VS 2005's console toolwindow (the new default is to launch console applications inside of a VS window)

jaybaz on refactorings in Whidbey with specifics on signature changes and rename.

Automata :: for automatically generating multiple variations from an Adobe Illustrator document

The new debugging datatips in Visual Studio 2005 (much nicer than the yellow tooltips, but not quite intuitive).

Discussion on Eric Gunnerson's C# Compendium about possible future C# language features and scenarios.

Cyrus talks about how the C# Intellisense might handle errors and why the VS editor behaves differently for different languages.

Using instant messenging social networks software to identify a person who can answer questions on a topic

How Gmail changes your email usage patterns (and saves lots of needless effort)

imagemaps :: an “online geographic map of historical documents” built with Processing

Wired article on using geolocation to customize web sites

Open Source GIS Conference 2004 via /.

Cyrus, author of one of my favorite of the MSDN blogs, on the difficulties of organizing dozens of running applications.

Suggestions for New Kinja Features

Kinja is a weblog portal that displays your subscriptions in a single, reverse-chronological, easily scannable list. I use it constantly, and just them this list of suggestions (update: response received on 2004 June 12).

Thanks so much for taking the time to send some excellent suggestions and comments. I apologize for the delayed response. My comments are in-line.

I love Kinja; it's spared me countless hours of flipping between webpages and kept me from missing a great many posts to sites I wouldn't otherwise read. I've made Kinja my homepage on my browser at home (and maybe at work soon, too). That said, I have a long list of suggestions.

As a computer programmer and blogger, I made not be Kinja's target audience. I do, however, appreciate your site for the same qualities that appeal to a non-technical user: its clean interface and ease-of-use. So I trust that my suggestions are relevant. Here's the list.

Thank you. Even if I weren't developing Kinja, I'd be using it hourly.

RSS Feeds for Digests

This one seems like a no-brainer. Wouldn't it be great if I could subscribe to someone else's feed, rather than tracking down every one of their favorites? I could even read my own digest in another reader, though I doubt I'll find one with a better interface than Kinja.

We have this capability, but we're hoping to use advertising to support the ongoing cost of maintaining and developing Kinja. At the moment, we just can't afford to provide free digest syndication with no potential Kinja page-views. (I know we could syndicate links back to the Kinja post-excerpt instead of the original permalink, but what would be the point? All the "teaser" information is available in the feed, and a link back to Kinja would provide no additional information. Clearly the link needs to be to the original post.)

Multiple Digests per User

I know I can just create multiple accounts, but it's not as convenient. And I'd need multiple digests to support my next idea.

This is a feature that is often requested, and we have the infrastructure to support it; however, we haven't had the time or resources to rework the interface.

Clippings

A way to add individual posts to a digest. It would make it very easy to edit a custom feed, without the overhead of a blog (finding a host, choosing a layout, commenting). Combined with RSS feeds for digests, this would make Kinja a method for publishing content, not just consuming it.

This is an interesting idea, but not in the plan. Having spent quite a bit of time working to develop a weblog publishing tool (Blogger), I can tell you that it isn't a trivial undertaking.

Suggested Favorites, Digests, and Posts

Kinja makes it easy for me to read content on other sites. But sometimes I'd like to spend more time on your's. How about some ways to explore other feeds and digests? You might, for example, replace the "Your Favorites" listing -- what use are partial URLs of sites I already know about? -- with a list of suggested favorites based on my current subscriptions. A list of posts (related or not) could come from an algorithm or a human editor. And other digests could contain links to similar ones.

Were you listening in on our last development meeting?

A Page for Each Feed

Give each feed its own page. That'll make it easy to browse old posts, to see how well a feed imports into Kinja, and pick out posts to add to my clippings. Plus, it's a good spot for listing users who subscribe to the feed and for displaying other feeds that are related to it.

This would be helpful. We hope to support many "digest views" in the future.

Feed Directory

If this is really a weblog portal for the average web user, it needs to be easier to find digests to read. Hell, even guys writing their own Movable Type plugins wouldn't mind a good weblog directory.

I agree. We haven't done a good job with this, and hope to eventually provide a better digest directory.

More Prominent “Manage” Link

I miss the obvious "manage" link that used to appear right below the red "Your Digest". Now it's buried near or below the fold in a list of similar looking links. Please make it more prominent again.

We'll take a look at this when we revisit the UI design. The manage link was changed when we added the "your favorites" list.

Hide the Editor's Digests

I don't need to see your list of edited digests everytime I look at mine. If I wanted to read them, I would. I'd rather get an hand-picked selection of interesting posts or feeds.

Because we currently don't have another mechanism to "explore" weblogs, we thought browsing editor's digests would provide, at least some way, for users to find weblogs to add to their own digest (by clicking on the '+'). The display of the editor's digests on all pages may go away in the future (or users may have the option to hide them).

Management of Favorites

A few picky suggestions. There's an "Add a Favorite" box on nearly every page but the one to manage a digest. Why? Pending digests should appear above the current favorites so they're visible after subscribing to the feed. And now that the feed titles are more prominent than the URLs, why not use them to sort the list?

We'll keep this in mind when we revisit the manage-page design.

Choice of the Number of Posts per Page

I may read more feeds than most users, and this suggestions might put more stress on your servers, but I really want more stories on each page. It's tedious to click through the pages of older posts until I find spot where I left out last time I checked my digest.

As I mentioned earlier, we hope to make multiple "digest views" available.

More Feeds

There may not be much you can do about this, but I'd appreciate more feeds from mainstream publications. The New York Times recently released feeds for many of their sections, but their robots.txt file denies access to them to all but the YahooFeedSeeker. It's a frustrating limitation of Kinja (not shared by many other aggregators) that there are URLs which I can access myself but not subscribe to. What if you only fetched the content when I asked for my digest? Would that let you ignore the restrictions in robots.txt?

It was decided early on that Kinja would respect robots.txt. I've had content providers tell me that they appreciate Kinja's robots file support, and they feel that other aggregators sometimes abuse feeds. I don't understand why, say, Google's 'bot' should be subject to robots.txt (indexing content, storing a cached copy of the full content, etc.), but somehow a (hosted) weblog-aggregator's crawler shouldn't.

Other Content

I can understand why you didn't go with 37signals's three column layout, but the current design does leave a lot of blank space. I wouldn't mind filling it with a weather forecast, a Google search box, and a few bookmarks, and others might want sports scores. After all, Kinja's what I see when my browser launches. This could be a big project and perhaps too like a traditional portal, but it's worth considering.

I don't think "Kinja as a home-page" was one of the design considerations, but maybe it should have been! It's unlikely that we will add these portal-like features.

More Kinja News

Finally, more posting to the Kinja news blog (in the style of Oddblog) would mean I'd already know your plans and wouldn't need to send you a long list of ideas you've already had. A place for comments would be nice, too.

Also, I was planning to post this email to (at my blog). Do you mind if I share your response?

I don't mind. I hope they've been somewhat interesting.

-matt

Hortus in Urbe

So that's what the City Hall Rooftop Garden looks like. I pass City Hall on my way to work, but haven't ever been on the roof.

From a Metropolis magazine article about Mayor Daley's Green Crusade.