September 2006 - Posts

Writing Blogs and RSS Readers
29 September 06 11:22 | Simon Phillips | with no comments

I was having a chat with a couple of people last night after the TechNet/MSDN event last night and the discussion for a short time moved to Blogging and RSS Readers etc...

Blogging Tool

To write blogs I'm trying out Microsoft Live Writer. I've heard that a lot of features have been borrowed from other writers.

Firstly Live Writer can talk to many of the popular blog servers, including Community Server which we run the NIMTUG site on. You can setup multiple WebLog accounts and publish articles separately to each of the accounts.

With my own blog, once I've setup my account Live Writer downloaded the style sheets that I use and I am give a editable view of what my post will look like.

It also allows me to open old posts from my blog and edit them.

Live Writer is starting to build a sizable community behind it creating all sort of plugins e.g. format code , flickr image link

RSS Reader

I've also installed the Microsoft Live Toolbar mainly to get the tab browser and the integration with desktop search.

One of the featured featured toolbars button is Onfolio. Onfolio is sort of a RSS reader with knobs on!!! and is now my RSS manager of choice.

 

 

You can use Onfolio as a desktop application or as a IE addin. On the left hand side you have a list of all of your feeds.

Clicking on the feed or folder give you a list of all the posts and a 'newspaper' is generated in IE which you can then read though. One of the great features is that you can add and post from any feed to a collection, so you can save those important posts off to a separate storage area. so you can find them again easily.

One of the things that I would like to see is the support for comments. Give it a try!!

Filed under: ,
Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh
29 September 06 09:49 | Simon Phillips | with no comments

I've been waiting for the update to Office 2007 Beta 2 for a while now. I've been experiencing a number of application freezes which the Office diag tools said would be fixed in the upcoming update.

So every couple of days I've been checking the Windows Update site, but nothing came through.

I did a bit of a digging around the Microsoft site and came across the Office 2007 download page.

Microsoft have released a update in the form of a Technical Refresh for the Beta 2 products.

The main update, which updates Access, Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, InfoPath, OneNote, Publisher comes in at 494MB. There are separate downloads for Viso, Project and SharePoint Designer

One of the first things you notice after the long install time is that the program icons have all changed.

 

In all, though I've only been using it for a couple of days the programs seam much more stable and performance (especially when starting the programs) has been increased.

Filed under:
Service is now restored!
27 September 06 04:50 | Simon Phillips | with no comments

For thoughs who did notice we were off the air for a while end of last week, this was due to a duff power supply.

This Blog

Applications / Addons

Irish Community

Microsoft Ireland Blogs

My Articles

Syndication