Monthly Archives: July 2010

Goals For crestind.com

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Now that I’m blogging on crestind.com, I need to set some goals. It’s a clean slate. If all goes well, the following will occur.

  • Posts will be well thought out, fluid and thorough rather than disjointed and messy.
  • Posts will be free of grammatical errors. I will still capitalize all articles in titles despite this being incorrect because the rule is too complex, and I can’t be bothered to memorize that.
  • I will stop using cheap intensifiers like “very”, “quite” and “rather”.
  • Posts will be (allegedly) insightful and substantial to some extent to prevent the blog from degenerating into another awful activity feed.

I will be revising all the old posts. While the authenticity of the moment is lost, I can’t have incoherent messes like that on this blog, especially when it has its own domain. Some revision of history is necessary.

As for the export, everything went smoothly except for some comments that didn’t transfer over properly.

Windows Live Spaces Export

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After almost 3 years of blogging on Windows Live Spaces, none of the nagging problems with the service have been resolved. While other platforms such as Blogger and WordPress have continuously improved, Spaces has not received any significant updates since its inception. Due to the service’s decline, I have ported my Windows Live Space to this website.

Windows Live Spaces has not always been the outdated service it is today. When it was originally released back in 2004, it had a competitive feature set. As a cornerstone of Windows Live, Spaces, rather than the activity feed, served as a user’s profile. Several years of inattention later, Spaces is nonfunctional in comparison to other platforms.

Following the Windows Live Wave 4 reveal, even the most dedicated Windows Live users have expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of updates to Spaces. Spaces is plagued with comment and private messaging spam. Rather than integrating a spam filter in the latest round of Wave refreshes, the Windows Live team decided to cut corners and limit the maximum comment length instead, effectively discouraging commenting. They were clearly aware of the PM spam problem, and now users who are not networked with somebody cannot sent that individual a PM. How they failed to see that the obvious alternative tactic of friend request spamming would immediately be employed is amusing. Needless to say, the addition of sorely needed core features such as integrated tagging, readable URLs, anonymous commenting and tracking were not added.

Like many other Windows Live projects, Spaces started off strong until inattention to the product left it uncompetitive. Worst of all is the growing possibility that Windows Live Spaces could be discontinued in the near future. Wave 3 ended Spaces as the profile page of users and Wave 4 eliminated Spaces from the main navigation, suggesting a gradual marginalization of Spaces. In addition, all of the Windows Live teams have stopped blogging on Spaces, opting for WindowsTeamBlog.com instead. A recent post on the Windows Team Blog implied that they do not even see potential in blogging, suggesting that more frequent update style posts are becoming the norm.

I had hoped that Wave 4 would bring solid improvements to Spaces, but instead it has only confirmed my doubts about the service’s future. As a result, I recommend transferring Spaces blogs to WordPress.

If you are looking to export your Space, there is a third party Windows Live Spaces export tool which exports all blog posts and dates into a WordPress compatible XML file. My export and subsequent import into WordPress 3.0 went flawlessly. The only issue is that it does not export post times or comments, so these will need to be transferred manually.

Windows Live Spaces could have been another great Windows Live offering, but now it’s just another service that might be phased out.