Scott's "SiteExperts" Place: Spaces Tips

Retiring the Spaces Cleanup Tool

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 06:57:17 GMT

Just as we were able to eliminate the Edit It Tool!, with the recent update to Spaces we can now retire the Spaces Cleanup Tool. The Spaces Cleanup Tool made it easy to quickly delete multiple comments and trackbacks from your blog. This feature is now natively supported by Spaces by selecting "Blog" when you are in author mode on your Space.

Spaces Cleanup Tool

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 19:00:28 GMT

I often find myself cleaning up comment or trackback spam. These are comments or trackback that are either out of scope or are attempting to drive traffic to a specific site. Currently, it is very tedious to delete multiple items. I created the Spaces Cleanup tool to help.

Before I explain the tool, I want to be clear that this tool is not endorsed or supported. I have tested this tool against my own space. Feel free to use this tool at your own risk. It is very likely this tool will be broken at some point by an update to Spaces (it is designed so I can update it if necessary), and I expect, like the original Edit It tool, will become unecessary in the future.

What is the Spaces Cleanup Tool?

It is a button you can add to your Internet Explorer toolbar (via your favorites). When you are editing your space (either the "Home" Page or "Blog" Page, select this tool from favorites menu to convert all the individual delete options to checkboxes. You can quickly check multiple items and delete them. On the "Blog" edit page, if you expand any items, you can click the Spaces Cleanup button again to reconvert any new delete buttons.

When you are finished selecting items for deletion, click the "Permanently Delete Checked Items" button added to your web-page (immediately below the Home, Profile, etc., tabs). Once confirmed, sit back, and the selected items will be deleted. Once all the items are deleted, the page will reload.

How do I Install the Spaces Cleanup Tool?

Visit the Spaces Cleanup Tool page and follow the instructions.

Where is The Edit It Tool?

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 07:35:43 GMT

I get a very large number of comments asking where to find the Edit It! tool. This tool was retired (as explained on the Edit It page) because we started to natively support HTML editing earlier this year. Just click on the <HTML> button in the formatting toolbar.

Since many of the inquiries come from China, I had the following explanation translated into Chinese with the help of a colleague:

"To help my visitors from China who frequently inquire about the Edit It tool, I had this message translated into Chinese by a collegue. Last December I posted an extension to Spaces for editing the actual HTML of your blog posts. In a Spaces update earlier this year, we built the HTML editing functionality directly into the editor making this extension no longer necessary. Now, rather than use the Edit It tool, you just click the <HTML> button on the toolbar. This button enables you to format your blog entry using standard HTML."

为了回答来访的中国朋友们的疑问，并对（Edit It tool）有更好地了解，我请我的同事把这段话翻译成了中文。去年十二月，我在Spaces的功能中设计了一个编辑功能的插件，通过它您可以直接对space上的网络日志以HTML格式进行修改。在今年早些时候的Spaces升级中，我们将HTML编辑功能直接添加到了Spaces中，所以现在已经没有必要再使用早前的HTML插件了。现在，你不必使用 ”Edit It tool” 只要点击工具栏上的<HTML>按钮就可以对你的blog帖子进行标准HTML模式编辑。

My vision isn't 20/20 either...

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 14:43:49 GMT

I have received quite a few comments about the font-size of my blog entires (the default size of the spaces theme). I am in the process of revisiting each post on my blog and surrounding them with the following HTML:

<div style="font-size:115%">...blog contents...</div>

This quickly increases the size without generating a large amount of extra HTML in your blog entry (the font-size drop-down in the editor uses much more verbose HTML). I am hoping this new size is more appropriate and easier on the eyes.

If you want to try this on your blog entires, I suggest

Type your blog entry,
Switch to HTML mode (click the <HTML> toolbar button in the editor),
Surround your blog entry with the specified HTML (<div style="font-size:115%">...</div>). You can pick a larger or smaller percentage to adjust the size.
Verify it looks good by clicking the "Preview Blog Entry" tab (note - do not click links in your blog entry when previewing or you may lose your edits - this will be fixed in the future).
Publish!

I highly recommend the preview step because if you enter bad HTML you may lose some content. I accidentally entered broken HTML one time and almost lost one of my existing entires (thanks to MSN Search caching pages I was able to resurrect it).

Also, I noticed a small bug where increasing the text-size in IE (View -> Text-Size menu option), the blog text may get clipped on the current page. If your refresh the page after changing IE's default text-size, the contents should reflow and everything should become readable again.

Talking about Spaces Enhancements

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 06:33:43 GMT

Mike has given an overview of the improvements we released tonight. Rather than repeat, feel free to head over to Mike's blog and read more about it.

Quote

RSS & pinging enhancements

We've worked a bit recently on our RSS 2.0 feed format to bring it "up to snuff" so to speak with the more advanced capabilities in some aggregators out there.

Clicking on the orange RSS button or the "Syndicate" link above will no longer spit out raw XML to your readers using a modern browser. Instead, they will see a "pretty printed" RSS feed with a link to learn more, subscribe in My MSN, or subscribe in an aggregator supporting one-click subscription (feed://) Will this increase the number of subscribers to your space? I don't know... hopefully! But it sure is nicer to look at!

Number of comments is now a part of each item using <slash:comments> so you can track comment count on items using your aggregator!

Music tracks are hyperlinked to the MSN Music store so readers can preview and purchase music directly from their aggregator.

RSS "hits" now count towards statistics (my favorite feature). No longer will you be completely unaware of how many people are reading your feed using Bloglines, NewsGator, RSS Bandit, etc. You can track this in Statistics under Settings - all RSS page views start with "RSS". (side note: we have also cleaned up statistics a bit so each referring address won't take up the entire page!)

Type element. This is really for internal use, but feel free to take advantage of it. Here is a very quick and dirty introduction for the developers out there:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:msn="http://schemas.microsoft.com/msn/spaces/2005/rss">

<item>
<msn:type>{photoalbum|blogentry|list|musiclist|booklist|bloglist}</msn:type>
</item>

Note: if type is not specified, or if the type value is not recognized (in the case of future spaces content), just treat it as a standard item. List types *are* differentiated here, which means aggregators can do cool things with music list, book list, blog list, etc.

No more duplicate items when attaching a photo to a blog entry. YES!

Your profile photo is now a part of your RSS feed if you have it published on your space! So, if you wanted your feed to be more personal... you got it! Check it out in your favorite news reader.

More exposure for your space. If you have"pinging" enabled in Settings, your posts will now start to get exposure in Feedster, Technorati, PubSub, My MSN, and as before, Weblogs.com. This is a great way to start building a user base and drive some new traffic to your space.

Enjoy!

Talking about new themes!

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 06:08:28 GMT

Anyone who knows me, knows that while I am extremely creative at making the browser sing and dance using DHTML, but I am stylistically challenged. So with great fanfare, I announce that Spaces has shiipped an update tonight with over 70 themes! And of course, I picked the best one .

Quote

new themes!

A new version of spaces is up, and we now have over 70 themes to choose from. We got a LOT of feedback on the first set of themes we released last December and we've been working over the last couple of months to address the feedback we received.

Tracking the latest changes across Spaces

Fri, 01 Apr 2005 06:42:37 GMT

Check out http://www.weblogs.com/msn/ to see all the spaces that have been updated over the last hour. By default, all public spaces ping the weblogs.com server when they are updated. You can turn on and off this feature on your space by clicking "Settings" and then "Blog".

I see I got Winer-Dotted this morning :-)

FEdit! FireFox Helper Button

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 17:20:35 GMT

I'm back! with a new little tirck for you FireFox users out there. I will try and post a few pictures of my vacation by the end of the week.

For non-IE users, we do not provide a rich text editor (before you ask, this is on our feature request list). Instead, you get a simple text input box that takes raw HTML. While HTML is powerful, it has a side-effect of making multiple paragraph entries a little more difficult. Since we are interpreting your entry as HTML, all your simple line breaks are collapsed causing your entry to display on a single line. If you are quickly typing an entry most likely this is not what you desired. The correct way to create a line break is to type the proper HTML. This can be accomplished via the <p> element surrounding your paragraph or by using a <br> element.

As you may have noticed if you read my blog, there is almost always a way to provide a quick solution within the browser. Enter the FEdit! (click here to get it) toolbar button for FireFox users . Now, when you are finished typing your entry, simply use this toolbar button to automatically embed BR tags for all your line breaks. Click the button multiple times to generate multiple line breaks.

As a simple test, this entry was created using the FEdit! button in FireFox.

NOTE - This button may work in Opera and Safari. I have not had a chance to test it there.

Edit It! Enhanced Blog Editing Experiment...

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 23:16:54 GMT

EditIt! has been retired. You can now click directly on the <HTML> toolbar button to switch the editor into HTML mode.

First, I must say some of our user's are way too smart . I must give credit for this trick to Phil Harvey who has his own .NET Blog.

The rich text editor (or RTE for short), is a component (I wrote 5 years ago!) currently used by Hotmail, MSN Groups, and now Spaces for posting rich content. It was designed with a configurable toolbar for turning on and off different formatting options. Well, as Phil found out and sent us a note, you can execute Javascript on the address bar against the current page. He was able to turn back "on" some of the formatting commands that were disabled. (I am not going to try and explain why certain commands have been turned off).

So, rather than have Phil keep this a secret, I turned his simple trick into a new "Edit It" toolbar button (click here to get it). Consider this button completely unsupported and experimental (it may stop working at any time). When adding a blog entry, clicking this button will reenable a couple of the toolbar options and turn on a checkbox where you can edit your raw HTML. Before you get overly excited, we support a very small subset of HTML so there are no guarantees that the HTML you type (or generated by these new buttons) will render.

Please enjoy this toolbar button and keep the feedback coming - we are listening!
(and don't forget to check out the Blog It! toolbar button I posted earlier)

Layout Customization...

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 18:00:23 GMT

I have seen a number of comments floating around stating that you can't customize your page. While we currently don't let you tweak the underlying style sheets or modify the HTML used to generate the page, we do have a fairly rich customization interface for adding and removing the "content modules" from the page.

To customize the layout of your blog, click on the "Customize" button when in your blogs author mode (if you are at your blog and do not see the button, you are probably previewing your space - click on "Get Your Own Space" for a shortcut back to author mode). Alternatively (in author mode), you can get to customize by simply dragging a content module by its title to a new location (IE only for drag-drop). Note - the "Customize" button and drag-drop will not turn on until the page is loaded. Your customizations will not be saved until you hit the save button (we do not keep republishing your site while you are editing it)

At this point you should see the Customize options. There are three options, themes, modules, and layout. Themes lets you change the color scheme of your space, modules lets you add or remove modules from your page (you can create multiple lists using the "create" choice at the bottom of the menu), and last you can change the layout style from one to three columns using layout. To rearrange your modules, click on them and drag them.

For a keyboard accessible version you can click on the link in the orange box. This takes you to the same customization settings (without wysiwyg) done in a non-interactive way. If you are not using IE, this is the customization page you would see.

Last, there are a number of customization options unders settings. You can turn on and off RSS syndication, edit your title and tag line, modify various settings about your blog, turn on mobile blogging, and more. An important item to point out is by default we only enable internal trackback (trackback between MSN spaces) support. If you want to allow trackbacks to your blog from anywhere on the internet, you need to change this setting on the blog settings page.

Blog It! Toolbar Button

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 01:16:03 GMT

My first tip. The BlogIt toolbar button!

Spaces has a special URL that makes it easy to post entries into your blog, http://spaces.msn.com/blogit.aspx. This URL, when supplied with the proper arguments, can pre-populate your blog entry page.

Before I explain the technical details, let me introduce the unofficial Blog It toolbar button. The Blog It toolbar button is a little tool I wrote that allows you to quickly blog any web page. If you see something you want to blog, select some text, and click the Blog It toolbar button. Please visit http://www.siteexperts.com/blogging/blogit.htm to get your own blog it toolbar button. Also, if you have any improvements, please let me know (the button is implemented using basic DHTML so feel free to look under the hoods). Note: The toolbar button only runs in Internet Explorer and is not endorsed nor supported by Microsoft.

Obviously, you will need to create your own MSN Space (I recommend doing that first!)

Technical Details: The blogit.aspx is very simple and is how the blog it buttons below each blog entry work. There are a number of querystring arguments that are mapped directly into your blog. You can specify one or many of these arguments. ?Title=title&Description=Description&Trackback=Trackback&SourceURL=SourceURL

Title: This preopulates the title string of your blog entry page.
Description: This preopulates the body of your blog entry page. (typically the selected text)
SourceURL: This renders above the description in body of your blog entry page (typically the URL of the page being blogged)
Trackback: This prepopulates the trackback field (and pings when posted).

These arguments can either be submitted as a form post or as a standard http get. NOTE: If you are not logged in when blog it is called, you will first be asked to log in (otherwise how would we know where to send you :-).