October 28, 2008

The Microsoft Dynamic Languages Team Blogroll

This is Microsoft Dynamic Languages Team, responsible for IronPython and IronRuby. Not as big as you might expect for the “most important project at MS today”, but 100% blogging! Dynamic languages are the next big thing so believe me you want to keep an eye on these guys. I compiled ...

June 14, 2008

One more IronRuby blogger

Jim Deville of Microsoft IronRuby team has started blogging. If you are interested in IronRuby, definitely subscribe. ...

March 6, 2008

Sergey Dubinets is blogging

Sergey Dubinets, the guy behind Microsoft XSLT engine and tools is blogging. Subscribed. Highly recommended. More XSLT bloggers from Microsoft: Dimitre Novatchev, XSLT: Riding the challenge Anton Lapounov: XML XSLT and Beyond ...

April 25, 2007

David Carlisle and Jeni Tennison are blogging

David Carlisle and Jeni Tennison are blogging. Skies are falling. Enough said. Subscribed. ...

February 17, 2007

Google Reader reports subscriber counts

According to the Official Google Reader Blog Google feed crawler, Feedfetcher, started to report subscriber counts. "The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds." What I found it interesting is that they do it ...

February 8, 2007

Microsoft-free Daily Grind

If you like the "Daily Grind" by Mike Gunderloy you might like its Microsoft-free version "Quick Links" at the "A fresh Cup" site ("Notes from a recovering Microsoft addict") too. Worth subscribing anyway. ...

February 5, 2007

Expandable archive list for MovableType

I'm blogging since March 2003 and as time goes I noticed my blog archive list became way too long and ugly. Finally I figured out how to generate it in a nice expandable list form you can see on the right. Here is a my small how to for MovableType powered ...

February 3, 2007

Building Category Cloud for MovableType

Here is a nice trick how to build category cloud for your MovableType blog. No plugins required, just past this snippet into your template. <div class="side" id="CategoryCloud" style="line-height:1.6em;"> <MTCategories show_empty="0"> <a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>" class="<$MTCategoryCount$>"><$MTCategoryLabel$></a> </MTCategories> <script type="text/javascript"> e = document.getElementById("CategoryCloud").getElementsByTagName("A"); for(i=0; i < e.length; i++) { if(e[i].className != "") { t ...

October 3, 2006

Joe Fawcett is blogging

Joe Fawcett, XML expert and my fellow XML MVP  has started a blog. Highly recommended. Subscribed. ...

August 16, 2006

Dimitre Novatchev is blogging

Congratulations to all XSLT geeks - Dimitre Novatchev, XSLT extraordinaire is blogging! Whoha! Subscribed. ...

August 15, 2006

Testing Windows Live Writer Beta

This is pretty cool blog post editor. I'm gonna test it and if it's ok I switch to Windows Live Writer cause wbloggar seems to be dead. Works fine with my MovableType powered blog also and has all features I need. Allows plugins to be added, cool huh? I want ...

July 26, 2006

Anton Lapounov is blogging

Anton Lapounov is blogging! He's one of the brilliant guys responsible for XSLT in the Microsoft XML Team. If you are subscribed to my blog, you want to subscibe to "Anton Lapounov: XML XSLT and Beyond" blog too. ...

January 22, 2006

Yahoo! tests RSS ads

I've got an invitation to participate in Yahoo! Publisher Network Beta program, which seems to be another targeted ad system just like Google AdSense, but already supporting ads in RSS feeds. They support MovableType and WordPress. Alas I couldn't even login - it's currently USA only and USA tax information ...

December 26, 2005

Ignore this post

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster feedster:54ff7668410b28a62e65b7362c37778c ...

December 20, 2005

RSS Bandit Nightcrawler release in Russian

RSSBandit users who are interested in Russian localization were probably disapointed when found no Russian language support in the Nightcrawler release. Sorry about that, I was too late for the deadline. Good news is that RSS Bandit bugfix release with Russian localization is expected really soon - most likely before ...

October 5, 2005

XML is too hard for Google

I've been looking for a blog search service and been naturally inclined to use Google blog search, but I was quite disappointed to find out that feeds produced by Google are malformed. Trivial lame mess with encoding, hence no use by XML tools. Apparently XML is too hard for Google ...

September 19, 2005

Upgraded to MT 3.2

This is a repetitive pattern: once in a 6 months I get tired of comment and trackback spam and go upgrade my blog engine or install some antispam plugins.This time is not different. I've been massively attacked by spam trackbacks so I had to upgrade to MovableType 3.2. Not without ...

July 17, 2005

Tkachenko Family Blogroll

42. "Make all your family blogging" - done. Oleg (myself) - "Signs on the Sand" Alenka (my wife) - "Tigra Julia's Journal" (Russian only) Catherine (our little dauther) - "Little Catherine's Journal" (Russian only) Alexandra (my mom) - "wildgrass" (Russian only) ...

May 18, 2005

Jonathan Marsh is blogging

Jonathan Marsh, who is one of Microsoft's representatives at the W3C, an editor of XML Base, XPointer, XInclude, xml:id, some XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 specs and is by the way the original author of the defaultss.xsl which is used in Internet Explorer to display XML documents, is blogging. His ...

May 11, 2005

Blogging engine running XSLT?

Dave Pawson investigates if there is enough interest in a community developed web logging system based on XSLT processing and Atom8. He welcomes any feedback. I've been using XSLT-powered online publishing systems such as Docbook Website and definitely see enough potential behind Dave's idea. ...

April 19, 2005

Dave Pawson is blogging!

Dave Pawson is blogging! Great, subscribed. ...

March 30, 2005

wbloggar site hacked?

I'm setting up new notebook (HP Pavilion ze2070ea - really really nice one) and just realized I can't download one of the most important piece of software I just can't live without - w.bloggar, blogging client, because its site seems to be hacked and defaced out. When you go to ...

March 22, 2005

RSS Bandit v1.3.0.26 is here

Dare writes: This is the final release of the version formerly codenamed "Wolverine". This is the most significant release to date and has a ton of cool features. Enjoy. Get it here, this version rocks. I made the Russian translation again, so all typos and lame Russian words are my ...

February 10, 2005

Upgrading... Done

Well, I must admit it wasn't a smooth upgrade neither. Finally I had to remove all posts, migrate to MT 3.15 and MySQL as a backend and then to reimport all posts in a way they all get the same entry_id (to keep backwards compatibility with the archives). ...

February 5, 2005

Upgrading to MovableType 3.15 in a moment

I'm going to upgrade my blog's MovableType engine to 3.15. I'm full of hopes it helps with damn comment spam. ...

January 20, 2005

Turning Comments Off (Temporary!)

Ok, I can't take it anymore, too many spam. I turned comments off temporary untill I upgrade my blog engine. Sorry. ...

December 1, 2004

MSN is about to strike back

They say Microsoft is about to unveil MSN Spaces blogging service, may be even this week: Microsoft's MSN division is expected to take the wraps off its MSN Spaces blogging service this week, according to sources close to the company. MSN is expected to tout MSN Spaces as a direct ...

November 30, 2004

The Cafes

Elliotte Rusty Harold has started a new site called (not surprisingly) "The Cafes" - for articles "longer than a typical Cafe con Leche news item, but much shorter than a full book". Here is the RSS feed. Subscribed. ...

October 17, 2004

Derek Denny-Brown is blogging

That's sort of news that make my day - Derek Denny-Brown is finally blogging. Derek is working on XML/SGML last 9 years and currently is dev lead for both MSXML & System.Xml. Here is his atom feed if you can't find it on that dark-colored page. Subscribed. [Via Dare] ...

September 26, 2004

Beware of aggresive news aggregators

Dare writes on "News Aggregators As Denial of Service Clients": Recently I upgraded my web server to using Windows 2003 Server due to having problems with a limitation on the number of outgoing connections using Windows XP. Recently I noticed that my web server was still getting overloaded with requests ...

September 1, 2004

MovableType 3.1 is out

New and long awaited release of the MovableType blogging engine has been announced. New features of MT 3.1 include: Dynamic pages - now it's possible to switch between generation of static pages and dynamic generation. Well, I'm going to stay with static pages anyway. Subcategories Post scheduling Improved extensibility Plugin ...

August 29, 2004

Kurt Cagle is blogging

Kurt Cagle is blogging. Unfortunately it's Atom only blog (via Google's Blogger) and my RSS Bandit 1.2.0.114 (SP1 RC1) doesn't seem to understand it. Grrrrrr, how does thay say it - "Don't be evil" and "Google's mission: Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."? Rubbish! When ...

July 30, 2004

Another form of blog comment spam: indirect referencing

I just got several instances of what I believe is another resourceful form of blog comment spam. It looked like an ordinar spam, somehow making it through MT-Blacklist system I've got installed and after "Name: free government grants" I was aready clicking on "De-spam using MT-Blacklist" link, but then I ...

July 21, 2004

MovableType automatic IP banning system

Isn't it cool: A visitor to your weblog Signs on the Sand has automatically been banned by posting more than the allowed number of comments in the last 200 seconds. This has been done to prevent a malicious script from overwhelming your weblog with comments. The banned IP address is ...

July 1, 2004

Tired of spam

I'm tired of comment spam... It reached 15-30 spam instances/day level and finally I decided to install MT-Blacklist plugin for my blogging engine. 5 minutes of installation, updaing the blacklist, deep de-spamming and that it, I'm clean and protected. Well done, Jay Allen! Hope it's gonna help. Anyway if you ...

June 22, 2004

Microsoft Research RSS Feeds

Here are new feeds worth to subscribe: Microsoft Research News and Headlines Feed Microsoft Research Downloads Feed Microsoft Research Publications Feed Cool. [Via Roy Osherove] ...

June 9, 2004

Microsoft Security Bulletin RSS Feed

RSS makes its way. TechNet's security team announced the first version of an RSS feed for its security bulletins: Microsoft Security Bulletin RSS Feed. ...

May 4, 2004

RSS Bandit v1.2.0.112 Released

New version of the RSS Bandit has been released today. Amonst new features: support for Atom 0.3 support, ability to synchronize installations (killer!), 5 translations including Russian one made by me and lots more! Updated. Didn't check new features yet, but I can say the responsiveness is also improved! This ...

April 11, 2004

RSS Bandit speaks Russian

Ok, once I volunteered to make Russian translation for RSS Bandit - my favorite RSS aggregator, so finally I had to do it. It took me couple of days of my vacation time and it wasn't easy. There are just no established Russian translations for RSS terms, even for basic ...

March 25, 2004

First year in Blogland

Arrrgh, I missed that day - 20 March my blog crossed 1 year timeline. Here is what I wrote a year ago: Well, blogging is really infectious disease and finally I got the infection. I have installed Movabletype engine on my site quite easily (c'mon, it's cgi based) and here ...

March 16, 2004

MovableType 3.0 on the horizon

Here is what MovableType blogging engine team writes: We're taking our first steps towards the release of Movable Type 3.0. The pre-beta version has just finished its initial two rounds of alpha testing and we're now opening the testing to a larger audience ... What's new includes: "significant change to ...

March 14, 2004

RE: Opera As An RSS Reader

Hey, apparently recent Opera browser beta has RSS reader embedded. Here are some screenshorts - here and here. I like that trend. [Via 10x More Productive Blog] ...

March 10, 2004

The C# Frequently Asked Questions blog

Interesting new blog at blogs.msdn.com - "C# Frequently Asked Questions", where the C# team posts answers to common C# questions. Subscribed. Why doesn't C# support default parameters? Why doesn't C# support multiple inheritance? Why doesn't C# support #define macros? Ask your question here. ...

February 1, 2004

MovableType 3.0 Alpha soon

Six Apart has announced MovableType 3.0 Alpha testing is about to begin. Testers such as plugin developers, web standards advocates or just Movable Type users with an active commenting community are invited. Here is a list of upcoming MT 3.0 features. I keep getting 5-10 spam comments a day, so ...

January 22, 2004

Aaron Skonnard is blogging

Breaking news: Aaron Skonnard is blogging! (Via Carnage4Life). A must feed for every XML geek. ...

January 16, 2004

Fighting spam comments. MovableType 2.661 released

MovableType version 2.661 has been released. The release aimed completely to fix spam comments problem. New anti-spam weapon includes: We've included a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can only be posted every N seconds, where N is configurable (documentation on the setting that controls N ...

January 6, 2004

Happy 2004 under spam attack

Happy New Year to everybody my dear readers! Now back to mundane things. Yesterday for the first time my blog has been seriously attacked by evil comment spammer. Last months I got used to receive 6-7 spam/troll comments a week and remove them out weekly, but this guy(application?) has sent ...

December 29, 2003

On exposing comments in MovableType blogs

Here is small HOWTO on exposing comments to MovableType-running blogs to RSS readers.Note: Target MT versions are 2.64 and 2.65, I'm not sure about other ones. Intro The goals of exposing comments are: enabling for arbitrary RSS reader application to see comments made to blog items and to post new ...

December 28, 2003

CommentAPI & MovableType

Apparently there is no CommentAPI implementation or plugin for MovableType blogging engine. At leats I'm unable to find any. And the last thing I want to do is to code in Perl today. Well, proxy ASPX page should be just fine then. ...

Bye bye, RSS 1.0 feed

Moving the blog I relaized it's kinda layered by dust from architectural point of view. So I upgraded MovableType engine up to the latest version (2.65), added RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds and implemented wfw:commentRss in RSS 2.0 feed. Also I abandoned RSS 0.91 and 1.0 feeds. Implementing wfw:commentRss ...

October 3, 2003

Crazy spammers

These days my blog is under attack by some insane spammers. Hehe, funny huh? I have no idea what such a comment to one of my blog record means: Name: Sex Toys Email Address: Dave@Dave.net URL: http://www.sextoys######.om/ Comments: We live in strange times, but someday I think we will look ...

June 1, 2003

MovableType 2.64 released

Version 2.64 of Movable Type is now released. Security fixes and RSS 2.0 in the changelog. Upgraded without any hitch, good piece of software. ...