Windows Experience Blog : Blogging

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!

New Plug-ins Available for Windows Live Writer

Brandon LeBlanc — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:22:25 GMT

3 new Plug-ins for Windows Live Writer were recently release that I think bloggers who live and breath in Windows Live Writer (such as myself) will appreciate. These plug-ins were created by the awesome Windows Live Writer Team here at Microsoft.

DiggThis – Add a “DiggThis” badge to your blog posts so your readers can quickly “digg” your blog posts. The plug-in offers several different “styles” of badges to choose from, as well as alignment options for where its placed on your blog. Download the plug-in here.

Twitter Notify: This plug-in will automatically “tweet” the title and link to your blog to your Twitter account when you publish a blog post. Download the plug-in here.

Flickr Upload: When you insert an inline image in a blog post in Windows Live Writer it also uploads that image to Flickr you when publish your post. Download the plug-in here.

You can download the latest version of Windows Live Writer in the new Windows Live Essentials suite today at download.live.com. Some of the new features include:

Insert and upload Windows Live photo albums
Insert and publish video to YouTube
Server-side tagging (support coming soon to WordPress.com and BlogEngine.NET)
Improved blog account setup

And there is more! You can read about what’s new in the latest Windows Live Writer release via the Windows Live Writer Team Blog.

Windows Live Writer is a must-have tool for bloggers.

Open Already Published Blog Posts with Windows Live Writer

Brandon LeBlanc — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 08:19:40 GMT

A few days ago, I needed to edit a blog post that I didn’t publish using Windows Live Writer. I discovered that Windows Live Writer allows you to open any blog post on your blog that has been published – regardless of whether it was written and published with Windows Live Writer or not.

When I clicked “Open” in the Windows Live Writer toolbar, an options window appeared giving me several options to choose from.

I can open a blog post from Drafts, Recently Posted, and of course any of the blogs that I have configured in Windows Live Writer such as the Windows Experience Blog. When I clicked on “The Windows Experience Blog” option – I was given a listing of 5 of the most recent blog posts from the Windows Experience Blog. The default is to list 5 posts however you can choose to view more blog posts via a drop down menu. I was able to choose any blog post that had been published (via Windows Live Writer or not) from the Windows Experience Blog to edit and publish those edits.

The ability to open blog posts from blogs in Windows Live Writer exists today with the current non-Beta version of Windows Live Writer available at get.live.com as well as the current Beta of Windows Live Writer available at download.live.com.

If you haven’t already discovered this, thought it might be of some interest to my fellow bloggers.

Talking about Blogging Windows

Brandon LeBlanc — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 03:53:00 GMT

Last week was an exciting week for Windows and blogging. Senior Vice Presidents Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan launched a brand new blog called Engineering Windows 7 (or E7 for short). In case you don't know who these guys are, Jon DeVaan manages the engineering team responsible for creating the central (or "core") components and architecture of Windows and Steven Sinofsky manages the group responsible for the user experiences in both Windows and Windows Live. The Engineering Windows 7 blog is designed to create an open discussion about how we're making the next version of Windows - currently codenamed Windows 7 - and to create a background of understanding for the engineering decisions made in order to ship Windows 7.

Engineering the next version of the most used operating system to-date is a very complex software project. Why? Because Windows has a very large user base and that user base is very diverse. Planning the next version of Windows (and ultimately developing it) is a huge under-taking as it requires Microsoft to learn and understand the needs for all types of customers that use Windows today. On the Engineering Windows 7 Blog, you can expect a two way discussion on how those customer needs are balanced out to deliver Windows 7 into the hands of customers.

The one thing you won't find on the Engineering Windows 7 Blog is major product announcements. The focus is to simply discuss the engineering of Windows 7. Not only can we expect posts from both Steven and Jon on the Engineering Windows 7 Blog, we can also expect to hear from other members of the engineering team who are essentially building the next version of Windows as we speak. Sweet!

I look forward to reading about the engineering done to make Windows what it is.

So what does that mean for us here on the Windows Vista Team Blog and for the Windows Experience Blog? Windows Vista is still very much relevant today. There is still very much to say in regards to Windows Vista and lots more experiences to blog about surrounding Windows Vista and Windows Live. Our blogs here won't be going away. We continue to add value to Windows Vista with releases such as Windows Search 4.0 and coming soon the Beta 2 release of Internet Explorer 8. You can also expect us to take part in the ongoing discussion taking place from the Engineering Windows 7 blog on building the next version of Windows as well.