Finding new blog posts easier

I have been experimenting so if you’ve seen me on your Space without a comment, I was looking around. I have two solutions to finding new blogs that I want to share. One is to add your friends RSS Feed to www.my.live.com. Nice thing about My Live is you can see all your favorite blogs on one page!! I have found that only a few of you do not allow the RSS Feed but I will go through how to be sure it is on. The other is to sign up for Alerts. Both require the blog owner and visitors to set up the access. 

 

Owners this action allows allows your reader easy access to your Space updates, so please… pretty please… 

1.  Go to your Space and click on Customize

2.  Click on Modules

3.  Show the Visitors Tools – please leave it at the top someplace (mine is under the title and tagline)

4.  Save and you are done

 

RSS Feed

1.  First owners turn on the RSS Feed:

Go to:    Spaces – Options – General

Syndicate this space

Choose whether to syndicate your space.

Syndicate this space

Syndication url will be http://rosebayfl.spaces.live.com/feed.rss

If you syndicate your space, it can be read by news readers and aggregators and people who use Windows Live Alerts can choose to be notified when your space is updated.

2.  Go to the Space you want to see updates for

3.  Then add the feed to www.my.live.com one of two ways:

a. Click on Add to Live from the Visitors Tools

b. If the Visitors Tools is not showing — Under your sign in on the right top click Tools

Tools

• Send a private message
• Subscribe to RSS feed
• Tell a friend
• Add to My MSN
• Add to Live.com
• Add to Messenger
• Sign up for alerts

Help

Click Add to My Live

4.  Want to know who updated? Go to www.my.live.com From there you can see the past five blogs, hover over the “more” to get a snap shot of the blog entry or click on the title to go to blog. Of course you can click on the name and go to their Space. As I said, you can see all your favorite Spaces on one page – cool!!!

I’ll be sending private messages to those who have it turned off and ask if they would turn it on. Don’t be afraid to say no, I’ll still get there to read your blogs.

 

Alerts

This way really needs the cooperation of the blog owners by adding the Visitor Tools (instructions above) and I am asking everyone to add this to make life in Spaces much easier.

1. Click on the Alerts button

2. Decide where you want your updates to go – messenger and/or mail

  NOTE — If you are the owner click on Alert and be alerted about new comments!!

Ok  I know these instructions are cryptic and I would be happy to walk anyone through any of this. Send me an IM rosebay_fl@hotmail.com or email me (same address). I just know we can make this easier…

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
Turn and face the strange
(Ch-ch-Changes)
Don’t want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
Turn and face the strange
(Ch-ch-Changes)
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can’t trace time

 

OK so I know everyone is upset about the changes here on Spaces. I have found that I can’t get into blogs, post comments or see my comments (although I know where to find them). There are many things I don’t like about the new Spaces BUT we haven’t seen all the good yet. Please Please everyone take a day or two before abandoning Spaces. I have seen this before since I joined Spaces as a beta tester and each change took time but each change did make thing better.

 

We are a community and like all communities, there are crisises and a time to re-build.

I Believe in Miracles

Mouse_1.wmv

Good morning all,

I was looking around the internet and Stupid Videos when I found my all time favorite video. The link is up there at the top just in case you came in through the back door. This video was the first video I ever put here. For those who remember the dark ages, getting videos was not an easy task. This was before You Tube and many of the others. Now it sooo much easier.

Speaking of making things easier, how many of you have tried Live Writer? How many of you have written a blog just to watch it dissappear? Well Live Writer eliminates that problem. If you add pictures to your blogs, as most of us do, the pics upload without having to first add then to an album. It also has spell check. So if you haven’t tried it yet, do so and let me know what you think.

Speaking of miracles, my knee is improved this week. It may be due to not working this week therefore not swelling. I like to think it is because of all of you sending positive waves, through prayer and well wishes. I can actually bend my knee! Positive thoughts work, thank you all.

Speaking of music, I’m going to see the Doobie Brothers today (rain permitting). The annual Ribfest is today. I can’t wait to get some of that good food, elephant ears, cotton candy, lemonade, beer proceeds go to the children’s hospital so I will be making my contribution, and of course, ribs. Mmmmmmmmmmm

Have a good weekend all!

Clean your mouse

You should do this every few days.

More often if you spend a lot of time on computer!

I was shocked to see this works!

To recalibrate and clean your mouse, click and hold on the S.  Then drag the S toward the e.  If it doesn’t work, you might want to clean your mouse.

S top farting around and go do something constructive

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spaces, troubles and thanks

Spaces seems to be giving everyone a fit especially me. On Monday I did my usual post with a joke and a few pictures. Tuesday I noticed that the only hits I had were from search engines (why is everyone looking for dogs +bone?). I felt a little sad.  No one visited. So maybe I needed to change the video. I went to preview my Space and boom, shut down.  What? I opened IE again went to preview my Space and gone again. So then I was happy  to know I wasn’t being shunned and mad  at MSN. I took down the video, deleted my friends list, deleted the weathermodule, the horoscope module, each time checking my Space and every time, boom, gone. So where do we go when we have a problem? Well to Space Craft of course. Thankfully there was an entry that seemed to address my problem.

 August 16

Fixing IE crashes when visiting your Windows Live Space

Spaces PM Joe has written a great blog telling you how to fix IE crashes when visiting your Windows Live Space, to help those of you that reported experiencing this issue. 

 

Check out Joe’s step-by-step instructions here!

 

 

So then I went over to Joe’s to follow these directions:

This article is just a how to on how to fix the following problem:

 

When I try to view the main page (visitor mode) of my Windows Live Space in IE 6, IE crashes.

  OR

I can’t get to my Windows Live Space because Internet Explorer crashes when I try to access it.

 

This problem is typically caused by malformed HTML in one of the blog entries. Very complex web pages (like a Windows Live Space) that have a certain type of malformed HTML can cause IE 6 to get caught in a loop and crash. The HTML Filter in the Windows Live Spaces blog editor can be used to fix this problem as follows:

1. Go to http://spaces.live.com/ and click the Sign In link in the upper right hand corner.
2. Sign in with your Windows Live ID (formerly known as passport).
3. This should take you to the Author view of your space, and IE should not crash. (If IE does crash at this point you may have a different problem and may need more help. If this is the case drop me a line at joseph.bono@hotmail.com).
4. Click on the title for your Blog module to bring up the Editing Blog full page view.
5. Click on the title for the first blog entry, which will take you to the preview page for this blog entry.
6. Click the <HTML> link in the blog editor, then click the Publish entry button.
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 for each of your blog entries

These steps should fix this particular problem. If it doesn’t, please feel free to e-mail me at joseph.bono@hotmail.com.

 

Wow did that one take time. Lots of time as you can imagine. And I only did the last 5 entries. Still when I went to preview, boom, otta here. One of the comments gave me a glimmer of thought. So here is what I did to fix it.

I opened my last entry in the html mode, copied the code and pasted it into a text editor. I use Word but Notepad works too. I removed all the formatting code. Copied the text again then pasted it back into the entry in the html mode. It worked like a charm!

Example of too much garbage in the code:

                          <font face="Arial Black, Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif" color="#ff0000">

                          <span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: ‘Courier New’">

                          There was a preacher whose wife was expecting a baby

                          so he went before the</span></font><p>

                          <font face="Arial Black, Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif" color="#ff0000">

                          <span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: ‘Courier New’">

                          congregation and asked for a raise. After much

                          discussion they passed a rule</span></font></p>

                          <p>

                          <font face="Arial Black, Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif" color="#ff0000">

                          <span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: ‘Courier New’">

                          that whenever the preacher’s family expanded, so would

                          his paycheck.</span></font></p>

                          <p>

 How it looks after clean up:

<div>

There was a preacher whose wife was expecting a baby so he went before the congregation and asked for a raise. After much  discussion they passed a rule that whenever the preacher’s family expanded, so would his paycheck.

I hope this helps anyone that is crashing. I want to thank everyone for coming back and letting me know that you were here. From now on I will faithfully clean up my code before publishing. Oh and the joke, you would need to go to see Lee but his Space is not loading very well. If you need help with this, feel free to email me the code and I will do all I can to help.

Thanks again to everyone. Now I feel loved.

Going Live!

So here we go… MSN is going Live, Live Mail, Live Spaces, Live Favorites. Most of it is good although still in Beta. So this morning I started up the ole computer and completed the install of the Live Toolbar. Now I am getting all kinds of error messages. I’ve captured a few. Let me know if anyone else is getting the same errors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 DeWitt – Help!

Live Spaces

 

Looks like it will have a nice smooth interface. Check it out.

From Space Craft:

 

Windows Live Spaces is coming!

Hey Spaces fans,   Windows Live Spaces is arriving soon! Not only will your Space adopt the cool new Windows Live look & feel, but you will also be able to add new and exciting functionality to your space.  With the addition of the Friends Module, you can create a place to hang out with your friends.    The Friends Explorer, which will be integrated with and accessible through Windows Live Messenger, will enable you and your friends to explore others and create new friendships.   You’ll notice some changes we’ve made to the header, including the replacement of the current text ad links with banner ads across the top.  Of course, as always, if you prefer to see no ads at all in your space, remember you always have the option to switch them off as a subscriber.    In addition, your title and tagline will no longer be limited to the Spaces header.  Instead, you can choose to display the title and tagline of your space as a module and have it appear wherever you want it to in your space.  Removing the title from the header means you have more freedom and control over things like your space title and navigation to stuff in your space. Instead of always being stuck at the top, you can place them wherever you want.   The introduction of breadcrumbing and an optional new navigation module will enable you and your visitors to easily navigate through your space.   We are also going to offer many new ways to express yourself and customize your space.    You’ll be able to add mini-applications called Windows Live Gadgets developed by the community for the community.   Can’t find headlines, games, or other gadgets that reflect YOUR personality?   Build your own gadget or bribe a techie friend to do it for you!   Of course with all this great stuff, we also have to make some changes to our URL structure.  As Greg Phipps blogged about last month, your URL will be changing one final time with the switchover to Windows Live Spaces.  Don’t worry though, we are working hard to make this as seamless as possible for you and the visitors to your space.   Here’s a glimpse of what the new Windows Live Spaces will look like:   * Note text & UI  may change.

Spaces changes

Well it looks as though Spaces has made the URL change. The photo albums are different. When you edit your Space, you can use this list to re-order your albums: Just click on the up or down arrow that displays when you hover your mouse over the album title in the list box.

Hmm what else? Did you know if you use messenger there is a setting that allows your contact card to connect to your Space.

 

Contact Card Settings

Do you want information from your space to appear on your contact card or cause a gleam icon to appear wherever someone sees you? Click to check or uncheck the box below and then click Save.

Information from my MSN space should appear on my contact card or cause others to see a gleam next to me.

Yes folks, I want to see your "gleam"  next to your name when I open messenger. So anyone find anything else interesting? Let me know.

 

Another change, the new Spaces module is now a map. How cool is that?

 

Check out the new modules. I have added the weather, quote for the day and horoscopes to name a few. 

 

Thank you Whispering Storm for the gift of gif. Everyone enjoy the rest of the week. 

 

Spaces Update – Oh Sh**

 

URL Changes

All MSN Spaces Users: Please note that your MSN Space’s URL will change on June 5, 2006. As part of investments in the improvement of MSN Spaces, it we will be migrating all of the URLs from http://spaces.msn.com/<NAME> to http://<NAME>.spaces.msn.com. (For instance, instead of http://spaces.msn.com/thespacecraft/ you will now see http://thespacecraft.spaces.msn.com.) On and after June 5th, all viewers and users going to the "old" URL will be automatically redirected to the new URL. In addition, your MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger buddies will also be automatically directed to the new URL when they click on your contact card to view your Space. We want to assure you that all of your data and information will remain intact, and we apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause. Sincerely, The MSN Spaces Team

 

May 25

More info on the URL Changes

Everyone thank you so much for your feedback, because of the comments we have read in The Spacecraft Greg Phipps one of our rock star Spaces Program Managers had this to say!      “Spaces has grown very quickly into one of the Web’s mega services. So quickly in fact that we just passed the 100MM user mark and have had to do some architectural changes to ensure that Spaces can be deployed in multiple data centers. We needed to deliver a system that allows for Spaces to be distributed across multiple data centers without requiring a URL that included the data center name. How unkewl would that be? Can you imagine telling your friends and family that the URL to your space was http://cluster25.dc1.spaces.msn.com/gphipps?   So we have developed a DNS (Domain Name System) based solution that allows us to redirect requests to the right data center and allows us to keep a better looking URL. Moving the Space name into the domain name is a requirement of that.   We also heard the pain we created for our users with the URL change made in our release in January and to help mitigate this upcoming name change we have worked with the following companies to proactively address the associated ranking issues:   Technorati Weblogs Feedster PubSub.com Bloglines Ask.com   In addition, we have dialogues with the following search engine companies   Live Search Yahoo Google   I can’t promise that this will be a completely seamless transition; but rest assured we are working hard to make this as seamless as possible.   Doing the rearchitecture work and making the move to Live Spaces was not possible for a number of technical reasons. This is why we can’t move straight to the spaces.live.com name. However, we believe that when we do move to Live Spaces that will be the last time we have to change the URL. This really isn’t something we decided to do lightly. We have had to make a ton of tradeoffs from both a technical perspective and the impact to our users.”

Email Your Blog

I have found that I can email my blog entry. When I do so it sits as a draft entry (that’s the way I set it up) until I publish it. So you say, "Big deal." Well look at painted hands entry. I emailed it to my blog and all the pictures were attached, no uploading, saving to on-line file host. I made a few edits and published.

 

So where do you set it up? Under settings there is an option for email publishing. You must email to your blog from one address only. So now when I get emails with pictures, I forward to Hotmail then on to the blog.

 

Blog on fellow Spacees.