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Brendan Tompkins [MVP]

Blog First. Ask Questions Later.

Community Server 2.0 Coming Soon to CodeBetter and Thoughts on Focused Feed Blogging

I’m in the final stages of migrating CodeBetter.Com to Community Server 2.0.    I want to congratulate Telligent with the great job they’ve done with this new version.  There’s lots of nice new stuff in the UI, all based on Component Art’s latest suite of web controls.  As a result, it’s a much much easier blogging and forum tool to use.  Great job Telligent!  There are a couple of custom controls that I need to write before I get CodeBetter upgraded, but that shouldn’t take long. I highly recommend ComponentArt’s controls… I’m using them on a few projects, and they are excellent.

So, I’ve already done the upgrade from 1.1 to 2.0 over at CycleBetter.Com, and it went off without a hitch.  CycleBetter (familiar name huh?) is my attempt at creating a thriving community of bloggers around cycling.  It’s going pretty well, and beginning to thrive I sense. In fact, I’ve added 4 new great blogs this week. 

Focused Feeds

Speaking of CycleBetter, it’s my second attempt at creating a focused feed blogging site. I’m totally hooked on this idea of focused feeds.  I think it’s been a big part of our success here at CodeBetter.  We try and stay focused, that way, you don’t have to sort through a bunch of junk just to get to the good stuff.  At CodeBetter we also try to take it a step further here and not only stay focused but also stay lean – we try not to post the same stuff that you see everywhere else, focused or not.

As far as I can tell, CycleBetter is one of the few, if not only, biking sites providing focused feeds for cycling blogs. There are plenty of sites that list cycling blogs, but not many providing focused feeds around cycling.  I’m hoping to branch out into other areas, but I’ve got to prove the concept first with CycleBetter.Com.   I’ll let you know how it goes…

-Brendan



Comments

Chris Wallace said:

<sarcasm>And it only failed validation with 51 errors. Woo hoo! </sarcasm>
# March 9, 2006 12:01 PM

Chris Wallace said:

On a serious note, why does it use an XHTML Frameset DTD? I thought most peple quit using frames?
# March 9, 2006 12:11 PM

Brendan Tompkins said:

Hrm. Not sure why it uses that DTD... I'm sure they have a reason? As far as I know, there's no actual framesets on the site... That is a good question, however.. .

"<sarcasm>And it only failed validation with 51 errors. Woo hoo! </sarcasm>"

I know that in theory, your pages should pass XHTML, validation, but let's compare that with some other sites...

CodeBetter.Com Fails validation with 147 errors...

(ugh... probably need to look into this.)

Google.Com Failed validation, 48 errors

(Hmmm. So only a little better than CS out of the box)

CNN.Com Failed validation, 75 errors

And, even trusty SlashDot.Org and www.sun.com both Failed validation, 8 errors...

Hrm.. Is this a big issue?
# March 9, 2006 1:04 PM

Chris Wallace said:

For most people, probably not. Is CS 2 using .NET 2? Since .NET 2 technically passes out of the box it means someone must've done a lot of horrid hand coding to get that many failures on a single page. Hopefully in the near future it will become a bigger issue.
# March 9, 2006 4:45 PM

Brendan Tompkins said:

My feeling is that until it actually breaks someones app or becomes unreadable in browser, most people aren't really going to care... We have XML feeds and Web Services, they have to be valid, cause we consume them with many different apps...but HTML?

Don't get me wrong, I do understand the importanance of conformity, and I agree, but people have been crying cassandra about this issue since 1996 and the <blink> tag, and I... well I just don't see it becoming a top priority for most people anytime soon.

By the way... http://uallas.com/blog/ <---- Failed Validation, 57 errors.. :) Has this caused any problems for you? :)

# March 9, 2006 5:04 PM

Brendan Tompkins said:

By the way, Jeffrey Palermo has some great posts about this issue on CodeBetter...

http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeffrey.palermo/search.aspx?q=XHTML&p=1
# March 9, 2006 5:10 PM

Chris Wallace said:

I know, my blog is the only part of my site that fails and only because I haven't taken the time to write my own engine and much like CS, dasBlog isn't compliant. It would seem the only mainstream engines that are compliant are those of the other side (php etc.).

Yeah, I follow Jeffrey's posts (I actually read the entire CodeBetter feed).
# March 10, 2006 7:37 AM

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About Brendan Tompkins

Brendan has been programming with .NET since the first public beta and is owner and operator of Port Technology Services, a consultancy company providing .NET application development services to the Maritime industry. In July, 2007, he was awarded the Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET. He's also a proud co-founder of failed .COM startup Intrinsigo, and has had a hand in the failure of numerous other businesses. He currently runs CodeBetter.Com and Devlicio.us, and lives in Norfolk, Virgina with his wife Tiara and son Ian.

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