSS optimisation services
• Publicising services
• Monetising services (currently invite only)
• Troubleshooting services for resolving common feed issues

If you elect to pay a small monthly fee you can also find out:

• Detailed information about each click through(who clicked etc)
• Enclosure statistics
• Ranking of item clicks for complete stats or search engine stats
• More…

Of course one of the big benefits is that if you move your blog or RSS feed you simply have to associate your FeedBurner feed to the new location and not interrupt all your existing readers. Certainly using a tool like this helps give deeper meaning to how parts of your blog or website are being used.

 - JD

25 August 2006 in Microsoft | Comments (3)

For those folks that like to keep up with the latest happenings in Microsoft land, RC1 of Internet Explorer 7 is now available for download on both XP & 2003 platforms.

Grab it IE 7 RC1 here.

- JD

18 August 2006 in Intergen & Microsoft | Comments (4)

Well I’ve been pumping out the posts lately since I’ll be heading off to TechEd this weekend. Hope to see some of you there and just a heads up on the lack of posts for the next 5 days or so

- JD

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

16 June 2006 in Business & Microsoft | Comments (0)

Ray Ozzie joined Microsoft as their CTO when his company, Groove Networks, was acquired in March 2005. Effective immediately he has taken over as the Chief Software Architect, the role that Bill Gates has had since stepping down as Microsoft CEO.

In two years time Bill Gates will cease working at Microsoft full time and start working full time for the Gates Foundation.

This will be interesting since Ray Ozzie is so focused on web based delivery. Very clever guy but I’m sure the share price will slip a bit on this news.

- JD

14 June 2006 in Code & Microsoft | Comments (2)

Anybody who reads my blog that is also having a serious play around with the new Office System and in particular SharePoint 2007 will want to check out the SharePoint 2007 SDK. While parts of the documentation process are still in progress I haven’t often seen SDK content that is as complete as this.

The samples are separated out from the huge 117MB chm file but I would strongly recommend getting the full SDK. It makes reasonably easy reading too

- JD

13 June 2006 in Code & Microsoft | Comments (2)

Just a quick post about SharePoint 2007 for anyone who is also playing with it. Make sure you disable the Windows Defender real-time protection when creating new sites. It intercepts and prevents changes to your hosts file so your sites don’t get created properly even though the site creation will claim to have been a success.

This shouldn’t be a problem on an actual server but while tinkering at home it’s worth noting.

- JD

12 June 2006 in Microsoft & Windows | Comments (7)

I’ve been using Windows Vista Beta 2 at home for a few days now (bit of a laggard I know) and have been enjoying reading other peoples thoughts on it. One thing I’ve seen as a common theme is comments about memory consumption. For a bit of a laugh I thought I’d see just how bad Vista’s memory consumption was and here is what I found:

Windows 95, Recommended memory: 8MB

Memory in 1995 cost $500 for an 8MB SIMM

Windows XP, Recommended memory: 128MB

Memory in 2001 cost $60 for 128MB

Windows Vista memory requirements ~1GB

Memory at the moment is $121 for 1GB

Some things to note:

1. 2001 was the year that had the massive memory glut and prices became stupidly cheap. Perhaps this was fortunate for the release of XP.
2. The memory price in 2001 was a rough conversion of mine to the NZD plus our magically tech gear markup.
3. There is still six months of memory price drops before Vista actually comes out.
4. I’ve used the “Vista Premium Ready” Certification for this example. If comparing to the “Vista Capable” certification which requires 512MB it would be $61 for 512MB – only a buck more than XP prices.
5. I read the recommended memory requirements for Windows 95 off the Windows 95 box that I still have in my closet that my Dad brought the day Windows 95 came out

Looking 6 months ahead, I’d be willing to predict that memory prices will be approximately in line with the costs of Windows XP which is pretty darn good considering the massive memory glut for the time. According to Yahoo the price of a computer capable of running windows Vista will be approximately 70% of the cost of a computer that was required to run XP.

So I don’t quiet get why exactly is Vista’s memory usage really an issue? It surely can’t be a price issue.

- JD