Getting used to the new system..

If you think the coolest ASP.NET projects are being done by Microsoft, you'd be wrong.

The whole new WC2K5 project is doing some amazing things with ASP.NET. Things that I suspect most developers don't make use of but I suspect the development team at Microsoft hoped someone would make use of.  The caching features, the threading, and other goodies are being used to great effect.

But it's taking me time to get used to it.  You see, I'm writing this from my WinCustomize.com home page: http://frogboy.wincustomize.com. But it gets syndicated out to other sites depending on what topic it is.  If I were using Blog Navigator (which I will as soon as WC2K5's RSS is completed like it is on JoeUser.com) then I could just write it from that program and the underlying ASP.NET on the master site takes care of the rest.

So like I was saying, depending on what category I choose to write on, the article gets syndicated to various Stardock.NET sites.  If I were to write about PC Games, it would get sent out to JoeUser.com and TotalGaming.net.  If I were to write about Galactic Civilizatiosn projects it would get syndicated out to JoeUser.com, TotalGaming.net and GalCiv2.com.  If it were on Politics, it would get sent out to JoeUser.com, and PoliticalMachine.com.  And if I wrote on Personal Computing or OS Customization, it will end up being in the WinCustomize.com's main articles area and JoeUser.com.

As you probably have pictured, EVERYTHING will end up on JoeUser.com pretty much. It's the catch-all for all. But as the syndication rolls out to other sites (when we have time we hope to syndicate out to Lockergnome sites for instance, Neowin, TweakXP, and elsewhere), people who are interested in a particular topic can go to that particular site and jump into it. 

What I am excited about is the seamlessness of it.  On JoeUser, everyone gets their own personal RSS feed automatically. If someone links to your article, you see who is linking. We don't have to deal with "track back" stuff. It's automated. If someone links to this article, it'll show up in the referrals.

And I can control who can even see my articles if I want. I coudl make it just for co-workers. Or I could make it for family. Or I just myself. Same is true for who can respond to my articles.  This is control that any user can hopefully appreciate.

But like I said, the syndication features are going to take a bit more effort to nail down.  I know that this article is going to show up on JoeUser.com.  But eventually we'll need to allow users to understand what will show up where.  I wrote a couple of DesktopX support articles that I forgot were going to end up showing on my JoeUser.com blog site. Doh! Fixed for future posting though.