Entries tagged with evnet - Channel 9

Canonical and ShortUrl on Channel9

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:11:00 GMT

One of the things we spend time on for Channel 9 is trying to make sure we are following the right standards, adopting new ones as necessary and that we render correctly for both real people and for search engines. As part of that ongoing work, we recently adopted two new concepts.

Canonical URL

The first is the concept of a canonical URL, as described here by Matt Cutts (his blog is a must read for anyone building public facing web sites); a link element that specifies what our definitive single URL should be for any given post.

Why does this matter? Well, on many web sites (including ours) there is more than one URL that will get you to the same piece of content. Consider the latest 'This Week On Channel 9' episode, it is available at:

Assuming Google/Bing/Yahoo only found the post from links on the Channel 9 home page, it would always see the first one... and everything would be great. That isn't how search engines work though, they care about inbound links from many different sources, and it is possible that many different URLs are out there in the wild that really represent the same single piece of content. Each additional URL beyond the first looks like duplicate content and takes away from the search engine love that should be given to the first result. The standard way to avoid this in the past was to redirect every person coming in on anything but the link we want. That works, but forcing your user to go through an extra browser round trip for some obscure technical reason is less than ideal. Enter the idea of the canonical url. Add this to your page and no matter how the search engine finds the page, it knows what URL to associate it with in the system.

If you check any of those links above and view source, you'll find the same thing on each and every one:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/This+Week+On+Channel+9/This-Week-C9-Windows-7-RTMs-7-Sins-of-App-Compat--cool-Silverlight-apps/" />

A fair number of other sites implement this as well, check out Ars Technica for example, and I'm sure more will follow. Should you implement this on your site? Well, first think about how many duplicate URLs will work on your content (if you are running a site that supports both www.sitename.com and sitename.com, that's one ... then if you can optionally have a filename like default.php or index.html... then that is already two duplicates for every URL) and then think about whether or not your position in search engine rankings is important... odds are you should look at adding support for this link tag on your pages.

ShortUrl

A lot has been written about how services like TinyURL, is.gd and other URL shortening services are bad for the internet, and we completely agree. They remove meaning from the link you are about to click (including the source of the content, which is an important issue for trust and security), and they are dependent on the reliability of some unknown third party that might just go away at some point in the future. One solution, that sites like C9, Amazon and others have decided to go with is to implement their own URL shortening. Yes, much of the meaning is lost, but at least they have control over that URL namespace and can make sure it is always available and always points at the intended content. Now that we have such a service though, what's to stop people from just taking our original URLs and using any one of the free URL shortening services? Well, nothing at the moment, but a movement is underway to allow content owners to specify a pre-existing short URL if they have one. The hope is that once this concept catches on, then URL shortening service or client applications (like twitter clients) will try to look up a site's short url before calling out to a 3rd party service to create one. We don't know if this will catch on, but we like the idea so we've gone ahead and added the appropriate link tag and populated it with our special r.ch9.ms short url. Once again, if you view source on that TWOC9 episode from above, you'll find this:

<link rel="shorturl" href="http://ch9.ms/AAPV" />

More to come...
If you went and viewed the source of those pages, you would have seen a ton of other <link> tags, and many different <meta> tags as well. Each of those does serve a purpose, and I'll dig into the rest of them in upcoming posts.

Note: For those of you who have the immediate response of 'aghhh... so much wasted bandwidth for meta tags!', I know what you mean... and I also know that some sites choose to only render those tags out when a search crawler hits them. That practice is a bit sneaky though, in general you should avoid alterting the content you serve up to search engines... although it is probably only an issue if you change the actual content of the page in an attempt to deceive the search engine.

Spelling, Code Blocks and Twitter on Channel 9

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:14:00 GMT

Hey folks, I thought I'd take a moment to update you on what the dev team has been working on recently, including spell checking in the editor, a slick way to insert code snippets and some already deployed features that you may or may not have noticed.

We asked nicely and were given the code behind the 'insert code' button on MSDN's editor (from their forums) and between Nathan and myself we were able to wrestle it into place onto our site. Not a lot of work in truth, but we needed to replace their script and css references with ones that work for us and build a simple service that takes in code and returned styled html (for the preview function). Of course, sending all sorts of code and markup to that service was causing the ASP.NET Request Validation to freak out, so that had to be selectively disabled ... isn't web development fun!

Next up came the addition of spell checking.... which TinyMCE already includes a plug in for, with all the client side code already in place to break up the text into small chunks and send it off to a server side encoded into a block of JSON. The server side code they supply is php though, which is workable on our IIS boxes, but would involve a fair bit of custom work for a relatively small feature and either calls a console app (aspell ?) or calls out to Google. Neither of those options seemed that appealing, so I wrote a service that works with the Live (Bing!) Search APIs and does the same thing.

I'm still doing some testing with this service, but so far it seems to be working out fine... English only at the moment, but the Live API certainly supports more options so I'll add more options in the future.

And last, but not least, I thought I'd talk about a feature that was rolled out a while back; the addition of MSDN/Twitter/DotNetShoutout to the 'Share' drop down on videos.

Ages back, Erik converted our 'share' options to be pulled from a database, with the idea that we'd add new ones from time to time, and now we finally have! In a recent update we added Twitter, DotNetShoutout and support for the MSDN bookmarking service.

We toyed with the idea of a 'send to twitter' option for awhile, but once you put our URL into a tweet, we are either over 140 characters or we've hardly left any room for you to talk about the content! That meant that the deployment of a twitter link was dependent on the use of some form of URL shortening service. We have all sorts of reasons why we'd rather not use any of the existing services (bing problems url shortening canonical for some of these reasons), so now the twitter button had to wait on the creation of our own URL shortening service.

Enter the C9 url shortening service :)

Not really a replacement for Tiny URL or any of those services, as ours only works for our content, but definitely what we needed so that we could (1) create short URLs that we control to prevent future broken links and (2) create them algorithmically so that we didn't have to make an external service call to display the twitter link on our page.

The formula is simple, just turn the Entry ID of our post, which is a long into a short string by Base-36 encoding it and then stick 'http://ch9.ms/' onto the front of it. This produces reasonably short URLs, and can be computed at either end without any need for a database look up. The result, a URL like http://ch9.ms/A49H is then used in creating the twitter link.

You can access the twitter link from the little 'share' drop down below each post, which is another interesting bit of code

This drop down and the 'Formats' drop down for downloadable media files share a common set of code and both support the storing of user preferences. It was our thought that most people have a single way that they usually will want to share a link and a single file format they usually want to download, so when you pick an item from either of these lists, we store your choice in a local cookie. Then, when you visit that page again later or any other page on C9 with the same drop down on it, we'll remember your choice and make that the default choice shown in the drop down. Of course, you can pick something different at anytime, so if you like to use Twitter most of the time and then feel like trying out DotNetShoutout you are not blocked in anyway!

When will we see those editor updates?
Soon... I'm still working on them, trying to make sure they are stable and reliable before we deploy them, but I definitely expect them live within a week!

Silverlight support for Chrome and other site updates

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:23:00 GMT

Hey folks, since the last C9 Team post, we've deployed (to C9, C8 and Edge) the TinyMCE editor that I talked about last time, and we've made some other small fixes and changes as well. The editor problem where you couldn't put in a link to another page on C9 has been resolved... check out this page on the TinyMCE Wiki if you'd like to know specify relative or absolute URL behavior on your own site(s). We also fixed the Add/Reply buttons in Safari and Chrome, so those buttons will be styled normally for you WebKit folks now.

We also resolved the weird 'go to a random page when you click Reply and are not signed in' bug... although we have degraded the experience a bit there. When you do a Live ID sign in, you can't include query string parameters or anything after a hash mark, so to keep track of the fact that you wanted to reply to comment x, we used to send you to a special URL (something like /replyto/<commentid>) and that would then construct the appropriate URL to put you on the right page, with the editor open and the focus in the right spot to post your comment. That wasn't working reliably, so when we were trying to fix the 'go to a random page' bug we switched to just sending you back to the post you were on when you clicked reply. Yes, this means you have to click 'Reply' again, and we aren't happy with that, but that is at least consistent so it is the current state.

Finally, and this should be interesting to the approximately 8% of you using one of these browsers, I tweaked the Silverlight detection code to treat Chrome and Safari on Windows as supported. I've only tested in the latest version of both of these (I happen to be writing this post in Chrome 2.0.172.28 right now since I was just testing it), but let me know if you run into any issues.

Fun C9 Fact: According to the Geographic info in WebTrends, when you view our traffic by city, London is #1 at 4.5% of our total traffic, and you don't hit Redmond, WA until #3 (1.4%).

Update on some new site features coming in the near future

Duncan Mackenzie — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:28:00 GMT

Hey folks, Duncan from the dev team here. Just wanted to give you a heads up that we'll be rolling out some new features along with a list of bug fixes in the next few days.

The main new feature is a completely new editor. We've moved to TinyMCE for the commenting and creating new threads, and along with that move we've fixed a few of the issues that have been brought up around the editing experience. For one, we'll have a emoticon drop down finally :) and the insert image and insert URL dialogs should be much faster and simpler to use.

At the same time as this update, we'll be rolling out fixes to some bugs that you've reported, including seeing the 'subject' field in some cases when commenting on videos, the fact that the 'all forums' feed is not updating and others.

Welcome to the Channel 9 Team Blog

Jeff Sandquist — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:18:00 GMT

Welcome to the Channel 9 Team blog.

You know it is kind of ironic (some would say sad) that the team that for over five years who has worked to communicate what is happening behind the scenes at Microsoft does not have its own blog. Sure, many of us have our own personal blogs, but there is no official place on Channel 9 where we post regularly where we're headed.

So today, we're changing that and have created this new blog as a way to explain where we are headed in the future and to listen in on your feedback. We'll post updates when we have updated the site to fix a bug or added a new feature. You can expect content that is a simple text and sometimes videos from members of the team.

Over the years, the continued growth of Channel 9 has exceeded our wildest expectations and we are humbled by the fact that millions of visitors come to Channel 9 each and every month.

Right now, we are in the early days of planning for the next major release of Channel 9. Our goal with the next release is to focus on the basics from site performance, reliability and content discoverability. We want to deliver on a great experience that makes it easier for you to interact with content, your peers and connect with Microsoft.

So with that stayed tuned for news and updates on what's next for Channel 9 and thank you all for participating.

-Jeff

Building Channel 9: Inside EvNet - Part 2

Charles — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:59:00 GMT

EvNet, which is the codebase that powers all of our channels, was written from the ground up. How is the codebase designed? What's the architecure? What did each developer work on? What were some of the challenges? Who are these dev geniuses, anyway? This is part two of the great conversation with the awesome folks who build and innovate Channel 9 (and several other web sites). Tune in.

Part 1:

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Building-Channel-9-Inside-EvNet-Part-1/

Building Channel 9: Inside EvNet - Part 1

Charles — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:52:00 GMT

You asked. We deliver. Meet the developers behind Channel 9 (and 8, 10, Edge and MicrosoftPDC.com). Mike Samspon, Erik Porter, Duncan Mackenzie and Nathan Heskew are the super talented devs who built C9 V4. Unlike the older versions of Channel 9, V4 is a completely new codebase. Gone are the days of stitching together half-baked technologies (though, they did scale and Bryn and I deserve some credit for that! ).

EvNet, which is the codebase that powers all of our channels, was written from the ground up. How is the codebase designed? What's the architecure? What did each developer work on? What were some of the challenges? Who are these dev geniuses, anyway? This is part one of the great conversation with the folks who build and innovate Channel 9. Tune in.

Enjoy.

Part 2:
http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Building-Channel-9-Inside-EvNet-Part-2/

Dev Diary for April 15th

Duncan Mackenzie — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:36:12 GMT

Just a quick, and poorly filmed, update from the dev team on what we worked on during the last sprint and what we are building right now. Yes the filming is shoddy, and yes the screens are hard to read... we'll get better, but we didn't want to spend a lot of time redoing this one when we know you'd rather we keep focused on developing the dev site :)

Jeff Sandquist: Skateboarding, Channel 9 and Life at Microsoft

Jeff Sandquist — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 15:29:52 GMT

Rory, in one of his final interviews for Channel 9 turned around the camera and interviewed me (Jeff :-)) for Channel 9.

Here's the description Rory wrote for this piece:

Jeff Sandquist was there at the beginning. He has been behind the scenes at Channel 9 for years. He was part of the initial crew and has had a tremendous impact on the development of the site ever since. Oddly, despite his core involvement, Jeff has never before done a Channel 9 interview. Here, we get to talk to him just after he's come back from taking several months off, and he's in a very, very good mood :)

The Channel 9 beta has been updated

Duncan Mackenzie — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 09:42:48 GMT

Hey folks, it has been awhile since we first published the Channel 9 beta site and we thought you might be wondering where we are with the whole 'new Channel 9' project. Well, we have been moving forward on many different areas of the code and we even shipped a new production site (http://Channel8.msdn.com) built on the exact same code base. All of the work done since we last updated the beta site is hard to describe in a few lines of text, but let me give it a shot anyway :)

First and foremost, we have added the idea of 'managed tag pages'. These pages take the idea of filtering content by a certain tag and then add in the concept of an 'editor' for that tag's area. The editor will be your guide to the topic in question, selecting content from Channel 9 to feature on the page, blogs that should be included and more. We haven't fully configured it, but you can see an example of what I mean on the Silverlight tag page, where Adam Kinney is designated as the ownere of that page. You still get your straight filtered list of videos (right in the what's new area) but you can also see recommended or featured content along the upper right. We have more planned for the managed tag pages, but for now I hope this gives you an idea of what is to come in that area.

The other major change is around the style of the site. In addition to a ton of minor changes, (many of which were as a direct result of feedback from you Niners), the site was made much more consistent overall. The fonts, HTML tags and information displayed have been standardized around the site; an entry displayed in the sidebar on one page should look exactly like another... this has the benefit of a better experience for you, and it also really simplifies our code, which is a great help for when we need to make ongoing changes or even launch a new site based off the same code.

Finally, we heard your comments around the new AJAX asynchronously loading of posts, threads and comments, and we acted on some of that feedback in this update. Your back button should work now, even when all you are doing is paging through the videos on the media page or all the comments on the current post. If you watch the address bar you'll also see that the page number is part of the URL, and that it is being updated as you page back and forth. With those URLs you'll be able to link someone right into a specific page in a discussion, as requested by your feedback on the first Beta site we shipped. The AJAX features have a bunch of other improvements added to them as well, including a 'throbber' animation to let you know when we are loading data and other less obvious changes.

Check it out over at http://beta.channel9.msdn.com and let us know what you think in the recent set of Halo 3 videos :)

Silverlight on C9

Duncan Mackenzie — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:19:48 GMT

In
We've updated the Mike Nash video to use a different streaming media server than all the rest so you might want to try at least that video

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=339887&Silverlight=true

Building a Silverlight player for Channel 9

Adam Kinney — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:08:50 GMT

version 4 of Channel 9.

He discusses how he was able to reuse the code that comes with Expression Encoder and how, as the developer, he can code the player while the designer David Shadle can work on the design.

A preview of the player is available on Channel 8 today and I'm expecting the player to go live on the Channel 9 beta sometime in the near future.

Shipping the 10 update

Mike Sampson — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 21:26:29 GMT

Last week we shipped out an update to 10 that not only refreshed the design but set up the EvNet platform to support Channel9. Community Server and FlexWiki but has grown to a lot more. When we started working on10, the goal was to create a new site as well as a stable, extendable code base that we could grow all our communities on. That project is called EvNet and this is the dev team behind it. We dive in to how this all works as well so take a look.

Learn how 10 was made

Jeff Sandquist — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:24:38 GMT

Channel 9 now has a sister :-)

This weekend we launched an all new community called 10 at http://on10.net

10 was built from the ground up using ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005 with a simple, easy to use design.

Our dream with 10 is to create a place for those people who want to use technology to change the world. Int his video Adam, Duncan, Erik and Jeff talk with Robert about how the site was built and the crazy weeks leading up to launching the site.

Since 10 was built by the same development team that builds this site, is their anything from the 10 experiene you'd like to see in Channel 9?