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yet another Microsoft blogger

# Friday, May 20, 2005

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This blog location

For a while now (since January 2004) I have been posting both to my personal blog (http://www.shahine.com/omar/) and another blog located at http://blogs.msdn.com/omars/. At the time there were about 140 Microsoft blogs on blogs.msdn.com. I don't actually post things twice, rather dasBlog can crosspost both to this blog and any number of other blogs that support the blogger APIs.

My main motivation for doing this was that I wanted to be part of the Microsoft blogger community. I also used to subscribe to the full blogs.msdn.com rss feed, and pretty much read what everyone there was posting. Finally, I also got a lot of great comments from folks on that blog (I supose because they did not specifically subscribe to my feed, but the blogs.msdn.com feed).

In the past 16 months the blogs.msdn.com site has grown an order of magnitude. I no longer feel like my presence is part of a small community and many of the benefits I have felt by crossposting have been overshadowed by things don't care much for. Particularly the new Community Server product. It's made managing my blog, comments, and feedback much more difficult. So much so that I completely ignore the comments on my msdn blog because I find the product unusable. It takes 20 clicks and postbacks to do simple things. I find myself lost. Additionally, the community on blogs.msdn.com is big enough now that I don't think I need to cross post any longer. Don't get me wrong, I wish Scott and company the best of luck with CS, and the fact that is powers our employee blog property is cool, but it's an experiment that is not something I think I need to be a part of.

And just to be clear. I figure that I cross posted 80% of the content on my personal blog to my msdn blog. Anything technology related got crossposted, some personal rants and such did not.

So, my question is this. Does anyone care or even find it confusing that I even do this? Should I stop crossposting? I'm leaning to just mothballing my msdn blog (leaving all the content there, but no longer cross posting). Do people who subscribe to the msdn one want me to keep posting my tech stuff there? Does anyone even care :-)?

PS - Speaking of Community Server, and blogs.msdn.com, I just noticed that Dare also stopped crossposting from his blog to blogs.msdn.com.

Blogging
Posted Saturday, May 21, 2005    Permalink    Comments [7]  View blog reactions

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Friday, May 20, 2005 7:57:37 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
As long as you keep bloging, and let us know on both blogs where you will go and which one we should subscribe to, I'm cool. I'm with you, not the biggest fan of CS... hence why I joined a projec to continue where .Text left off (just like .Text the most of all the engines... and want it to continue).

Anyway, just keep blogging, I enjoy your stuff. Personally I don't see the need to cross post... why would I subscribe to the same magazine just because the covers are different? Stay with what you like.
AC
Friday, May 20, 2005 9:28:28 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
I dropped off the corp blog in January - it's just too much of a pain to keep the crossposting up and running.

Personally, I read YOUR site, not the ms blog feed - there's just too much repetitive noise there.
Steve
Friday, May 20, 2005 10:26:40 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Keep an eye out for Subtext, a fork of .TEXT. I've already implemented checkbox deletion of comment spam. Check off the comments you want to delete, click delete, confirm and you're done.

Soon I'll even remove the "confirm" step and implement and "undo" instead, so it's one less step (every click counts). Of course I have to sleep so I didn't get to that just yet.

Battling and managing Comment Spam is going to be key for Subtext and a primary focus.

Phil
Haacked
Sunday, May 22, 2005 9:30:37 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
Personally, I'd like to see you use Spaces. :)
Rick Eames
Monday, May 23, 2005 8:06:47 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
You blogged on blogs.msdn.com? I can't find crap there anyway.
Sean
Thursday, May 26, 2005 8:21:21 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
I hated having to track both of your blogs to track both sets of comments. Personally, I say stick with one blog. If you want a separate blog for a separate "personality" (all rants, all the time)that makes sense, but the content has to be completely separate. Crossposting=bad.

Then again, I'm a Ludite. :p
Reeves Little
Friday, May 27, 2005 10:21:24 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)
It makes sense to have only one blog. As Reeves says, it was sometthing of a nuisance to have to go to both locations to check comments (you don't port those). As I mentioned once before, this shahine.com location takes about 3-4 times as long to load (up to 10 seconds or more) where your msdn blog conects immediately (less than 2 seconds). I don't suppose you av any way of speeding it up?

I notice that your most recent topic here is not replicated at msdn. You've started (stopped)?
Paul Berkowitz
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