Site :: vbfeeds.com

vbfeeds.com was down on Sunday but it is back up and running fine

Serge Baranovsky — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 01:52:00 GMT

vbfeeds.com subscribers may have noticed the site was down for about 24 hours. Hopefully it wasn't much of inconvenience.

VB Feeds was running on SQL 2005 Beta 2 which expired in this month. I knew that's coming but as usual many things that required immediate attention pushed moving VB Feeds to another box with SQL 2005 RTM down the list.

It is done now - I moved the site on Monday night and it is running fine.

I apologize for the downtime.

C# Feeds launched!

Serge Baranovsky — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 18:19:00 GMT

Those of you who are subscribed to our VBFeeds have only seen one side of the coin ;-) Today the other side has become available - Steve Smith launched similar C# Feeds service:

Today CSharpFeeds officially goes live. This is a pet project of mine and Gregg Stark’s based on Serge’s VBFeeds.com site and its source code (thanks to Serge for letting me see the source!). VBFeeds is a great place to find just VB information from the top VB people, moderated so that it doesn’t include posts about going on vacation or other personal posts. C# Feeds seeks to do the exact same thing, but for C# content, rather than VB. If there’s a C# feed we should be pulling that we don’t have, let us know. We’ll be adding a suggest a feed mechanism fairly soon, though I’m not sure what that translates into in real time.

Oh yeah, and we updated all of Serge’s admin tools to use Atlas. Anonymous users won’t see any difference, but it totally speeds up the post moderation process. Very cool.

via Steve Smith

And, Steve, I wouldn't mind taking a peek at the Atlas admin piece ;-) I do the majority of the VBFeeds moderation on my Pocket PC phone and the mobile layout is most important for me, but a real life Atlas example would be cool to look at.

New VB related feeds added to VBFeeds.com

Serge Baranovsky — Sat, 06 May 2006 02:35:00 GMT

Haven't updated you on VBFeeds.com status in a while - my apologies.

The feeds were added recently into the aggregation list - Microsoft XML Team's Blog (they have regular posts about VB and LINQ) and Brian Beckman - great posts on VB9 and LINQ.

And just last night I added Geoff Appleby's Blog - Geoff is VB.NET MVP and a nice fella all around :) - there is plenty of VB and .NET stuff on his blog.

Hopefully this helps to keep you connected ;-)

vbfeeds.com RSS was broken ... and it's fixed now

Serge Baranovsky — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 01:48:00 GMT

vbfeeds.com RSS was broken for the last few days... Thanks to Richard Laniel for pointing that out. I was too busy in the last week and didn't have time to read my Bloglines.

What happened is there was one post that is over 90K and it turned the RSS feed over 200K - I fixed the feed by removing the offending post.

So, vbfeeds.com RSS is back and working fine ... for now :) And I added on my list to implement the feed/size validation.

vbfeeds.com is mobile-enabled now

Serge Baranovsky — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 03:44:00 GMT

How many times did I mention lately I love ASP.NET 2.0 and VB2005? Not enough. Yet one more time – I absolutely love Whidbey!

So, I decided to make vbfeeds.com mobile-enabled so visitors could browse it on their mobile device.

In the past I would have a choice of setting up a virtual directory with mobile-only scripts or parse the browser HTTP_USER_AGENT request header and search for “Windows CE“, “PPC“, “Pocket IE“ and such. I didn't fancy either of the options.

Here is where the new ASP.NET features come in handy - Request.Browser.IsMobileDevice and Master Pages. I basically added the following couple of lines in every ASPX page

    Protected Sub Page_PreInit(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs)
        If Request.Browser.IsMobileDevice Then
            MasterPageFile = "~/MasterPageMobile.master"
        Else
            MasterPageFile = "~/MasterPageFull.master"
        End If
    End Sub

The code above assigns master page depending on Request.Browser.IsMobileDevice value. That's it!

Just too darn simple - like many things in VB2005!

Now, if you navigate to any of the vbfeeds.com pages on a mobile device, it will be rendered using a smaller, mobile friendly master page.

The good thing is that I can now screen and approve the new web feed items right from my Pocket PC phone the very same minute they aggregated into the database!

If you don't have a mobile device to try vbfeeds.com on it, there is a QueryString parameter I added that switches vbfeeds.com to the mobile Master Page just like you were to browse the site from a mobile phone. Try it in your desktop browser - just add mobile=true to any page URL, for example, http://vbfeeds.com/?mobile=true or http://vbfeeds.com/post.aspx?id=680&mobile=true

Announcing new web site - vbfeeds.com

Serge Baranovsky — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 05:21:00 GMT

The idea of the new web site - vb:feeds - http://vbfeeds.com - was inspired by DelphiFeeds.com I stumbled upon last month.

So, I decided to build a web site that would syndicate select web feeds with Visual Basic/.NET related content. But I went further - all posts are screened for content and only the technical ones make it to http://vbfeeds.com. The approved content then is published on the site as well as exposed via a single web feed. Be sure you will not see on vb:feeds posts like my recent one.

The basic aggregation idea is not new at all, take .NET Weblog Archive for example. I subscribed to their feed over a year ago but unsubscribed a couple of weeks later as they collect hundreds of posts daily (impossible to read through) and the biggest problem is that many of those hundreds have very little to do with .NET.

In the past couple of weeks I shared the vb:feeds web site with vbCity Leaders and most owners of the blogs being syndicated at the site. And so far the feedback was very encouraging. Here are some comments:

Mike McIntyre: The best compliment I can give you is that I am starting to depend on this site.

Ged Mead: I like the idea .... even though it meant that I just spent another 30 minutes reading blogs that I didn't mean to ! :-}

Mark Dryden: In short, a terrific idea... Wading through a blogger's progress through a specific game, restaurant reviews and bigging up new gadget purchases generally leads to an unsubcribe from me - therefore, pure technical content is a BIG plus.

Jay Roxe: I think this is a fantastic resource and I'm glad to see that you're putting it together.

vb:feeds is the first of the projects that went live which I developed using ASP.NET 2.0, VB2005 and SQL2005 – I love how Whidbey is shaping up in the August CTP and RC1 – real pleasure to use it! I haven't had so much fun with Visual Studio since VB6 :)

Things to do - site search, grouping, tagging, rating posts and such.

What do you think about the idea in general? What do you like about it and what don't? What features you would like to see added? What are VB related feeds you know of that I may've missed?

Please post your feedback in this blog comments or on the vb:feeds support forum.

vb:feeds - http://vbfeeds.com