Home Page Overview

By the time you read this, you’ll have seen the new home pages of the MSDN and TechNet Blogs. I wanted to give a little more insight into what’s on there and how it all works. I’m using the MSDN home page in the images but it’s the same on the TechNet site.

The home page is based on the overall MSDN and TechNet site themes. You’ll find those themes continue through the site in the profiles, settings, search etc. Now, the blogs are more than just a collection of individual blogs by different teams and individuals from around the company. They are a huge collection of knowledge to help you, our readers, customers and partners do your job, learn technology and hopefully have some fun!

Let’s walk through the home page together...

Home Page Header

The header section contains a few interesting things of note.

• You can access the rest of the MSDN and TechNet sites and information through the tabs.
• You can use the search box to search all of the MSDN and TechNet blogs.
• After you’ve signed into the blog sites, you can click on your name to manage your profile, Settings to manage your site settings or Sign in and out.

Popular Topics

Popular Topics lists tags used by blog authors to categorize blog posts in specific topics. Select any of the tags to view content related to that topic throughout the entire site. For example, if you click on a ".NET" tag, you will be taken to a "Related Content" page that lists all blog posts that were tagged with the ".NET" tag.

The Latest Blog Posts

This section of the home page contains a list of the most recent blog posts across the site. You’ll see the post title, avatar, author and time of each post. Click on the title to see the actual post. You can subscribe to that feed by clicking on the RSS icon. You can also click on the "View All Blog Posts" link for an in-depth view of all recent blog posts. On that page, you can see excerpts of all blog posts and change the view from Excerpt View to Full Post View. You can also sort the posts by Most Recent, Most Views and Most Comments.

Got Feedback?

This is a big update and I’m sure many of you will have feedback. We want to hear it! Click this link and fill in the subsequent form to share that with us.

Legal and Abuse Reporting

Besides the usual legal links, you’ll find a link to Report Abuse on the home page and on every page throughout the site. If you find inappropriate content or users within the sites please report it!

And with that, I’ll let you go play in the new sites.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  If you go to blogs.technet.com/opml.aspx that'll give you the full list of blogs. It's slow but it's a list.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Are we unable to associate multiple technet blog accounts to one Live ID or do we have to create a Live ID for every blog account?

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  asdf

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  We will be adding search within a blog in our next update in just a few weeks. Temporary glitch. Should be back online later today. Thanks for letting us know.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  @ Sumit Potdar - You need to be a Microsoft employee to blog on the TechNet Blogs. If you, please let me know (your Profile does not appear to be an affiliated MSFT employee account.)

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  sorry, i am not a Microsoft employee, and thanks for the information

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  how can I write a New blog

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  by the way... how can I write a blog... I can't find anything like a button "create your ownblog"

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  We are working on improving the printing experience for the blogs. Most of the printing issues are resolved at this time but you also may need to scale the page down in the browser print preview to get all the content on wide posts.

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2010
  I really liked to search in an specific blog

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2010
  It would seem that RSS / Atom links for specific site feeds just redirect to the homepage - e.g. blogs.technet.com/.../privaterss.aspx kicks back to http://blogs.technet.com/ Presumably this is a temporary glitch?

• Anonymous
  May 26, 2010
  I've noticed a few UI issues that have thrown me for a loop:

1. In this specific blog, if I click "Home" in the breadcrumb, I'm taken to the home for all TechNet blogs. However if I click the "Home" link in the sidebar, I'm taken to this specific blog's homepage. That's extremely confusing.
2. If I'm on the main TechNet homepage and click on "Blogs" in the header, I'm taken to basically a mashup of all the most recent posts from all TechNet blogs. However if I click "blogs" on the sidebar, I'm taken to a completely different page. Again, confusing.
3. If I go to the MSDN homepage, at first I couldn't find any link to MSDN blogs. I tried looking in the header and the sidebar, since that's where the links were on the TechNet site. Finally I searched for the word "blog" and realized the links were in the center content section. Then I finally realized that on MSDN, blogs are considered a sub-section of community, which doesn't exist on TechNet.
4. Where is the Browse Blogs Control? I still haven't managed to find that link/feature on either site.

• Anonymous
  June 17, 2010
  If you created a blog without a Live ID how can you now access it? I'm unable to do anything on our blog :-(

• Anonymous
  June 22, 2010
  There doesn't seem to be a "printer friendly" option on the new blog pages to print out material for reading.  Is this by design?

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2010
  Is there a way for me to duplicate this main page in my sharepoint environment?

• Anonymous
  January 20, 2011
  Hi, Is there an overview page somewhere listing all of the blogs? Kind regards, Arp

• Anonymous
  March 01, 2015
  Why don't you sort out all the nonsense spam comments on http://blogs.technet.com/ that take up all the space in feed pane?