MSN Spaces has officially moved out of b3ta (even though it still says b3ta in the banner space)! Mike Torres has the run down of whats new at his blog.

New features include new themes and 30MB of storage for photos. My favorite new feature which Mike hasn't mentioned is the inclusion of RSS views in the page statistics section. Top stuff!

See:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/mike/Blog/cns!1pG4qKNdtRA5Nl-UhvZI_1rQ!1470.entry

http://spaces.msn.com/members/mike/Blog/cns!1pG4qKNdtRA5Nl-UhvZI_1rQ!1387.entry

http://spaces.msn.com/members/mike/Blog/cns!1pG4qKNdtRA5Nl-UhvZI_1rQ!1386.entry

See the orange RSS button at the button of my blog? Every space has one now. I noticed this last night. Its seems like the tech standards people have won over the user interface guys on the Space team. Most other blogs, and other sites that offer an RSS feed, have such a button. +1 points for Spaces.

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RSS button mayhem

It took 4 months of daily deliberation and two fist fights in the cafeteria right next to where the butterflies were standing, but we finally caved. We now have an RSS button on the page. If you look hard, you just might find it!

(OK, so that is a total lie. It took 6 minutes, not 4 months. And no one lost any teeth. But most of the time people think Microsoft is this place full of people that "don't get it", so I figured I would play along for a minute)

We also released a bunch of little fixes today (primarily under the hood) - hopefully they will continue to improve the overall experience on MSN Spaces.

Oh, and we have a favicon now too. Not mind-blowing by any means, but it makes your space look cooler when someone is reading it in an aggregator, or in a browser that supports it in the address bar (like Safari, which I am using right now.) OK, time to get some sleep.

I promised something like this some time ago, but here it is. Spell It! - Spell checked posting for MSN Spaces.

This requires you to be logged into your MSN Space before posting.

This is a basic release to prove the concept. There are some limitations to the interface it uses to post to MSN Spaces which I am trying to get to the bottom of. Notably, it quotes everything you submit .

Hurrah! Scott's back from his travels. However the Spaces team have been getting on fine without him . Theres been software updates to the MSN Spaces engine with a couple of front end enhancements. If you click "Preview My Space", you can get back to edit mode by clicking the new "Customize" button that appears in its place. Nice feature, but the button doesn't always appear when your logged in. Its only there after you've clicked the "Preview My Space" button. There are other fixes, but we can't see them. Getting better guys and girls.

He also gives us another browser button to make MSN Spaces easier to use. This ones for the FireFox crowd.

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FEdit! FireFox Helper Button
I'm back! with a new little tirck for you FireFox users out there. I will try and post a few pictures of my vacation by the end of the week.

For non-IE users, we do not provide a rich text editor (before you ask, this is on our feature request list). Instead, you get a simple text input box that takes raw HTML. While HTML is powerful, it has a side-effect of making multiple paragraph entries a little more difficult. Since we are interpreting your entry as HTML, all your simple line breaks are collapsed causing your entry to display on a single line. If you are quickly typing an entry most likely this is not what you desired. The correct way to create a line break is to type the proper HTML. This can be accomplished via the <p> element surrounding your paragraph or by using a <br> element.

As you may have noticed if you read my blog, there is almost always a way to provide a quick solution within the browser. Enter the FEdit! (click here to get it) toolbar button for FireFox users . Now, when you are finished typing your entry, simply use this toolbar button to automatically embed BR tags for all your line breaks. Click the button multiple times to generate multiple line breaks.

As a simple test, this entry was created using the FEdit! button in FireFox.

NOTE - This button may work in Opera and Safari. I have not had a chance to test it there.

I've tried a couple of different online syntax highlighters to pretty-print code snippets I post on this Blog. Thats why all my posted code looks slightly different.

A lot of them create HTML which is overly complex for MSN Spaces and the engine strips out all the formatting.

The previous post was formatted by GeSHi - The Generic Syntax Highlighter. It produces MSN Spaces friendly HTML and supports lots of languages. Simply copy and paste the formatted output into the Edit Blog Entry text editor. I like it and will most likely use it for future posts with code snippets in.

Mike Torres responds to some assumptions made about MSN Spaces made in a recent post. It seems the MSN team are rapidly counter-claiming any assumptions made regarding censorship on MSN Spaces.

Who Owns My Blog Content?

An interesting discussion has cropped up around the ownership of content you post to your Space.  Specifically, a few people have dissected the legal language in our Terms of Use, and interpreted it as saying that we somehow own your creative work.

That is not the case at all.  You own the content you post.  Period.

I’m not a lawyer, but we have one of those guys down the hall.  He says that the wording in the TOU is all about granting us the right to post your content and share it out on MSN.  Since you own it, we need that right to actually draw it on the screen. 

Hope that clears this up.  We’re looking at make changes to the wording of our TOU so it’s less confusing.

Ryan, a Development Lead at the MSN Spaces team, posts about bugs and gives some tentative timescales regarding the next release of MSN Spaces. Watch his blog for temporary workarounds on the most common problems.

Theres been some excitement in the MSN Spaces regarding a high profile blog called Red Couche. Robert Scoble and Shel Israel had been planning to write a book on corporate blogging, discussed and authored entirely through blogs in the public eye. Well, two days later Scoble decided he didn't want to use spaces after all. His reasons:

We need a place where we both can sign in and post. A team blog. Something like .TEXT would be great for us. That's another option. But I wanted to learn TypePad first. Learning all the tools is very important to our book as well. I think we'll need a chapter on the "how" of blogging and collaborating. So, we'll need to authoritatively write about a variety of tools, not just Microsoft's.

Finally, I know the MSN Spaces team is working on a whole raft of things. I'm actually suprised at how much I like their service. It's limiting in a lot of ways, but it really is nice in a whole lot of other ways.

They specifically designed it for personal publishing and ignored the "professional" uses of blogging. Will that change in version 2.0? I hope so, but that's for the team to decide after doing market research and all that.

That's kinda pissed on the MSN party a bit!

A few days ago I posted how to search MSN Spaces if the search box did not appear. I asked Mike Torres why the box did not appear for me and he said the UK market asked for it to be turned off. If you are in the UK and want to see the search box, you'll have to change your browser language to en-us. In IE you can do this via Tools->Internet Options->Languages.

The MSN Space home page has a Search Spaces box. Most of you won't see it because you need a magic feature finding browser like I've got ;)

If you don't see the box, you can still search Spaces. Goto http://beta.search.msn.com and make sure you enter site:spaces.msn.com as part of your query. This is exactly what the search box does for you anyway. I guess that its disabled because Spaces aren't getting indexed very fast. A search for my Space returns nothing :(

I discovered a little hack to enhance the MSN Space rich text editor (RTE). Some guys at Microsoft liked it and gave me the nod. Thanks guys!

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Edit It! Enhanced Blog Editing Experiment...

First, I must say some of our user's are way too smart . I must give credit for this trick to Phil Harvey who has his own .NET Blog.

The rich text editor (or RTE for short), is a component (I wrote 5 years ago!) currently used by Hotmail, MSN Groups, and now Spaces for posting rich content. It was designed with a configurable toolbar for turning on and off different formatting options. Well, as Phil found out and sent us a note, you can execute Javascript on the address bar against the current page. He was able to turn back "on" some of the formatting commands that were disabled. (I am not going to try and explain why certain commands have been turned off).

So, rather than have Phil keep this a secret, I turned his simple trick into a new "Edit It" toolbar button (click here to get it). Consider this button completely unsupported and experimental (it may stop working at any time). When adding a blog entry, clicking this button will reenable a couple of the toolbar options and turn on a checkbox where you can edit your raw HTML. Before you get overly excited, we support a very small subset of HTML so there are no guarantees that the HTML you type (or generated by these new buttons) will render.

Please enjoy this toolbar button and keep the feedback coming - we are listening!
(and don't forget to check out the Blog It! toolbar button I posted earlier)

Mike is a developer on the MSN Space team. He has his own Space where he blogs various technical details of the new MSN Spaces. A lot of the points he raises are things that I questioned when I first started using the system.

Its nice to know that I'm not alone when it comes to my opinions on the various technical inadequacies of the system. For example why is there not a red RSS button even though there is an RSS feed available for public spaces? This is fast becoming a web standard. MSN Spaces are running via ASP.Net, so why doesn't Microsoft provide some form of web services to manage my Space?

For technical answers visit http://spaces.msn.com/members/mike/.

Robert Scoble also has a good roundup of MSN Space opinions at http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/12/02.html#a8789.