If you’re an existing Windows Live Spaces user, there’s no need to panic! You have six months to make the move over to your new home, and you’ll find tons of support available to help you get there as well as migration tools which will make the move as easy as possible.

I’m sure you’re keen to check out what your new site will look like at Wordpress, but with six months to make the move, why not take some time out to revamp your blog?

One of the great things about Wordpress.com is that there’s a huge population of developers out there creating beautiful themes, and awesome widgets and plugins which extend the features of the core platform – many of which can be used with free Wordpress.com accounts as well as self hosted blogs.

Before pushing the button to migrate, check out some of my favourite features:

1. Wordpress Themes & CSS Editing
   You’ll find over 75 free themes available to radically change the design of your blog. You can change colour palettes, switch between single and multi-column layouts and insert custom header images to truly personalise your blog. If you’re a dab hand with CSS (or want to learn through experimentation), then you can tweak your design to your heart’s content (via an upgrade).
   
   
2. Sidebar Widgets
   Developers have been busy creating hundreds of sidebar widgets for Wordpress, which can be dragged and dropped into your blog’s sidebar to add new features. Photo sideshows, video players, Twitter feeds and a whole lot more are available to add content into your blog.
   
   
3. Works Well With Windows Live Writer
   If you’re yet to discover Windows Live Writer, then this is your opportunity to check it out. WLW is a fantastic post creation and editing tool that allows you to write your posts offline, add images, embed videos, tags and set categories before uploading and publishing live to your blog when you’re ready. Check out Windows Live Writer’s Plugin Gallery too for hundreds of additional features from the developer community. Windows Live Writer is freely available as part of the Windows Live Essentials Suite, and once configured with your Wordpress.com account details will quickly become your best friend. Find out more about plans to integrate Wordpress.com into Windows Live Writer.
   
   
4. Spam Canned
   Blog spam can very quickly turn the fun of writing a blog into an administrative nightmare. Fortunately, Wordpress.com’s Akismet feature blocks spammers from leaving comments and trackback spam on your blog.
    
5. A Fresh Start
   Having moved my own blog a few times, I’ve found it gives you the opportunity to step back, have a good think about your writing, and make a few changes and improvements. Migrating to Wordpress may provide the impetus to take your blog in a whole new direction, or simply make a few tweaks here and there. 

Once you’ve found your feet with Wordpress.com, you may want to go the extra step and host your blog on your own server. Wordpress runs on Windows, courtesy of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, which will install key components such as Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer. If you’re running  IIS with SQL Server or SQL Azure, there’s a patch available to get Wordpress working with your setup too.

Have fun creating your new blog at Wordpress.com.

For example, a tag using several of the options would look like this:

[sl-bingmaps background="transparent" width="100%" height="300" NavigationVisibility="1" CopyrightVisibility="1" LogoVisibility="1" ScaleVisibility="1" ZoomLevel="5" Mode="Aerial" StartLocation="48.8756271_2.3493838" Pushpin="48.8756271_2.3493838" Culture="fr_FR"]

or:

[sl-bingmaps background="transparent" width="100%" height="400" NavigationVisibility="1" CopyrightVisibility="1" LogoVisibility="1" ScaleVisibility="1" ZoomLevel="17" Mode="Aerial" StartLocation="51.50809105417733_-0.07589511573314667" Culture="en-GB"]</p>

In order to use this plugin, you’ll need to first create a Bing Maps Key here. For further instructions, check out Kebeck’s post.

“You can create dynamic maps that allow your visitors to pan and zoom, or static maps that don't have those features,” it reads. You can choose from Road maps, Aerial maps, Aerial maps showing the road labels, or a 3D Birdseye map.

To use the plugin, you just add a shortcode to your post like this, for example:

[bingMap location="Buenos Aires, Argentina" zoom="13"]

Or a more complex shortcode using all the available attributes may look like this:

[bingMap location=”Seattle, WA” width=”250” height"=”250” title=”Bing Maps Rocks” type=”dynamic” maptype=”AerialWithLabels” zoom=”15” pp1=”Seattle, WA”]

To use the plugin, you’ll first need a free Bing Maps Key. Then you can download and install the plugin from here.

The blog itself features thought-provoking, interesting, beautiful or otherwise eye-catching photos from around the world. Each photo is accompanied by a short description and a link to a related news story elsewhere on MSNBC or a photo slideshow.

Posts are also tagged so you can browse more of that same genre. Registered users can leave comments. And at the bottom of the page, a social networking bar lets you share the blog via Facebook, Twitter and email.

More design tweaks and features are coming “in the near future” promises a quick post about the new site.

In the meantime, you can follow the site via RSS or email or simply go here: photoblog.msnbc.msn.com

Now why would you want to do that considering that Posterous is already one of the easiest platforms to publish to? Well, maybe you want to send the same post to both your traditional blog or website and your Posterous blog at the same time. If you create the post in WLW, that’s possible. You would just write the post once, publish it to one site, then switch blogs to publish it a second time to the other site. Or maybe you just prefer WLW’s interface over anything else (I know I do!).

In order to support Posertous publishing, you’ll need to grab the Writerous plugin from Codeplex. Once installed, you access the new settings via Tools –> Options –> Writerous from WLW’s main menu. Here, you’ll have to provide your Posterous login info and site name (the latter if you maintain more than one Posterous blog). You can also configure your Posterous posts to autopost to Twitter and Facebook, too, by checking the box next to that option.

For more details on how to configure and use the plugin, check out the project’s page here.

The first plugin lets you easily change the title and tagline of your blog (by default, it reads “Just another Wordpress.com weblog”). While that’s handy, the coolest part about this plugin is that it integrates with Twitter so you can use your current Twitter status as the blog’s tagline. Only status messages that are not @replies or those that contain links will be used.

The second plugin is designed to help you manage blog comments from within Windows Live Writer. Comments are categorized as “New,” “Approved,” and “Spam.” New comments are those awaiting moderation. Below each comment listed in this view, you can click links to approve, spam, or delete the comment as desired. You can also click to view the blog post in case you want to respond to the commenter on your site.

The third and final plugin is a bit more complex. It lets you add custom fields to your blog. In Brandon’s example he has added fields like City, Language, Mood, and Music. After the initial setup, the dialog box will show the custom fields across the top as links you can click on. From that point forward, every time you publish via WLW, you can select from the available custom fields and include them in your blog post.

All three plugins are available for download here.  Developers can also access the source code here. And if you haven’t installed Window Live Writer yet, you can download it from here.

According to the release notes, this new version of Oxite offers the following:

• New Model, Services and Repositories
• Dependency Injection (Routes, Controllers, Services, Repositories, etc)
• ActionFilter Registry
• Better test coverage
• New validation class added
• Improved background services architecture
• Projects cleaned up and consolidated
• Views cleaned up
• No more *.cs or *.cs.designer for views in web project
• Now works in a sub directory
• New admin dashboard
• New and update (from last version) SQL scripts included
• Many other small features, improvements and bug fixes

In addition, as our own Duncan Mackenzie notes on his blog, Unity was implemented to provide Dependency Injection, xUnit was used as the test runner to remove a dependency on the higher level SKUs of Visual Studio, and a great deal of work was put into restructuring the data layer to completely abstract the Linq 2 SQL code from our actual objects.

We mainly have Erik, Sampy and Nathan to thank for the work involved in making these changes happen, these are the hard-working folks behind the code at Channel 9 and Channel 10 (and Channel 8, VisitMix, and Edge).

For more information on Oxite, check out the discussions, issues and wiki pages on Codeplex.

I have no idea how they do this, but the Xbox comes across as having a real personality. The blog format is conversational, with your Xbox raving about your excellent game-playing skills. Or lightly ragging on you when it's deserved. The entire thing is automated, too. You don’t have to do a thing.

Here’s what a sample blog post looks like, excerpted from Fshguys’s blog:

Fshguy is awesome! Just plain radical even... I say that because we played some games. Did you know our gamerscore is 123,031? He made some progress on Viva Piñata, and wished it would never end, but it did and that was sad.

Oh, remember the challenge that Fshguy was competing in? Well, it's over. Fshguy didn't manage to get the win... but I guess number 62 is better than number LAST!!... wait... maybe we are last? How many people are in this thing? Can I count? You know, sometimes someone else just has better cheat codes than you do -- I mean, that's the only explanation for a loss in this challenge!!!

What’s even funnier is when the Xbox gets on your case about giving up:

…He opened up Left 4 Dead, KUF: Circle of Doom picking up 1 achievement, and then the lightweight went to bed. Freakin' wuss.

That's just plain hilarious!!

If you want to set up your own Xbox blog, you can do so by signing up here: http://360voice.gamerdna.com.

If you’re already using the older Blog This extension, you should first uninstall it before trying the new one. The extension is still considered experimental, so you’ll need to log with your account info at addons.mozilla.org if you want to try it out.

(Thanks, Brandon, for the tip!)

So What’s New?

Insert Multiple Photos: One of the new features you’ll notice in Live Writer 2009 is the ability to insert multiple photos and Windows Live Photo albums. With this, you can easily insert several photos at one time. Because of Live Writer’s tight integration with Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can also insert the photos and have them sent directly to your Live Photo Gallery upon publishing. Alternately, you can select photos from an existing album to add to your post.

Search Your Drafts: If you keep a lot of unpublished posts handy for when you have blogger’s block, you’ll be glad to know that the new version of WLW has an integrated search feature which lets you search through your old drafts by keyword.

Tag Suggestions: For those of you who tag your posts in your WordPress blogs, the new tag suggestions feature will auto-suggest tags as you begin to type. Now you don’t have to worry about tagging things incorrectly or creating near duplicate tags.

Insert and Publish to YouTube: Video bloggers - if you hadn’t yet discovered this feature before, you’re going to love it. From the Insert –> Video option, you can browse for a file on your computer and have it automatically upload to YouTube or Soapbox upon publishing. How convenient is that?

New Plugins: The version of WLW supports plugins, all of which can be found at the Windows Live Gallery web site. If you haven’t already added these plugins, they are definitely must-haves:

• FLICKR UPLOAD
  Uploads an image to your Flickr account and inserts an inline picture into your post.
• DIGG THIS
  Automatically adds a DiggThis badge to your blog post after you publish it from Writer.
• TWITTER NOTIFY
  Automatically generates a TinyURL and sends a Tweet about your blog post after you publish it from Writer.

According to the Live Writer team blog post, the complete list of new features in this version includes the following:

• “Instant photo” border treatment
• Insert multiple photos
• Insert and upload Windows Live photo albums
• Insert and publish video to YouTube
• Spell checking in: Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, English (Australia), Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, and Ukrainian
• Server-side tagging (support coming soon to WordPress.com and BlogEngine.NET)
• Type-down filtering in the Open dialog
• Improved blog account setup
• Windows Live Spaces inline preview support
• Support for bidirectional languages
• Updated look and feel

The Oxite platform supports all the blogging features you would expect including pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting, optional comment moderation, gravatar support, RSS feeds at any page level, and support for the MetaWebLog API. That last bit means that there’s no trouble integrating Oxite with Windows Live Writer, a must-have for any serious blogger.

Oxite is also more than just a simple blogging tool – it’s a true content management system. You don’t have to create blog posts with this platform, you can instead use it to create pages and even child pages. It also easily supports multiple blogs on one site as well as the ability to keep separate sites’ data in one database.

Oxite is currently available as an alpha release and is licensed under the OSI-approved Microsoft Public License. To see how Oxite works, check out the Channel 9 video. To play with the source code and help contribute to the project, click here.

Another developer also recently created a similar, but much simpler, Autoreplace plugin which will replace any words you enter into the editor. To install this one, click here and save the file into your plugins folder. For the Search and Replace plugin, this is the download here (.msi file).

Did it matter that I could only work three days a week because I was busy with my book and other projects? Nope! Would I get the same famous MSFT benefits as a 40-hour/week employee? Pretty much! Did it matter that I have pink hair and am prone to accidentally cussing in team meetings? Nope! What about the fact that I don’t like working before 10am? No problem!

As she began working there, she realized that she had many misconceptions about the company. It wasn't all boring and corporate after all. She started meeting smart and inspiring people, so she decided to start a blog which profiles them. That blog is Microspotting.

Some recent entries include interviews like the following:

• Career advice from Jeff Lin, former Flagpole Sitta and current Program Managa
• An Exchange test manager muses on work/fiddle balance and why enterprise software is sexier than you think
• Sara Ford on what Microsoft can learn from open source
• Dare Obasanjo on the perils of being a Microsoft blogger, and why he actually has to read all that Nigerian 419 spam

Definitely a great read. Subscribed!

[Check out Jeff Sandquist on Microspotting. - Larry]

Let us provide you with all the amenities you would expect to experience at MIX in true blogging fashion: Massive bandwidth connectivity, food and drinks (steady caffeine stream), Plasma Screens, Xbox 360s with games such as Rock Band, Halo 3 and more. Come mingle with fellow bloggers and interact with Microsoft spokespeople, Microsoft customers/partners and session speakers as they casually drop in.

Hours of Operation: 

Location:  A Suite in the Venetian Tower, 3^rd Floor  Room: TBD  (there will be signs)