Blog Upgrade, Part 2

Since the last time I blogged about the blogs.msdn.com upgrade, a lot of things have improved and bug fixes made... to the point that I am now very happy with the upgrade. I have gotten over the growing pains and like the new set of features very much.

I have to admit that the CS Control Panel is one of my most used applications on a daily basis (Remote Desktop, Outlook, Outlook Express, the NT Command Shell, and Textpad round out the rest of my most used applications), and it is certainly the one that undergoes the most amount of change.

You can imagine my delight last time at getting direct comments from scottw about CS issues. So, yes, I can imagine your reaction when getting comments/assistance from a product team member. It is an awesome feeling to see feedback directly acted upon, and the faster the turn around, the better the feeling. I guess that is one of the nifty properties of any Open Source project to capitalize on...

Anyways... the 503 Service Unavailable issues seem to have mostly went away. I still notice it once in a while, but a quick refresh brings things back. I have also figured out *why* certain settings were not sticking - one of my Category tags had '&' in it and was causing trouble, so I reported the issue and then renamed that category as a workaround in the meantime.

I am also very glad to see a spam filter kick in, which enables me to keep my wide-open policy of allowing anonymous feedback yet protecting me from getting spammed. Spam comments no longer trigger an email notification to me and are automatically blocked from being visible on the blog, which gives me control to either delete the comment or moderate the comment back to being visible. I am totally happy with this feature.

And the blog Search box... all I can say is - USE IT! It actually works now, indexes within a day, and it is pretty darn fast, too.

Ok, that's about all on my mind on the blog upgrade for now. Onward with more content...

//David