Windows Experience Blog : Blog

Easier Navigation on The Windows Blog with New Menu

Brandon LeBlanc — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:22:34 GMT

This morning we deployed a brand new menu system to The Windows Blog. This new menu system is designed to make it easier to navigate the family of Windows blogs that live on the site. When clicking new “Blogs” button, a drop down menu for blogs appears which displays a categorized list of blogs. Blogs with long titles are also no longer cut off.

Overall, the menu improves navigating the site quite a bit. And as we grow the site, it no longer made sense to keep a list of blogs on the left hand side as we had been doing before.

This is just the first of several more updates we’re hoping to make to the site before the end of the year!

State of the Blog – A Little Update on Where We Are Today

Brandon LeBlanc — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:03:59 GMT

We are in an exciting time for Windows. We’re about to launch our best version of Windows yet – Windows 7. In between all the Windows 7 awesomeness, I wanted to take a moment to talk about The Windows Blog and where we are today with the site.

We’ve come a long way since 2006 when we launched as the Windows Vista Team Blog. This last fall we re-launched the site as The Windows Blog. When we re-launched, the focus of the site was to be the ultimate resource for Windows through the use of blogging – and to grow.

In the site’s design, we put an emphasis of multiple blogs existing under The Windows Blog “umbrella” that would cater to different audiences. Our original blog, Windows Vista Team Blog, became one of several blogs under that “umbrella” and we also launched the Windows 7 Team Blog which is where you will find all the latest Windows 7 news and announcements. Also in the fall, we launched the Windows Security Blog featuring blog posts focusing on Windows security from Paul Cooke. Paul blogged live from RSA earlier this year.

And in the last few months, we’ve grown quite a bit to cover a broader array of audiences with several other new blogs joining our site:

Windows for your Business Blog: Launched in February by Gavriella Schuster, this blog focuses on our commercial customers for Windows. Most recently, Rich Reynolds who is a GM on the Windows Commercial Marketing Team posted a blog about how our business customers provided early feedback for Windows 7.

Windows 7 for Developers Blog: At the end of March, we launched the Windows 7 for Developers. This blog is run by Yochay Kiriaty from the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) Team here at Microsoft. Yochay blogs about all the really cool things developers can do with their applications to take advantage of Windows 7 features like the new Windows Taskbar. If you’re a developer – this blog is a must read.

Springboard Series Blog: This blog launched in early June and is run by Senior Community Manager Stephen Rose. The Springboard Series is a TechNet portal and is the ultimate Windows resource for IT Professionals. The Springboard Series Blog focuses on calling out those resources for IT Pros. Just recently, a Virtual Roundtable (VRT) discussion was help with Mark Russinovich on Application Compatibility – check it out here!

Soon, my friends over on Windows Mobile will be blogging on The Windows Blog too! Their blog can be found here.

And of course I continue to focus on my Windows experiences on the Windows Experience Blog as well.

What’s great about growing the blogs under The Windows Blog “umbrella” is that we have blog posts talking about a variety of Windows topics relevant to a broad set of audiences.

However what if some of the content being blogged about isn’t relevant to me?

All blog posts from all blogs automatically appear in our main RSS feed. Some people want to see and read everything. This is likely how they are doing so or going to our frontpage. But if you only care about content from a specific blog, you can subscribe to the individual RSS feed for that blog. Here are the RSS feeds for each of the blogs here on The Windows Blog:

Tags we use for blog posts also have their own RSS feeds. If all you care about is our announcements, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the Announcements tag.

If RSS isn’t your thing, you can also follow The Windows Blog on Twitter and get all our latest blog posts too.

So what’s coming up for The Windows Blog? Well – lots more awesome Windows 7 blog posts of course. We’re also going to be introducing a new menu system in the coming weeks and introducing more new blogs – including some localized blogs in a variety of different languages.

I’m very proud of the community of Windows blogs we’ve built up here on The Windows Blog. Thank you to the millions of visitors who read our posts each month and continue to be excited for Windows!

Welcome to Our New Blog - The Windows Blog

Brandon LeBlanc — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 03:12:39 GMT

As you probably have noticed, we just re-launched our blog today as The Windows Blog sporting an all-new look and feel reflecting Windows in a broader sense instead of a single Windows release. We figured it was time to give our blog a good facelift (it’s looked the same since we originally launched in October of 2006) – especially as we start talking about Windows 7, Windows Live, and many other interesting Windows topics. Our old design focused strictly on Windows Vista. Our new design is no longer tied to a specific Windows release allowing us to talk about a wider range of topics.

With the previous site design – we essentially had 2 blogs hosted together on the same site: the Windows Vista Team Blog and Windows Experience Blog. But because of the design – not a lot of people noticed that there were actually 2 distinct blogs on our site.

We wanted to fix that.

In thinking about the design for The Windows Blog, we wanted the site to act like a community of blogs focused on talking about Windows.

Today – our new design reflects that.

As you can see in the left-hand navigation menu – The Windows Blog is currently home to 3 Windows blogs, 2 of which you already know.

Both the Windows Vista Team Blog and Windows Experience Blog are the same blogs with the same content you have been reading – however they are exposed differently with our new design. We are also introducing a 3rd blog today – the Windows 7 Team Blog. All 3 of these blogs sit under what I like to call The Windows Blog “umbrella”.

All 3 of these blogs also have distinct purposes. As you can expect – the Windows Vista Team Blog will continue to talk about all-things Windows Vista and the Windows 7 Team Blog will talk about all-things Windows 7 as we move forward. The Windows Experience Blog, which is written by me, will continue to talk about anything related to the cool and interesting Windows experiences people can have with Windows. The focus of the 2 “Team” blogs is to deliver important news and announcements we think are important to you as a consumer and as a Windows enthusiast in a more personable way. Real people (like me and Mike Nash) write these blog posts.

Each blog has its own RSS feed and unique banner. You can subscribe to the individual blogs you are interested in reading content from in your favorite RSS feed reader or simply subscribe to the main RSS feed from The Windows Blog front page as ALL blog content is aggregated to the front page and main RSS feed of The Windows Blog.

· Windows Vista Team Blog | RSS Feed

· Windows 7 Team Blog | RSS Feed

· Windows Experience Blog | RSS Feed

· Front Page | Main RSS Feed

As we move forward – you can expect new blogs to be added to this community of Windows blogs here which I think is exciting. We are committed to building this community of Windows blogs – this is just the beginning.

We’ve got a lot more changes to talk about too.

Our Media Gallery is much better – allowing for Tag navigation. Each Tag comes with its own RSS feed too. When viewing the Media Gallery, readers are now able to sort our photos and screenshots Name, Most Recent, Most Downloads, Most Popular, and Most Comments. We also have specific Galleries of images as well you can navigate through under “Browse Media”.

We are now running on Telligent’s latest Community Server release. Because of this, we are able to take advantage of Telligent’s social networking investments within Community Server such as enhanced user profiles. Users who sign up to be members of The Windows Blog can now enjoy much more customizable user profiles. Members can add announcements to their profiles, add custom RSS feeds (such as the RSS feed to their Twitter account for all their tweets), and add other members as friends. Users can also leave comments on user’s profiles as well. The Windows Blog has a mini social network!

Click here to see my profile.

The new enhanced user profiles also have an activity stream called “My Activity”. If you are an active commenter, your comments will appear here as activities. The activity stream has its own RSS feed allowing you to take advantage of tapping in to other social networks such as Facebook and FriendFeed. Members can add their activity RSS feeds as Notes on their Facebook profile or add the feed to FriendFeed.

Also: when you see a little green dot on people’s avatar that means they are “online” – signed in to the blog and browsing the site.

And don’t be surprised if you see members of our Windows Featured Community Program or Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals leaving comments on the blog either!

Along with the new site name and design – we’re also using a new URL. You can now find us at www.windowsteamblog.com. The old URL – www.windowsvistablog.com – as well as all RSS feeds should redirect to the new URL.

And with that – I welcome you to The Windows Blog! Stayed tuned for tomorrow as I’m here in Los Angeles at the PDC and will be bringing lots of Windows 7 news your way.

Pardon our dust…

Brandon LeBlanc — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:42:33 GMT

Please pardon our dust, we’re currently deploying a pretty sweet upgrade to the site and ironing out a few issues. Some things may not work correctly at the moment. I’ll be posting more shortly on the changes to the site once we get everything the way we want it. Thank you for your patience!