Darren Neimke's Live Portal

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.

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! 

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.

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

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.

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.