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

Thanks to the great help by Rick Klau, VP, Publisher Services, FeedBurner, the problem I raised earlier today in a blog post has been identified.

According to a post by the Microsoft RSS team, Outlook 2007/IE7 should identify themselves in the HTTP request of an RSS feed as “Windows-RSS-Platform/1.0″ when requesting subscribed feeds. Rick determined though that Outlook 2007 B2TR identifies itself as “Mozilla/4.0″, which is the user-agent string used by IE7 when a feed is just browsed to. Therefore all subscriptions from Outlook 2007 didn’t get counted, but rather recorded as hits by a webbrowser. I will keep you updated.

Update

As most of you probably know, Outlook 2007 and IE7 have built-in RSS support. In fact, they use the same RSS engine. If you want to know more about Outlook’s RSS support, then check out the blog of the Outlook program manager for this feature.

If you provide an RSS feed for your blog, then there is a good chance that you use FeedBurner. FeedBurner is a great tool to get accurate statistics on how many subscribers an RSS feed has for example. Unfortunately, FeedBurner doesn’t count any subscriptions from Outlook 2007 or IE7. It looks like FeedBurner just doesn’t know that Outlook 2007/IE7 can be real RSS readers. This is a pretty annoying problem for me, as I would assume that a large number of you are subscribing to my blog via Outlook 2007.

With over 3.5 million downloads of Office 2007 and I don’t know how many of IE7 RC1 and Vista, this is not just a minor issue. Hence, if you use FeedBurner, your subscription number might be too low as well. Let’s hope that they recognize this problem and fix it soon.

1. Update

2. Update

This morning, I became a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Microsoft Office OneNote. If you have no idea what an MVP is, take a look at the MVP website. You can also take a look at my MVP Profile.

With B2TR out of the door, Office 2007 is at a point where any kind of documentation should be stable and applicable to the final product. B2TR however brought one final revision of the Ribbon UI and RibbonX. Due to that, all examples, screenshots and add-ins posted on my add-in are outdated. I took the opportunity and started an overhaul of my website:

1. The normal and comment RSS feeds are now redirected through FeedBurner. This will allow me to finally know how many of you are subscribing to my blog via RSS.
2. I placed RSS icons in prominent spots across my page in the hope that this will get me more subscribers. The links to the RSS feeds were buried at the bottom of my page previously.
3. If you would like to subscribe to my blog via email, you can do this now too.
4. I submitted my blog to Technorati.
5. I reduced the number of blog posts that appear on one page, as the pages got rather crowded and long.
6. My B2TR issues blog post is very popular. To make sure everyone visiting my website can easily find it, there is now a link to it on the top of my page. This link will stay there until RTM.
7. The sidebar has been slightly changed as well. I reduced the number of blog categories and blog months shown there to make it less crowded. In addition, I introduced two sub-points for Office 2007 and highlighted the Office 2007 items
8. There are a number of new and changed pages that have basically no content on them right now (Customize Office 2007, RibbonX, OneNote 2007, Office 2007).
9. I fixed a number of CSS-related issues. The page should now render fine and almost the same way in IE6, IE7, Firefox and Opera. Thanks a lot to FrontPage MVPs Cheryl Wise and Murray Summers, as well as Windsun for their fantastic help (gross understatement, they told me what to do, I followed their instructions) with this in the Expression Web MS newsgroup.

What can you expect from this website and blog going forward?

1. I started my blog to talk about the Office 2007 UI and customizing it. Over time, it ended up becoming a mix of topics, which it will continue to be. Some will be more personal in nature (such as my friend’s cool wireless device or my hard drive upgrade story). Some will be news (such as the release of B2TR). Some will talk about Office 2007 in general. Some will talk about OneNote 2007 specifically. And last, but not least, some will be about customizing Office 2007 and RibbonX.
2. If you are new to customizing Office 2007 and RibbonX, my blog is not the best guide to learning it. The RibbonX posts are not really linear in order, nor is it easy to find the posts that you should start reading with. If you are using this blog as a reference, then it is equally hard to find your away around. Posting the content as a blog though makes it easy for me to write the content (as I can do that in OneNote) and it makes it easier for you to not miss anything new. In order to improve the navigation of previous posts though, the Customize Office 2007 page will become the starting point for anyone interested in the topic. I will provide links to all blog posts related to that topic on that page. Everything RibbonX will be linked to from the RibbonX page. So whether you are looking for a getting started guide on RibbonX, a RibbonX reference or just a list of add-ins you can use to customize Office 2007, that section of my website will get you to what you are looking for quickly. I hope this new organization structure will make your life easier on my website.
3. Over the coming weeks, I will repost all relevant customization blog posts with updated content, examples and B2TR screenshots taken under Vista. As I repost them, I’ll integrate them into the new organization structure. I will also make sure that all posts are fully accessible. Some of my earlier posts are not, as alternate titles for images are missing.
4. I am fairly active in the Microsoft community newsgroups. A side effect of that is that I often end up giving the same answer multiple times. From now on, whenever I think that a particular answer I gave would be helpful for a lot of people, I’ll convert it into a blog post and integrate it into the relevant Office 2007 page on my site.
5. I love OneNote. Hence I’ll be featuring OneNote specific posts on my blog going forward.

Let me know what you think all of this by commenting on this post. Also, let me know if there is any specific content you’d like me to blog about in the future.