Trying to keep up with Technology and Blogging
- by Dave Campbell
A little bit of everything...
The heading above got changed a bunch during writing and I finally settled on that because this has become a 'stream of consciousness' post... or maybe a stream of UNconsciousness :)
If you've noticed, my blogging has been a tad slow this fall. There's been a lot going on personally. But then again, I haven't skipped anybody either. Rather than go through ALL the blogs I have aggregated, and take a week to get to the bottom, at some point in the last year, I had moved the lists around so I now have "SilverlightMVPs", "Very Prolific", "WP7", and "Top Checks". This is a total of about 250 of the more prolific bloggers.
Those 250 bloggers have kept me very busy up through about //BUILD. Sometimes it would take all week to go through just that list putting out 13 posts per blog per day... but not anymore.
This weekend I made it all the way through the BIG list... close to 700 blogs, and if you read my blog, you know I had one medium day (Saturday), and yesterday was very short.
Why is this?
To be honest, I don't know... is everybody busy re-tooling, or churning waiting for direction? I have a short list of WinRT/Metro/W8 folks... maybe I need to be pointed to more of them... but my old favorites are not pumping out posts as they have in the past.
I said before that I am attracted to Metro, and I've already got My first Metro app post out there, and were it not for working with the new site, I'd have had another out last weekend... so definitely look for more from me in that area.
New Site?
Did I say 'new site' ? oops... didn't mean to do that, but now that the cat is out of the bag, I may as well continue... While at //BUILD, I discussed a re-tooling of SilverlightCream with lots of folks... probably more than wanted to hear about it to be honest! ... it's needed a facelift, and there's stuff on there that never worked right, plus there's a lot of manual effort that goes into a blog post.
In an effort to alleviate all the above, Michael Washington and I have been working on the next iteration of SilverlightCream. Not wanting to lose that branding or mess with any saved links, I decided to change from a somewhat funky name to something more professional. I also decided to put my blog on the site, and tie my main announcement twitter feed to the site as well. The way things sit today, there are 3 different names in those locations and it's gotta be confusing for folks just stumbling in.
We're going to do a series of posts talking about the site and the new backend processing (hint: Michael Washington is responsible for it, so you can take a guess at the technology), but for now, we'd like some eyes on the front end of the site, and some submittals using it to see if it falls over somewhere that we haven't tried.
So... I'm going to give it up... the new site is Windows Dev News. The Twitter feed is @WindowsDevNews, and the blog will be on the site as well at Windows Dev News Blog.
I've got the RSS Feed on Feedburner too, so I think all the nuts and bolts are good to go.
The submittal and search pages work, as does the blog page. You'll notice we used the MasterPage from SilverlightCream to get started. That will probably change, but it's just the visual... the content is the important part.
Other missing things are the tracking and 'Skim' page that we will eventually have up and running. There are some formatting issues with the blog posts but if you hang in there with me, those will be taken care of.
If you're a blogger, please submit through the site and let me know if you find any problems. If you're a reader, please add this feed and site. I'll be duplicating the effort for a while but at some point will stop that foolishness. We won't lose the data from SilverlightCream though, so keep using that as a search resource... I have hopes to pull that database over to WindowsDevNews, or link to it in some manner... that part isn't set in jello yet, but it will not be lost.
So there it is... let me know what you think, send me your WinRT/Metro/W8 postings along with your Silverlight and WP7 posts... it's not that different, it's just more.
Stay in the 'Light
