The saga of the Office UI Bible continues (read part 3).

The blog “Life On The Wicked Stage: Act 2” by TabletPC MVP Warner Crocker gave me a “2006 Life On the Wicked Stage Inkblot Award” for “Best I Love Jensen Harris’s Blogging But I Just Have To Create A Table Of Contents So I Can Find What I Want”. Warner is one of the TabletPC MVPs behind GottaBeMobile.com.

It seems that my Office UI Bible post is very popular. First, Ed Bott blogged about it. Then Jensen Harris adopted my categorization of his blog as his official index. The post has until today been hit 3,390 times according to my website statistics, making it my second most popular blog post (the most popular blog post is my B2TR issues one with 12,725 hits). Add to those hits 879 views via RSS.

Today though, I got my by biggest surprise about the popularity of this post, when I got my mail. In the mail was the latest issue of eWeek (November 27, 2006. Vol. 23, No. 47). The cover, as you can see below (the black spot is where my address had been printed), announced prominently an Office 2007 review.

I went ahead and read it, and then came upon the first column about it: Jim Rapoza’s column titled “Office 2007 - nothing new” on page 46, which is interestingly titled “Office 2007 - Something New” in its web edition. If you are interested in the column, but can’t read it in the scan below, just read the online version.

I read the column, and then there was this box with WWWeb Resources. Take a look at the box for yourself:

I couldn’t believe my eyes. There, in a printed computer magazine, was a link to a blog post of mine! And better yet, it was listed before the link to the Office test drive!

That definitely made my day! Jim, thank you very much for that link.

P.S.: This blog has been quiet on the RibbonX front for a while. The reason is that I have been gearing up for the launch of my RibbonCustomizer add-in. I am happy to announce that its launch will be on Thursday coinciding with the Office 2007 launch. The Professional version will be available then for $29.99.

I have added forums to my website. Do you have a question about RibbonX? Pop into my forums and ask it.

The main purpose of my forums is to support the upcoming release of RibbonCustomizer. If you have a particular feature request, post it in the forums.

Now go to my forums and be the first one to post!

For other Office 2007 questions, please use the appropriate Microsoft community newsgroup.

As diagnosed correctly by FeedBurner, the problem of Outlook 2007 not being counted in the RSS subscription statistics lays with Outlook. Michael Affronti, the Outlook Program Manager responsible for the RSS feature, just announced that Outlook 2007 doesn’t and won’t report a custom user-agent string. That means, any service, not just FeedBurner, trying to interpret the data will only see requests from IE7 that look like someone is browsing a feed. Without a custom user-agent string, there is simply no way to differentiate real IE7 feed browsing from an Outlook 2007 feed subscription.

This is extremely unfortunate and with Outlook 2007 probably going to be adopted widely, means that RSS feed subscription statistics will be significantly lower than their real number. How much lower? I can only guess.

FeedBurner reported that I had 148 subscribers and 2445 hits from IE7 on Monday. It seems to me most likely that the majority of those IE7 hits are generated by Outlook 2007. After all, most people would not browse to my RSS feed, but rather browse to my website. Let’s be conservative though and assume that only 80% of the hits (=1956) are generated by Outlook 2007. I don’t know how often Outlook pulls my feed, but once every hour sounds reasonable. If I am very conservative again, I assume that a copy of Outlook pulling my feed is running 24 hrs. In that case, the 1956 hits represent 81.5 subscribers. Looking at my weekend drop though, I would say it is reasonable to assume that most people read my blog at work or at least during office hours. So maybe they don’t have Outlook running 24 hrs, but just 16 hrs. That would represent 122.25 subscribers.

I get to pick then between my total subscription number being 229 or 270 instead of the reported 148.

My post about the changes in Outlook 2007’s HTML rendering capabilities featured a section titled “Quick Links” on the top. It contained the two links you would want to have handy when you have already read the post and are using it as a reference.

Is that section a good idea? Should I include a Quick Links section in all posts (if appropriate)? Or should I just forget about it and not do it?

Let me know what you think. Post a comment