TechEd 2012 Orlando Blogger Hub
We are proud to announce today that Geekswithblogs.net will be at Microsoft TechEd 2012 in Orlando, hosting the Blogger Hub for the event. This area in the Expo Hall will be dedicated to blogging.
- If you need a spot to gather your thoughts, grab some power, and write a blog post, we will have it.
- If you need to talk with a veteran blogger to help you gather ideas for your blog, information on how to get started, or how to find your blog’s voice, swing by and we will be ready to help.
- If you would like to interview a TechEd influencers or speakers for some quality content for your blog, we will have a schedule ready for you.
- And if you just need a place to hang out with other bloggers (and even play a few backyard games), come on by.
As the event gets closer, we will publish more information about setup, hours, and what to expect. If you are planning to attend, let us know.
One more thing….Announcing the Virtual Blogger Hub
We know not everyone can make it to TechEd and most of us who will be there will be blogging about the event, speakers, sessions, keynotes, parties, etc to let the rest of the world know what is going on. This year, we will be offering a site as part of the Blogger Hub called the Virtual Blogger Hub. This is where you can go to get content specific to TechEd 2012 Orlando. We invite you to visit the site and signup if you are a blogger who will be at TechEd or signup if you would like to participate in rating the content and building your own feed based on the categories you like.
Here is some more information about the site:
The Virtual Blogger Hub is an aggregated community of bloggers who are attending the TechEd North America event in Orlando this year. The content is aggregated by a team of bloggers from the site Geekswithblogs.net, but not all blogs are equal. We need you to let everyone your opinion one what content is relevant by using the rating buttons next to each post. If you have reviewed a post, make your voice heard and give it a rating. For more information, visit the About page.
Keep you eyes on this blog to find out more about the event, we will have some really exciting announcements over the next month. We don’t want to let everything out of the bag at once.
http://virtualbloggerhub.com
John and I will be making a visit to the UK in March for a week and we are very excited. If we have any London based bloggers or readers, please let us know if you would be up for a gathering while we are there. We have a few meetings during the days, but will be around the area from the 13th to the 18th of March.
Today we launched a new feature on Geekswithblogs.net to make it easier to share your posts with short URLs. The domain we are using is wblo.gs and you can share individual post or you can share you main blog page through the shortened URLs. To share your blog URL, use your blog application name like this:
If you would like to share a post using a short URL, you can find the URL in two places. The first is on the post itself at the end of the post next to the “Share This Post” links.
The second location is on the admin page where you edit your post. You will see it at the top next to the traditional link.
The “Share This Link” buttons have been updated to use the new short URLs to help save characters in your Twitter posts.
Well let us know if you have questions or see any issues while using the short URLs.
Just a few months after the launch of the new total site spam tools, I have some very good early results. Right now about 45% of all feedback left on the site has been flagged as spam by the service. That is a lot of spam!
The service is not perfect and quite a bit of spam still gets through, but I am very happy with the tool thus far and I wanted to share the results with you all. If you have further suggestions on how we could make Geekswithblogs.net better, please feel free to leave feedback on our UserVoice site.
We are really getting tired of spam. They get past the captcha and keep posting. We have decided to pay for an Akismet account for Geekswithblogs.net globally and have integrated it into the system. We hope this will take spam down by 50%. My hope is you will see a dramatic decrease in spam and we hope to continue to build the system further in our fix to end minimize the spam on Geekswithblogs.net. I will also be going through the old feedback and running it against the Akismet system to see what should be labeled as spam. Akismet is not perfect and it still lets a lot of posts through, but it definitely helps!
Over the past few months we have been tweaking the usability of the Geekswithblogs.net Admin Tool for editing posts. We definitely suggest using Windows Live Writer for publishing you blogs due to the awesome plugins and support of image uploads, we understand the need for a non-Windows editor for posts or updates. One of the bugs submitted to us in the usage of our text editor was reformatting of posts when you publish from WLW and then make changes from the admin tool. The tool was eating up all that good formatting and making the post ugly. Well we fixed the bug and now it should keep the nice editing from WLW. The example plugin I have used to ensure the good formatting is “Code Snippet” for WLW, which is totally awesome.
Sample Code:
private void SetCommentControls()
{
if (!Config.CurrentBlog.CommentsEnabled)
{
chkComments.Enabled = false;
chkCommentsClosed.Enabled = false;
}
}
If you see any other bugs on Geekswithblogs.net, please submit them to support@geekswithblogs.com
Thanks,
@StaffOfGeeks
Over the past few weeks we have been cleaning up the skins to support most modern browsers and monitor resolutions. This will cause your content area to have more space and support larger images. If you see any problems, please email us at support@geekswithblogs.com and we will get back to you ASAP.
We have also added some changes to the “Share Link” feature to make it a little cleaner and support for Facebook, Twitter, and Technorati. We will add G+ once they support the ability to publish from a link without their plugin. It is hard to fit the plugin into all the skins.
If you would like us to make another modification to the system, please let us know as well. We are always open to suggestions. We really want to bring the homepage into the 21st century as well as publish some video tutorials for new bloggers and members.
After reviewing some of the feedback from our bloggers we added a couple new features to Geekswithblogs.net and there are still more to come. Here is a list of the features we added.
- Fixed the Twitter parser to better support URLs and Hash Tags
- Added some hooks behind the scenes to tags posts with common keywords automatically
- Added Facebook likes and Tweets to the bottom of every post
- Cleaned up a few skins
- Images on the main page for bloggers who use Gravatar or Twitter integration
- Random bug fixes based on Log
We are definitely working to make Geekswithblogs.net faster and better. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to share them with the team. On a side note, if that suggestion is move to WordPress, I will reply to you with stop writing ASP.NET for your day job and move to PHP. That request is the equivalent in my eyes. If we have enough bloggers leave the Microsoft .NET Platform for their main source of income, we might consider it.
It looks like the MVP renewals went out over the weekend and we want to congratulate all the renewed and new MVPs for this quarter. If you are new, renews, or removed from the MVP program and are a Geekswithblogs.net blogger, please let us know @StaffOfGeeks and we will update our system accordingly. Congrats again!
Technorati Tags:
MVP,
Geekswithblogs
“Utt ohh, someone’s got their frowny face on”
Yesterday we were part of the group of Internet sites that were down for a few hours due to a DoS attack from Saudi Arabia. The site should be up and running just fine again and we apologize for the outage.
James Hare and Jeff Julian are in the Tuesday video, we will publish it when it is on YouTube. Go Geekswithblogs!
John walks you through the Blogger Hub at TechEd 2011 Atlanta. If you are here, you should swing by.
John Alexander and I made it to Atlanta just in time today to get to the Georgia World Congress Center and see the Blogger Hub. Wow, this is a huge area we have to spread the news about Geekswithblogs.net and blogging about IT related topics. Here is a little of what we have in store for you if you are here at #MSTechEd.
- Reserved Seating for Influential Bloggers (If you don’t have a seat, talk to us about how you might be able to next year).
- Two Conference Room Tables dedicated to blogging by Attendees
- Couches where you can talk to other bloggers and get ideas on how to make your blog better
- Whiteboards for telling others about your blog
- Interview Stations for you to interview key folks who are at Tech-Ed
- Hanging out with @StaffOfGeeks!
Tomorrow we finish up setting up the place, but keep your eye out on this blog and @StaffOfGeeks to find out what is going on at Tech-Ed 2011 Atlanta!
Next week is a huge week for us at @StaffOfGeeks. We will be at what we think is the best tech conference of the year, Microsoft TechEd. John and I have been going to this event for years and now we have the honor of running the Blogger Hub (formerly the Blogger Lounge) to help generate some buzz around the event, sessions, and experience. So if you are attending, how do you find us? To the cloud….just kidding.
We will be in Atlanta!
Then we will be at the Georgia World Congress Center:
Then we will be in Build B on the First Floor:
Then we will be in the Connect Zone section of the Expo Hall:
Finally, we will be in the TechEd Blogger Hub!
If you can’t find us from these maps, ping us @StaffOfGeeks and we will help you get to the Blogger Hub from there!
See you all next week!