First look at MSN blogs
Since Scoble pointed to his (content-free and Japanese) blog on the new MSN Spaces blog server, I thought I’d take a quick peek. Several hours later, I need an extended entry.
Starting at the start, the headers: the HTML itself is sent with no useful-for-caching headers other than Cache-Control: private, so you’ll be reloading it every time. The CSS is delivered with both a Last-Modified: Fri, 06 Aug 2004 02:06:22 GMT and Etag: "0e338f8597bc41:628" header, which would make it quite cacheable if not for the fact that for two of the three external stylesheets, the Etag: changes on every page load, despite the CSS being unchanged. Four images are able to return 304: Not Modified, seven are uncached. In part, that’s because two of the images are web bugs: one for c.msn.com and one for c.spaces.msn.com (which strikes me as exactly two more than you should need for statistics when it’s your own damn server). Javascripts return one 304 and two 200s, probably in part because they are used for the blogroll.
The HTML is, of course, execrable. The one possible way they could have gotten some approving buzz from tech bloggers was to use extremely clean (X)HTML, but given the apparent total lack of a corporate culture believing that code is poetry, at least when it comes to HTML, there was little hope of that. It might be possible to persuade Microsoft tools to produce valid HTML, but judging by what mostly comes out of them, they must think of HTML as a hot dog factory, where nobody in their right mind would ever look inside. Validating Robert’s page, without even a post, produces 166 errors, but judging by the way they become confused toward the end, it’s one of those cases where cascading errors completely baffle the validator, and the actual number is unknowable. Validating another weblog, with one post, produces 186 errors, but they are equally confused toward the end. Given how pervasive and external the errors are (the first error is a missing DOCTYPE, there’s a slug of errors from the table (!) at the top that inserts the MSN branding), I’d say there’s no hope of an individual altering a template (assuming they even have templates) enough to be able to use the validator to check their own HTML. (As it turns out, no template, and also no user-produced HTML, so it probably doesn’t matter that much.)
The actual HTML is… painful to look at. Clearly generated, it includes special delights like a table of all-caps tags in the middle of a table of lower-case tags, unquoted attributes that include units, “id” attributes that start with utterly illegal characters like underscores, a mix of tables with spacer gifs, inline style attributes, and divs and spans with id attributes to apply CSS, along with utterly jarring things like a <LINK REL="stylesheet" HREF="Parts/Css/Parts.css" type="text/css"> element appearing in the middle of the body. The fact that it appears in readable form in more than one browser is an amazing testament to the skill and hard work of browser makers.
Semantically? There are no semantics. Zero headings, meaning-free classes and ids and names, table layout, blogroll marked up as list items, but not within any sort of list… no semantics whatsoever. None. Posts are marked up as paragraphs, rather than with pairs of break tags, and that’s the only thing I can find to praise.
The design is moderately pleasant: reminds me of one of my favorite designs from the old Blogger template contest. Reminds me of it a lot. A very great deal, I must say. Quite reminded. There are three layouts, three column and two two column with sidebar left and right, seven color choices, and a rather nice drag-and-drop tool to move around the various possible chunks of the layout.
Permalinks go to individual entry pages, with crufty members/username/Blog/cns!1pgo08wW8299KK4zVpfEl7tA!113.entry URLs. Archives are also available by month and by category if you have Javascript enabled. The “link” to a monthly archive is something like javascript:BoldArchives('82004');javascript:DispatchHelper('BlogByArchives', 'ayear%3d2004%26amonth%3d8', 'BlogView');. The only possible explanation I can come up with is to discourage accidental linking to somewhere other than the permalink target, but at a simply astonishing cost.
Both comments and trackback are supported, though they don’t include the RDF for Trackback autodiscovery, making pinging a bit more awkward. The Trackback URL is just the permalink with the “entry” at the end replaced by “trak”, so at least it’s less difficult than it could be. To reinforce the opinion of all those doubters of TypeKey who said it was just the return of Passport, there’s a big fat Passport login right above the (disabled until you sign in) comment form. Oddly, signing in doesn’t convey any benefit to the commenter: not only do you still have to fill in your name, email, and URL, there isn’t even a cookie to remember them, either for that single blog, or to leverage the community nature of everything being on spaces.msn.com by remembering them for all Spaces blogs. It’s just a senseless hurdle, easily leapt by any half-competant spambot scripter.
Warning: your email address will be displayed, in a mailto, without even the courtesy of useless entity encoding. Be sure to either use your favorite a@b.com equivalent, or just skip it: Name is the only required field.
Up to this point in my looking around, my complete lack of any Japanese wasn’t much of a problem: HTML is HTML, and blog layout is standard enough that I can find my way around most parts in any language. However, Robert wasn’t kind enough to post an entry where I could play with comments and Trackback, so I had to sign up for my own Space.
To the surprise of exactly nobody, when I clicked the signup URL in Firefox, I was told to get a better browser. Instead, I switched to Internet Explorer.
If you’ve ever doubted the benefits of standard user interface, try signing up for a service and using it, all in a language where you don’t even know a single word. Thanks to almost everything being exactly where I expected, I only made one misstep, with what must have been Cancel when I wanted OK. (And, for a little cheating, it does help that the URLs are in English, so I could tell Profile.aspx from SpaceSettings.aspx.)
The posting form is a basic rich-text editor, with an uneditable date, a title, a select list for categories prefilled with a dozen with a link to add a new category, the editor with the usual bold, italic, underline, left/center/right align, ordered and unordered lists, indent and outdent, link (your choice of http, ftp, or mailto, nothing else), and color buttons, then a section to add photos (gif or jpeg, less than 1MB, upload from your computer to storage.msn.com, included as a thumbnail linked to the full image with no option to add alt text), a section to add a Trackback URL (or possibly multiple URLs, separated with something: being able to read the directions there would help), and buttons to post, save a draft, and (apparently, at least) cancel the current edits (delete an unsaved entry, but not a drafted entry), and a preview tab.
The editor seems a bit touchy: quite often, I’d wind up with only part of it loaded, so the textarea itself didn’t exist, though a refresh generally cleared it up. If there’s any way to edit the HTML directly, I couldn’t find it.
Of course, they have RSS feeds (though you can choose not to publish RSS, in the settings). Dave will be delighted that they are RSS 2.0, with no sign of funk that I could spot: items are title, link, description with full encoded content, comments, a guid which is a permalink, and a pubDate (though, sadly, no orange XML button). Sam will be delighted to know that they validate out of the box. Charles will be delighted to know that they include both Last-Modified and Etag headers, and apoplectic over the way that when presented with the proper If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers to reply to a request with a 304 Not Modified, they instead return a 200, with the exact same Last-Modified and Etag headers, and the exact same content. I am interested to note that the feed I get while I’m signed in to Passport includes draft entries, unlike the feed I get when I’m signed out. Since most RSS readers aren’t going to be sending a cookie that includes the Passport login information, <wide-eyed-and-innocent> that would seem to make an RSS reader built into the browser more useful than others </wide-eyed-and-innocent>.
The main page and archive pages both support RSS autodiscovery, though with an XHTML-style <link ... /> which I think is one of the things contributing to the huge cascade of confused validation messages.
Trackback pings worked just fine, both from another Spaces entry and from Movable Type, though I’m a bit disappointed by the way they ducked the i18n issue by only displaying the URL of pinging sites.
Beyond the way that editing your weblog requires Windows and IE 5.0+, the only other bit of “evil” I noticed was in the way comments and Trackbacks are displayed: in Firefox, the links from the blog main page for comments and Trackbacks go to #comment and #trackback in the individual entry, while in Internet Explorer with Javascript enabled, they are Javascript “links” to open (but not close) the comments and pings inline in the main page. I seem to remember reading somewhere that there’s a bit of browser sniffing built into ASP.NET to be evil in that way, but I can’t get too excited about it: I don’t like the inline effect anyway, so I’m not going to miss it. It’s much more useful where you can’t escape being in IE, heading into the post editor. On your way to a new post, you pass by a list of your posts, with the number of comments and pings listed, and a toggle to display and delete (though not edit) them.
In a very curious twist on the usual system, weblogs are presented without ads other than the self-advertising line of links to MSN and to sign up for MSN Spaces, while the editing interface, ad-free in every tool I’ve ever used, has a huge (well, 728×90, big by my standards) banner ad at the top forcing content down below the fold. I’ve got rad.msn.com in my Hosts file, so I don’t know what sort of thing they are selling, but it’s hard to imagine advertising that’s displayed while you are in a web app, with a task in mind, being very effective.
I’m sure there’s more to look at, including the mobile features (which aren’t standard enough for me to be able to guess what the setup was asking for, without a translation), and whether or not there’s any option to ping update services, but I’ll have to leave that to someone who reads Japanese.
MSN Blogging Service
First look at MSN blogs…
What I don’t get is why all but one character (ã?†) of the text on these templates is displayed as a question mark. I’ve tried switching to several differnt fonts, but I’m not seeing anything that looks right.
I should know this, but I can’t remember: what OS?
On Windows, you need to install the East Asian language support (Control Panel, Regional and Language Options, Languages tab) to get a pretty (but baffling) display of Japanese.
That was exactly what I needed. Thanks for the help, Phil.
It strikes me the utter backwards-ness of this mess is a complete counter-foil to everything the tech blogging community has learned over the past few years. Clean, hackable URLs? Nah. Nicely indexable markup? Forget it. It’s silly to see this level of cluelessness when almost every other major weblogging tool around gets the basics right.
I’d suggest Anne’s list should bring them up to speed in a hurry on what’s expected here in 2004, just in case the spillover from Scoble means the MSN team gets wind of this post.
Agreed, mostly. I’d be more inclined to treat Anne’s wonderful list as a set of RFC-style SHOULDs: if you aren’t going to do this, you should know the reason why, and know what it’s going to cost you.
But it’s important to note that it isn’t just the MSN team being sloppy and careless. What I meant by the lack of a corporate culture is that from everything I’ve heard from people who use MS tools, if you sit down with Visual Studio to bang out some ASP, you’re going to get bad HTML unless you move heaven and earth to clean it up.
They know that there isn’t very much market for producing clean HTML. What they apparently haven’t quite realized is that there’s no market for crappy HTML. Nobody’s asking for sloppy junk, and if Scoble’s right about the importance of word-of-mouth and blogged opinion in the modern world, then even the small market for clean HTML is disproportionally important.
”I’d be more inclined to treat Anne’s wonderful list as a set of RFC-style SHOULDs: if you aren’t going to do this, you should know the reason why, and know what it’s going to cost you.”
Completely agreed. Some of the items are esoteric and impractical for the casual user, and may be safely discarded provided there are defendable reasons to do so.
But it’s great as a starting point because it does highlight the relevant issues.
”They know that there isn’t very much market for producing clean HTML. What they apparently haven’t quite realized is that there’s no market for crappy HTML. Nobody’s asking for sloppy junk, and if Scoble’s right about the importance of word-of-mouth and blogged opinion in the modern world, then even the small market for clean HTML is disproportionally important.”
The HTML is only the tip of the iceberg in the case of MSN weblogs (at least they’re using UTF-8!), but I understand what you’re getting at. Assuming in-house tools have been used to generate the code, what they’ve come up with is not a big surprise.
Though it’s important for early adopters, word of mouth may not matter so much. MSN clearly has a platform to publicize the tool, so if the community doesn’t like it… so what? Not that I assume or endorse this mindset, but logically there’s no real need for community approval. If that’s not the case, perhaps we’ll see some changes. Interesting one to watch.
That is not necessarily a good thing.
Outputting valid UTF-8 is not, alas, straightforward, and depends greatly on the quality of your tools and the data (trackbacks!) you are dealing with. Consider the sort of problems Phil (and others) have been having trying to produce UTF-8. Phil’s solution, alas, is to throw up his hands and say, ”I know it’s not actually UTF-8, so I’ll send it as
text/htmland rely on your browser’s error-recovery to sort out the mess.”If MS put 1/10 as much thought into trying to get this right as Phil did, I’d be surprised. Which means that, in short order, those pages will be UTF-8 in name only.
Well, no need to conflate utf-8 and XML’s draconian error handling: if I manage to push a EUC-JP ping through your defenses, you’re just as vulnerable as I am. There’s a few more codepoints to defend for utf-8, is all. I could do it brutally in a few minutes (though not a few minutes right now, since I got three PHP parse errors in a row before I realized I’m not thinking well enough to do it) with the regex that made the rounds last month: either you give me characters that might be utf-8, or all I show from you is a URL. Which, incidently, is MSN Spaces’ defense again Trackback: all they show is the URL.
I didn’t test the ability of either the editor or the comment form to detect that you’ve switched your browser’s encoding, but I’d be surprised if they bothered: it’s easy, just include a hidden form element named
_charset_, but although character encoding matters greatly in XML, where in some alternate universe where people actually use utf-7 with its alternate codepoint for the less-than character, you might mistake an element for character data, once you’re in the (tag) soup, it really doesn’t matter. Someone can make a mess of question marks? Well, they’ll probably know better next time.I wasn’t conflating them, so much as trying to point out that declaring a UTF-8 encoding is not the be-all and end-all of i18n. It solves some problems, but not others, and in some instances actually seems to make things harder.
I’m not sure I understand that statement. There are an infinite number of byte sequences which are invalid UTF-8.
If you know that the data is supposed to be UTF-8, and you’re willing to take the brutal approach of showing nothing if it isn’t, then the REGEX you linked to suffices to decide the matter.
I guess we could call that ”UTF-8 Draconian error handling.”
I s’pose showing only the URL would solve your Referer problem too.
I heard from a reliable source that they actualy had a fully compliant, validating blog system all ready to go, but corporate policies require at least two releases to fall short of the mark before it can be made available to the public.
[If you want Dave, or anyone else who is not me, to contact you, leaving a comment here is most unlikely to succeed. A more sane approach is to go to his site, click the contact link, and contact him. If, on the other hand, you are fishing for spam to your gmail account, er, that's weird. -- Phil]
Thanks Phil. I have a special account for running spam tests on GMail: report.spam@gmail.com. Please feel free to spam my account all you want.
-viksra
What’s odd is they clearly copied TypePad’s template design stuff (TypePad Japan has been running there for a while, along with partner-branded services based on TypePad) but made it *not* work in all but one browser. Wacky.
MSN Blogs
Following the queue of Blogger and other free blogging service, MSN also opened its blogging service in Japan. But as we all know, half of MSN’s services and products are a mockery. Here’s a first hand view of what a MSN blog is like.
Firefox, T…
MSN’s feeble blogs
Phil Ringnalda rips MSN a new one over their new, incredibly bad (from what I hear) blogging service.
The actual HTML is… painful to look at. Clearly generated, it includes special delights like a table of all-caps tags in the middle of a table of…
MSN Japan blogs = crufty HTML
Yikes… I don’t know who designed the basic templates of the MSN Japan weblogs but my god they are a…
Actually, when I told Firefox to report itself as IE6, the signup process worked like a charm. Like yourself, I don’t understand even the slightest bit of Japanese, but found no trouble getting signed up. Well, not until the last page, when it told me the Spaces server was experiencing technical difficulties or some such.
The editing thingamajig is still IE-only, though, and I don’t really like the layout choices: it’s just a silly change of hue.
From the Department of Low Expectations
While I get an occasional attaboy for this site design, I feel compelled to point out that it’s simple and uncluttered because that’s about the extent of my design abilities;…
Welcome to the world of ASP .NET, where FrankenCode is the norm because Micro$oft knows that IE still enjoys a 77% marketshare (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp).
I work at a place that requres ASP .NET for web development. I have struggled to design web applications that produce valid XHTML and have finally decided to give up… for now.
At TechEd 2004, several Micro$ofties said that the next version of Visual Studio (2005) and ASP .NET 2.0 will produce valid XHTML if the author so chooses…
…I’m not holding my breath, but maybe next year I can finally build web apps in the M$ dev environment that validate.
MSN weblog tool
Judging by Phil Ringnalda’s initial report, it looks as if Microsoft’s weblog editing tool is going do for standards-compliant weblogs what Internet Explorer on Windows has been doing for web pages in general for years now.In fairness, it’s early days …
Best Quote (Today) About HTML
Phil Ringnalda provides a surgical view of the new MSN blog pages- beyond the wonderfully dense details, I loved this quote: The HTML is, of course, execrable. The one possible way they could have gotten some approving buzz from tech…
Phil, do you know why I get this?
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fphilringnalda.com%2Fblog%2F2004%2F08%2Ffirst_look_at_msn_blogs.php&charset=%28detect+automatically%29
I assume you get the following error also.
Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line 497 it contained one or more bytes that I cannot interpret as utf-8
Yep, of course I know why: bloody PHP, and people’s sullen insistance on using charsets other than utf-8. That would be down in the Referrals, from vouich.com (one of my favorite responses to the post, by the way).
The title has a non-US-ASCII character, and the blog’s in ISO-8859-1. In Python, determining the charset’s no big deal. In PHP, where the HTML parser is a regex that you write yourself, determining the charset is somewhere between a huge deal and impossible. In Perl, converting from J. Random Charset to utf-8’s no sweat: shell out to iconv, or use the module from CPAN. In PHP? They’ve gone out of their way to make it easy for the person compiling PHP to make it as difficult as possible to get to the underlying OS. Mine host has disabled the backtick operator, exec() and shell_exec(), and a couple of other things I’ve forgotten. I did figure out a way to do it, using proc_open to fork a process running iconv and talking to it through a couple of pipes. Apparently that’s so strange and terrible that nobody’s ever considered disabling it (plus, it’s a bit fragile and self-disabling).
So, that’s why I’m still delivering
text/htmlinstead ofapplication/xhtml+xml- the list of referrers is the one remaining hole into my site that doesn’t pass through a validator (well, Trackback’s still a little loose, maybe), but I’m not quite willing to give it up, yet.A patch, taking a URL and returning the page title in utf-8, in PHP, would be quite welcome :)
Do you have the mb_* functions available? Looking for a better host?
Do I have mb_*? Bwahahahaha. My dear friends at DreamHost wouldn’t dream of compiling in anything so useful.
The better host thing is… odd. Psychological quirk, I guess. Of course, I should dump them for at least a dozen reasons, but I can’t quite bring myself to do it.
Who knows, maybe PHP 5 will be better. They ought to be rolling it out in a year or so…
[Unintentional spam removed --Phil]
You know, when [you] started, I was very impressed by the whole thing: great specs, brilliant marketing, good people.
Now you’ve spammed me, with a PGP signed comment, so I can’t even delete the links and leave the comment to dissect.
Tell me, why shouldn’t I delete your comment? On second thought, tell me why I should delete your comment, rather than pointing the finger of shame at it? Is spamming okay if it’s related to an off-topic digression that I’ve already closed out by saying I’m not going there? There is now absolutely no chance that I will ever use [you], but I’d be interested in hearing your defense, and I’m willing to consider removing the whole sub-thread, rather than linking it and denouncing it from a new post.
Phil: OOC, can you pinpoint what makes that post spam? This particular situation looks like such a gray area that I’m not sure what I would think in your position.
Would it be spam if he’d left out the <a> element and simply referred to the site in plaintext?
Would it be spam if he’d replied to a comment earlier in the thread, suggesting he simply hadn’t read your latest response? (Spam and Threaded Comments: Getting a Hint of Intent.)
Would it be spam if he were an old friend who had been playfully nudging you to switch to his services for ages?
Would it be spam if he had sent the same message to you via private email?
- From the bottom:
Right now, I’m trying to find the old code I wrote last winter to do feed autodiscovery on a comment URL. I’m still not sure how to use it, since I don’t want people to have to sit around waiting for autodiscovery every time they post a comment, but I’ll find a way, this time.
And now, we’re good: an honest mistake, doing the sort of thing we all would have done back a few years ago when none of us really ever thought about traffic, or PageRank, and certainly not about comment spam. A time, I’m trying to remind myself, when I wouldn’t fly off the handle at the first hint of unexpected commercial activity. Sigh.
Couldn’t you compile it in yourself?
Why didn’t that occur to me? Thanks for pointing it out.
First look at MSN Blogs
http://philringnalda.com/blog/2004/08/first_look_at_msn_blogs.php...
Word of the Day: Execrable
execrable
adj 1: of very poor quality or condition; ”deplorable housing conditions in the inner city”; ”woeful treatment of the accused”; ”woeful errors of judgment” [syn: deplorable, miserable, woeful, wretched] 2: unequivocally detestable; ”a…
I understand all the bashing of Microsoft and IE, but many of your arguments show how clueless you are. For example, most of the blogging tools do not have to be clean html or whatever you want html to be. People don’t care about it, and you must be one of the very few people who check out the html source everytime they visit a site. Also instead of telling people to spend time on turning their html code to something you like and get rid of all the functionality they worked for, why don’t you build a business that shows the value of what you are talking about, if there is any value at all. If you are so right about these things, you would be making millions of dollars, since Microsoft and people using MS tools don’t get it right? Only you get it right, because you have a blog and a voice so you can say whatever you want, without actually digging deeper into how people develop and use technologies. More to my point, you continously bashed Microsoft, IE and people who use Microsoft technologies and you even call people rude unnecessarily. That’s what we should call ”evil”.
Just a little friendly advice I forgot to mention earlier, ’Alex’: there’ve been several security updates since Gecko/20040614, so you really ought to update Firefox.
I did a little research to backup Alex’s argument:
1. Can we really trust the validator? The second error says ”Line 13, column 7: end tag for element ”HEAD” which is not open”. Please goto ”http://spaces.msn.com/members/scobleizer/” and view its source. You will see both opening and closing HEAD tags.
2. TextAmerica’s homepage has 103 html errors:
TextAmerica
3. A random blog at typepad has 56 html errors:
TypePad
Why do we care?!
”Yer head’s not open” : there are lots of things you can do in HTML that will implicitly close an element before you get to the end tag. In that case, as I said while talking about RSS autodiscovery, I suspect it’s the XHTML-style
<link ... />that’s implicitly closing it.TextAmerica : was that supposed to be a point for you, or for me? The file that you were validating is named default.aspx.
Random TypePadista : half for you, half for me. TypePad should catch all the unencoded ampersand in @href errors: they are easy to spot, and easy to fix. The rest? Yep, if you let people type HTML, some of them won’t care whether what they type even produces working links.
Why should we care? Well, if TypePad took care of the boringly obvious ampersand errors, then it could run posts through a local copy of the validator while saving them, and throw up a warning to the author that ”<a ahref…” is going to produce a broken link. That’s always been my number one reason for validation in weblogs: if you don’t have a million errors all the time, then you can use the validator to quickly check that you said what you meant, and to tell you where to look when something isn’t working the way you expected.
You may be arguing religion or anti-religion, but I’m not. I’m arguing pure pragmatism: is this likely to work in most things people will use, even on platforms I’ve never used and can’t test? If I screw something up, can I tell what and where?
I also found it funny that you didn’t provide a link to Scoble’s blog itself. That’s really evil and that’s the basic nature of blogs. Blogs is all about linking. I don’t think people will take you seriously on this if you violate the rules of the blog culture yourself and be just evil.
Still not bored with trolling weblogs, eh ’Alex’? When do classes start?
MSN Blogs
I would share Charles’s concern. On the plus side, I’m pleased to see utf-8 used consistently throughout (in both the content and the HTTP headers, and in both the html and feed). I’m also delighted to see feed autodiscovery being used. If you have
Unsurprisingly we have a nit-picking of the _formatting_ of the code behind the layout of the site. Well, I support it’s a bit much to expect that an open-source luvvie like you might take a reasonable look at the content of the ms blogs.
If you did you’d find a very open and honest account of Microsofts failings so far, and also its plans for the future. You’d read the words of an industry leading expert and learn from his attitude.
But no, we get more ankle-biting destructive criticism: and why? Every step of the way, the mozilla / open-source community has tried to usurp, disinform and generally detract from the market leader. After all, how else will you get your pet browsers any significant market share? Real-world users are not interested in how cleanly code is written for their special browser. People are interested in CONTENT of websites. That used to be what the internet was about. The web-standards ”jihad” is a ridiculous phenomenon that will one day pass and leave us with a de-facto standard set (hopefully) by Microsoft in the most part. After all, the open-source browsers have cloned enough MS innovations already! I despair at your hypocricy.
You don’t read the articles on Slashdot either, do you? Or whatever the MS equivalent is, rather. (If you really don’t get that, a huge percentage of the readers of Slashdot don’t actually read the linked article, they only read the summary on Slashdot, and then pretend to be able to comment from that misunderstanding of what it says.)
Scoble’s my mate, and I didn’t say word one about his actual blog (see troll-’Alex’ above, teaching Granny to suck eggs). I’ll lay you long, long odds I’ve been both reading him and helping him with code longer than you’ve known he existed.
If you can actually bring yourself to read my post, you’ll see that I spent several hours of my own time going over MSN Spaces, a new MS blogging server which Scoble doesn’t even use to the extent of making a single post, pointing out the trouble-spots where they are failing to properly cache things, where they are failing to do things that would help their users’ blogs be more effective, and, the only part anyone seems able to read, slamming the truly awful HTML that ASP.NET/Visual Studio/Whichever It Is produces. Do you know how I knew to look for that awful HTML? Actual users of MS products have been telling me for years that it’s a nightmare using them to produce HTML that will work with anything other than IE. You clearly misunderstand ”anything other than IE” to mean whichever other browser is the favorite darling of Slashdot users that day, but in fact it is quite often a screen reader for the blind, or a search engine spider, or another editing program, or a cell phone.
I have very little time for open source zealots, who only distract from the actual work of open source pragmatists; I have even less for people who think poor pitiful Microsoft needs outside protection from bullies. I’ve now spent it all.
It is funny that when you do desctructive cricistim and bashing, it is careful, thoughtful thing, but when others do it is trolling. Why don’t you show some respect for others, instead of claiming to know everything. Maybe those actual users know how much you love to bash Microsoft, they tell you what you want to hear and it is understandable that people have problems with the products they use. I am using Windows XP and have some problems, but does it mean that you can actually claim that XP is the worst operating system, because actual XP users complained to you about it and that somehow because you see the problems you can bash xp programmers? Asp.Net is a great technology as well as visual studio, and obviously you have no clue about what they mean. Oh, btw I am not your normal student and you can’t imagine how much I laughed at that. :)))
Phil, have you considered comment moderation to avoid posts like the above? I don’t think any of your readers would complain if you deleted all of his post. They just get in the way of enjoying your blog.
Moderation is great in, er, moderation. Things like the way WordPress moderates a comment with more than three links, or the new version of MT-Blacklist will moderate comments on older posts if they haven’t had recent activity, are a wonderful way of slowing down suspicious comments without actually stopping them.
But full-time moderation of every single comment? I don’t want to have to do that, and I doubt that many other people would like the effect, either. You end up going from what’s effectively a seminar to an elementary school class, where everyone has to raise their hand to speak and can only speak to Teacher, not to each other.
MT3.1 is going to allow for a bit more subtle hooks into the comment system, so maybe I’ll look at a De-Troll plugin, but it’s just like spam email: when you look at the stuff your filter missed, it’s incredibly obvious that it’s spam, but once you start trying to look at it programmatically, it gets harder quickly.
Un vistazo a los blogs de MSN
Phil Ringnalda le echa un primer vistazo a los blogs de MSN en Japón. Tiene algunas cosas interesantes, como estar libres de publicidad, ofrecer un editor rico de texto y soportar Trackbacks y RSS, pero tiene algunas otras no tan
http://www.sixdifferentways.com/remainder/007518.php
MSN blogs: suprise! They suck….
Floods, Harry Potter Tribute Bands and Other Oddities
Finally a use for all those inner city SUVs: The rescue services say the situation is likely to get worse. They are appealing to people who own four-wheel drive cars to help reach some of the worst-affected areas. The…
Thanx for introducing me to this!
I have another blog using Wordpress, but hate to have to learn php just to tweak a bit or two. But it is infinitely customizable, while MSN spaces isn’t. But the market is totally different.
I just signed up and got my own space at:
http://spaces.msn.com/members/tengoku1/
Sure doesn’t bother me or 99% of the people who eventually do sign up that it doesn’t HTML validate :)
MSN spaces - blogging from Microsoft
MSN has just released its new blogging service known as MSN Spaces. The service had been running quietly in Japan and Phil Ringnalda gave it a thorough going overback then. The outcome wasnt great in terms of technical competance.