Darren Neimke's Live Portal

My Windows Live-targeted blog

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 03:57:29 GMT

Recently Grant split his blog into personal and work. I’m doing a similar thing by splitting my blogging activities into 2 separate blogs. They are:

This blog that you are reading now and my new blog.

They are both hosted on Live Spaces, but my new blog will be focused solely on articles about the Live platform. So expect to see me blogging over there about things such as:

Live @edu
Managing small businesses on the Live platform
Live ID
and a raft of other Live-focused topics

So if Live is of interest to you, please add the URL for my new feed into your aggregator.

100,000 Views Today

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:50:35 GMT

Back in February, I posted a blog entry when my blog views reached 50,000. Today I was surprised to see that they have now passed the 100,000 mark!

Windows Live Features we’d like to see

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 08:46:32 GMT

Recently I’ve been talking about some of the cool uses for Live Spaces but, in this post, I’d like to talk about a pet peeve of mine - the lack of work that is put into development and communication from the Live Spaces team about upcoming features

I’d like to use this article/post as a place where I can keep a list of the things that the community believe we need to improve Live Spaces. If you have any items on your wish list please add them as comments and I’ll add them into the table. Then hopefully we can send them off to the team and lobby for a response of some kind from the Spaces team.

Submitted By	Feature	Description
Darren Neimke	Modules	Include the ability to have JavaScript in modules. I’d like to use Google Analytics on my Space to get proper statistics. But because Spaces strips out any JavaScript, I am currently unable to do this.
Darren Neimke	Statistics	Include some richer statistics out of the box. Currently all that is offered is the ability to view a giant, paged list of ‘page views’. Benefits could be gained by adding some simple extra views such as: Most common search terms from referrers (such as Google search terms used to land at your site) Most popular pages Daily, Weekly, Monthly traffic charts
Darren Neimke	Comments	Improved ease in managing spam comments. I made some suggestions about how to do this at the end of this post.
Darren Neimke	Comments	A bulk, paged view of comments. Currently I am only able to see the most recent 7 or 8 comments on my Spaces home page. But what if I wanted to find comments older than that?
Jamie Thomson	Publishing	I just tried to post a blog entry contianing pictures from WL Writer to my Live Space and received an error: "The server reported an error with the following URL: The remote server returned an error: (507) Insufficient Storage." I presume that this is because earlier today I hit the 500 photos per month limit on Live Spaces. I have no problem with that but I would assume that it wouldn't prevent me from posting new blog entries. That's bad. I'd appreciate it if you could contact me about this and tell me if my suspicions are correct but I suspect you won't.
Jamie Thomson	Blog	Blog posts can only appear in one category and that's not particularly useful. Better would be the ability to tag blog entries with zero, one or many tags. Just like nearly every other blog engine on the planet enables you to do
Jamie Thomson	Notifications	Please tell me (via my Live Spaces newsfeed) when one of my friends has commented on someone else's Spaces blog. I would love to know what my friends are up to and, moreover, I would love for people I don't know to be made aware of my blog.
Jamie Thomson	Notifications	If I post a comment on someone else's spaces blog I have no way of knowing if someone replies to it or not. I know there's an RSS feed for blog comments but I'm not going to go and subscribe to every single blog entry I ever put a comment onto. Given that all comments are posted using our Live ID it shouldn't be that difficult to receive an email and/or live alert telling us that someone has replied to my comment. Of course, we should have the ability to subscribe/unsubscribe to/from these notifications.
Jamie Thomson	Notifications	When I post a comment on someone's space there's no way of knowing if someone replies to it. perhaps they ask a question requesting a follow-up - and I'll never know. here's an idea. Why not put something on our "What's New" feed telling us when someone has replied to one of our posts?
Jamie Thomson	Notifications	The news feed tells us when soeone has posted a blog entry - and that is useful. However, in order to read it you have to leave the page. Live.com allows you to hover over a link and it pops up a window showing what's in the post. It'd be handy if the same was in the Spaces feed.
Jamie Thomson	Calendar	If someone shares a calendar publicly it would be great if on the HTMl link to that calendar (e.g. http://jamie.calendar.live.com/calendar/SQL+Server+MVP+Summit+2008/index.html) there would be the following information: -Name of the person who created the calendar -Link to their Live Space -Use Messenger IM control to IM them (if they have allowed it) -A link to "More calendars made available by this calendar author" Of course, we would have the option to make this information available or not
Jamie Thomson	Calendar	I've got a calendar here: http://jamie.calendar.live.com/calendar/SQL+Server+MVP+Summit+2008/index.html and there are various things I'd like to have appear as a different colour even though they are on the same calendar. You'll notice that each event on that calendar has some information in brackets (e.g. Event Details for Beyond Relational I – unstructured and semi-structured data (Engine) (Deep Dive)) so I'd like to treat those things in brackets as free-form attributes of the event. In other words, I'd like to create custom attributes for each event such as "Subject Area", "technical level", "Presenter". Thereafter, it would be good to be able to create seperate colours based on values of those attributes. Hope that makes sense.
Jamie Thomson	Calendar	I can distribute a URL that links to my calendar (e,g. http://jamie.calendar.live.com/calendar/SQL+Server+MVP+Summit+2008/index.html ) and that's very useful. However, that particular calendar only has events on 3 days (April 15th-17th) so it'd be nice of I could post a RESTful URl that links directly to those days. (e.g. http://jamie.calendar.live.com/calendar/SQL+Server+MVP+Summit+2008/index.html?start=20080415&days=3 )
Jamie Thomson	Notifications	If I change the tagline on my space, display that on my friends' What's New feed
Jamie Thomson	Notifications	We don't get a notification when someone accepts a friend request. Please could you add this to the What's New feed?
Jamie Thomson	Modules	Please provide a Spaces Gadget or Sidebar gadget that allows us too browse skydrive.
Jamie Thomson	Blog	Please add 'Search this blog' onto the title bar along with 'Spaces' and 'Web'. I'm always searching for blog entries that I know exist and this addition would make it SO much easier. In addition, automatically generate a search macro for every space. The search macro would be owned by the space owner.
Darren Neimke	Favorites	Add the ability to add a description of the link.
Darren Neimke	Favorites	Sort tags and folders alphabetically
Jamie Thomson	Live Home	It'd be nice to be able to delete an email from home.live.com without having to click on the mail and go through to Hotmail.

How to delete spam from your Windows Live Spaces blog

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:12:05 GMT

One of the first questions that I had when I started using Windows Live Spaces last year was “How do I remove spam comments from my Live Spaces blog”? It took me a while to work it out because the process for getting to the right screen to delete these comments is not necessarily that intuitive. So here are the steps that you can go through if you need to delete comments from your Live space.

The Problem

When you browse to the home page of your Space, you are presented with several modules (web parts), one of which shows you a listing of the recent comments on your space. We can see this module in the following image along with some comments which appear as though they might be spam.

As someone who likes to keep my blog free of spam, I’ve always been in the habit of removing the wretched stuff promptly – partly because I believe that spam has a habit of leading to more spam. So let me take you through the steps that are required to remove just one of these spam comments from my Live Spaces blog.

The Solution

Step 1 – Identify the comment as spam

The first thing that I like to do is to click through to view the full comment, just to be sure that the comment is actually spam. In the case of the comment below we can see that it clearly is spam.

Step 2 – Get the date of the blog entry

Now that we’ve identified the comment as spam, we need to get the date of the post so that we can locate it when we switch into Summary mode in just a moment. For the post that we are concerned about here, we can see that the date is the 27 January.

Step 3 – Switch the Blog View into Summary View Mode

In order to delete the spam comment from your blog you must switch into the Summary View mode which you can do from the navigation controls located on the left side of the page. You can also select the month of the post that you are interested in to quickly navigate to the correct set of entries.

Step 4 – Select the spam comment to mark it for deletion

Once in Summary View mode you can scroll to the location of the post and then click on the Comments link to expand out a view of comments for that particular post. Once you have the comments displayed, simply check on the checkbox to the left of the offending comment to mark it for deletion.

Step 5 – Delete the spam comment

Now that you have selected the comment for entry, scroll back to the top of the page and click the Delete selected items link to delete the comment.

You will be asked to confirm that you wish to delete the entries that are selected.

A Proposed Solution

Because most of the spam that I get is easily identified on the home page comments module, a feature that I’d love to see is the ability to delete comments directly from within that view. The following image shows my proposed solution for doing that.

It would also be good if spam could also be removed directly from within the post as you were reading it as shown in the following image.

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, spaces, how-to

Manage your Favorite’s online

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:33:33 GMT

Over the years I’ve used many methods for managing my Favorite web sites on the Internet. While each new method has provided it’s own set of features, each has fallen short of becoming my favorite Favorite method :-)

Today I thought that I’d share how (and why) I’m currently using Windows Live Favorites to manage all of my Internet favorite sites.

Before we get into an explanation of Windows Live Favorites, let’s take a look at the trusty browser-managed favorite’s, and see where they fall short:

They are not automatically backed up.
This often leads to losing favorite’s whenever you rebuild your computer or purchase a new one.
They are not synchronized across computers.
If I work from a different computer then I no longer have access to my favorite’s.
They are not centrally managed.
Even though I can copy my favorite’s and manually share them around on all of my computer’s, if I make a change on one computer, this change is not replicated to all of my other computer’s.

Windows Live Favorites solves each of these issues by allowing me to manage your Favorites from a centrally hosted location online.

Another reason that I love having my Favorites stored online is that it makes them so much easier to use in other ways – such as sharing them between my other web applications. Here’s an image of my Favorites being displayed via a module on my Live Spaces portal:

Windows Live Favorites allows me to manage your Favorites both through the traditional ‘Folders’ paradigm or through the use of tagging. Let’s take a peek at the following screencast to see how simple it is to use Windows Live Favorites:

So now the only thing that I need to remember to access my Favorites from wherever I am is: http://favorites.live.com.

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, favorites, toolbar, story

Staying connected with Live Writer

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 16:10:02 GMT

Staying connected for me means that my friends get to read my alerts and find out where I am and what I’m up to whatever I’m doing. To keep them informed I constantly update my ‘status’ on various social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and of course richer content goes in my blog.

In the past, getting my status alerts updated has meant visiting each site separately and making updates. Thankfully the tools are getting better and much of this stuff is now getting automated as the sites start to integrate and tools make it easier to share my updates around.

A few moments ago I published an article on my blog about how I had downloaded the latest version of Live Writer and the associated SDK. One of the sample applications that comes with the SDK is a plug-in that cross-posts your published articles as a tweet on Twitter.

To highlight how well this works for sharing information with my circle of friends, within 4 minutes of me posting that article, one of my friends read the tweet on Twitter and instantly posted a comment against the blog post to let me know that they were sold on this feature and that they were heading off to download the new version right away!

For me, staying connected means sharing information and experiences. By using Live Writer and the new Twitter Notify plug-in, the job of managing my community updates just got easier!

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, Writer, story, Challenge: Connections

Testing the tech preview of WLW

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 15:25:15 GMT

I’ve just downloaded the latest version of Live Writer and the SDK for developing against it.

There’s a few changes to the UI of the new Writer application but by far my favourite is the tabbed interface for switching between views of your posts.

One of the things in the SDK which has generated some interest so far are the new events that you can hook when developing Plug-ins for Writer. There’s an event that you can handle prior to publishing and one which fires post-publishing too. This potentially opens up many scenarios for adding value to markup prior to posting and doing things after you’ve posted - such as notifying your social networks that you’ve posted.

In fact the SDK comes with a sample Plug-in called Twitter Notify which sends a tweet after you’ve posted alerting your Twitter friends of your new post. In fact, I’ve just installed it prior to writing this post, so if it worked, then a tweet should be appearing on my Twitter account shortly

Update: Sweet, it worked :-)

The Saturday Set - 7th June

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 14:43:29 GMT

Band of Horses - Ode to LRC

The Shortwave Set - No Social

The Saturday Set - 31st May

Sat, 31 May 2008 23:33:23 GMT

Jimmy Recard - Drapht

http://www.myspace.com/drapht

The Presets - This Boy's In Love

This video has caused quite a stir in Australia based on discussion around the perceived 'gay' and 'sexuality' overtones.

Are Robert Scoble and ReadWriteWeb just pimping their own book?

Mon, 26 May 2008 11:53:28 GMT

Yesterday I vented about the so-called 'alpha users' and how they have recently turned on Twitter. You can read that post here:

The 'alpha crowd' have started calling the death of Twitter

Today I read 2 blog posts which have resonated with this theme. First I read this post by Rob La Gesse:

Robert Scoble has a "Social Problem"

In that post, Rob shows that his thoughts are similar to my own on the subject.

The lessons to be learned here are that you shouldn't always blindly follow people who are paid to write about new technology when they talk about new technology. Robert, ReadWriteWeb, and many others with them are 'talking their own book'. This would actually be illegal in financial circles! And as many people have said before me: if you talk your own book for so long and for so often you'll end up believing your own crap.

The next post that I read was from Scoble himself:

Should services charge “super users”?

I don't think that it's about super users at all really. For me I actually just question the integrity of the opinions of these people.

In his article Scoble is clearly pimping FriendFeed these days, and much of his bias against Twitter is now showing up as a bias for FriendFeed. In 6 months time who knows what he'll be saying about either of these free tools.

If Scoble truly did care about the 'industry' then it wouldn't actually be a question of one implementation over another, and it certainly wouldn't come down to an issue of whether 1 company was a tad faster.

If Scoble really did care about the business uses of this software ("no business “utility” if I can’t make infinitely large friend lists and use those lists in the same way I use email) then surely he'd be less interested in massive numbers ("FriendFeed which lets 11,000 people interact with me in a public") (he passed the 20,000 mark on Twitter not long ago) and more focused on services? But no. For Scoble it is almost always about having the biggest numbers.

Technology and innovation bloggers such as Scoble and ReadWriteWeb seem to have too much of a vested interest in keeping things moving for the sake of drawing eyeball's for me to really take what they say too seriously.

The 'alpha crowd' have started calling the death of Twitter

Sun, 25 May 2008 04:41:31 GMT

It seems that many of the so-called 'alpha users' have started to turn their back on Twitter lately. I've seen articles like this on ReadWriteWeb and also on other blogs too. I think that the main source of angst is that sometimes Twitter tends to go down - and perhaps finally that they suffered a DB crash.

I find comments such as this one by ReadWriteWeb totally absurd:

Our beloved Twitter has been digging its own grave for several months now. Recently, the service has experienced an absurd amount of downtime. There have been numerous posts calling for Twitter to be replaced

These alpha freeloaders are calling for a free application to be replaced? Who the f*ck do these people think they are? If you are using Twitter so often that having it out of your life for a few minutes causes you to have a brain fart, then perhaps you need to either get a life, or do some work. I agree with this comment from the Twitter 'Man Down' post:

Twitter is free - I miss it when it's down but cut 'em some slack....

I believe that a lot of the call for change probably comes from the fact that these 'alpha-types' like to lead the way. They felt like they led us to Twitter, told us that we need to use the service to follow 5000 others, and now they are bored and need to feel important all over again.

I like Twitter, I use it 20 or 30 times a week, and it's fun.

The Saturday Set - 24th May

Fri, 23 May 2008 17:40:24 GMT

Weezer - Pork and Beans

James - Getting Away With It

It's all happening for Readify in WA

Mon, 12 May 2008 04:03:41 GMT

Readify's new State Manager for WA, Andy Lamb, has things well and truly up and running over in the west. Per Andy's post from today, we will running an RDN in Perth later this month:

On the 29th May in Perth, come and see our free seminar Silverlight with Alister Jones and Reactive Programming with LINQ by Paul Stovell.

If you are in Perth, this is a great opportunity to drop in and learn about what's going on and to be a part of our successful RDN series of talks.

The Saturday Set - 10th May 2008

Sat, 10 May 2008 12:39:45 GMT

Cajun Dance Party - The Race

Flight Of The Conchords - Robots (Radio Version) Music Video

The Saturday Set - 3rd May 2008

Fri, 02 May 2008 21:34:02 GMT

Very mild superpowers

The Ting Tings - That's Not My Name

A Weekend Read - 10

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 19:46:06 GMT

"A Weekend Read" is my weekly link list of interesting blog articles that I've seen throughout the week. To learn more about the "A Weekend Read" series, take a read of this post. OK, onto this week:

Teaching/Learning/Talent

None

Knowledge Management

Objects That Blog: Expanding The Architecture Of Participation -

Healthy Wealthy and Wise

None

Leadership

Who Gets The Ax in a Recession? - A good formula for looking at yourself and your staff in tough times.

Why Quantitative Measures Often Make Performance Worse, not Better - interesting discussion about performance targets.

Technology/Development

Functional Programming in C# - Higher-Order Functions - a nice clear post by co-worker Andrew Matthews.

Microsoft Announces Changes for Accessing Hotmail with Outlook Express - goodbye Outlook Express, hello Windows Live Mail.

Customise Your Outlook Today Pane with Cut-and-Paste HTML - this is pure gold.

Miscellaneous

Astronomy Picture of the Day: A Protected Night Sky - Amazing picture. I'm currently using this as my desktop background.

Mile-High Skyscrapers and Floating Cities That Never Were - gallery of imaginary cities.

The Saturday Set - 19th April 2008

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:09:33 GMT

Concrete Blonde - Tomorrow Wendy

Cajun Dance Party - Amylase

Lights & Music - Cut Copy

Cut Copy's new song 'Feel the Love' is also worth listening to.

A Weekend Read - 9

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:32:50 GMT

"A Weekend Read" is my weekly link list of interesting blog articles that I've seen throughout the week. To learn more about the "A Weekend Read" series, take a read of this post. OK, onto this week:

Teaching/Learning/Talent

Boss problems? Don’t Leave, Train Your Manager! - useful techniques for me both as an employee and as a manager.

Knowledge Management

Tell me how we’re connected? - long'ish article which talks about how KM contributes to locating skills within an org.

Deciphering Social Networks - Thesis - I haven't fully read this as yet, but it looks interesting.

Are Social Networking sites KM? - another interesting article.

Healthy Wealthy and Wise

The Unusual ROI of Going Green: From Saving to Eco-Friendly Index Funds that Beat the Market - some interesting prompting about where to invest for the coming green bubble.

Leadership

100 Year M.B.A Birthday. Is it a “Right Brain” World & Age of the M.F.A.? - I wasn't sure which category to put this under. I decided upon the Leadership category because of the focus on the MBA program. The stuff about right brain/left brain and computers is pretty interesting.

Technology/Development

Shockwave traffic jam recreated for first time - there are some really cool modelling animations about traffic and city activity on this site. This link is to 1 particular one.

Miscellaneous

Top 10 Wired Reader Night Photos, Decided by You - some nice night photo's

TUTT 54: Definitely Not Coming Out - more TUTT goodness from Ben and Josiah

Top 50 Worldwide Most Influential Blogs of April

BLANKSPACES - Mitch has been doing some great blogging about co-working on his current trip up the west coast of the US. There's a post about another co-working location that he wrote here.

How to manage expectations - Dilbert style :)

Overqualified - LOL. "Don't overdo it" :)

Tip: Download YouTube Videos in Zuneable Format - sweet!

Fanboy Supercuts, Obsessive Video Montages - this is a link to an amazing set of fan videos.

The Saturday Set - 12th April 2008

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:49:31 GMT

Millencolin - Detox

Bloc Party - Hunting For Witches

The Wombats - Kill The Director

Saab Television Commercial

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 12:04:38 GMT

Photo Album: Hockey

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 01:51:39 GMT

Hockey

Strategy_DefensiveStructureInDefence

Strategy_DefensiveStructureInAttack

Photo Album: Virtual Worker

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:21:07 GMT

Virtual Worker

2008-03-07 The Office 001

2008-03-07 The Office 002

2008-03-07 The Office 003

2008-03-07 The Office 004

Photo Album: Things I see

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 03:16:57 GMT

Things I see

Focus

My Book

HandOfVirtualWorker

Bubble Lamp - Blue

Bubble Lamp - Green

Bubble Lamp - Red

Spring2006(1)

Spring2006

Hockey_TheGuysPreGame

Friday Afternoons

More Photos...

Photo Album: Readify

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 03:26:27 GMT

Readify

002

PaulStovell_AjaxMaster

PaulStovell_AjaxRocks

Photo Album: Blog Images

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 00:54:58 GMT

Blog Images

More Photos...

Photo Album: Ambient Places

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 03:18:48 GMT

Ambient Places

Starbucks Glenelg 001

Starbucks Glenelg 002

Starbucks Glenelg 003

Starbucks Glenelg 005

Panoramic photo looking down Jetty Road towards the Glenelg Jetty. This is the view that you get from within Starbucks.

Pauls House

The outside of the new Santos head office in Adelaide. This building was recently built as a 'green' building.

The feeling in the foyer is modern and they have comfy egg chairs.

The foyer of Santos Adelaide looking at the area where you order coffee and food.

More Photos...

Photo Album: 2007-11-11

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 05:28:32 GMT

2007-11-11

FrontYardStitch

CarStitch

005

Photo Album: Pictures

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 21:32:59 GMT

Pictures

Me_PearlPREvening

PearlPR_Group1

Photo Album: Accomodation

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 05:06:41 GMT

Accomodation

Docklands Oct-07

Photo Album: Blog Images

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 01:39:39 GMT

Blog Images

Photo Album: Kitchen

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 04:47:49 GMT

Kitchen

Photo Album: Sport

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 09:54:22 GMT

Sport

Grand Final 2006

Photo Album: National Museum Of Australia

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 07:01:50 GMT

National Museum Of Australia

CharlesHouseOfFuture

CharlieFunny

CharlieInZone

DarrenCarOfFuture

GirlOnHigh

HarrisonCarOfFuture

HarryCharlieByWindow

HarryCharlieInZone

HarryFunny

RunningOnSlope

More Photos...

Photo Album: Blog

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 20:39:45 GMT

Blog

VirtualBarometer

FranksTeam

MeegoHappy

MeegoSmiley

Custom List: Think Globally

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 04:20:03 GMT

Think Globally

TripleJ Unearthed
TripleJ is my favourite radio station and this is the site of anannual competition that they run where independant artists can upload their music and we can listen to it for free. My mate Jem - http://JemsJerra.com - has his tracks listed on the site.
Volunteering SA Incorporated
Some interesting ideas for things to do when I get home.
Australian Holidays
Australian School and Public Holidays

Blog list: Blog list

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 00:35:56 GMT

Mitch Denny
Who you gunna call :-)
Frank Arrigo
The head geek.
Scott Hanselmann
.NET Community thought leader
Phil Haack
.NET Open Source thought leader
Rob Howard
.NET Community thought leader
Dare Obasanjo
The Don Box of Live.com