The Darling of the blogging world…When was that again? On well i cant remember now once i found out it was built on mvc I let it go. But it seems that are make a strong comeback. Here is the improvements.

• New Model, Services and Repositories
• Dependency Injection (Routes, Controllers, Services, Repositories, etc)
• ActionFilter Registry
• Better test converage
• 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

A lot of work went into these changes; 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 our data layer to completely abstract the Linq 2 SQL code from our actual objects. Like most software projects, there is always more work that could be done, and we will be making changes and additions as we continue to use this code for our work projects and for our personal sites.

While at the PDC Underground TechZulu’s Geoffrey Emery got a chance to talk with Scott Hanselman about what it takes to grow and maintain a large audience. Scott’s blog is currently generating around 35,000 feed subscribers and he has a diverse amount of content including podcasts, tutorials, multi subject blog posts. One of my favorite parts of this interview is when Scott brings up the point about not posting bile. I really like this statement and the keeping the web positive not that this means that you need to not be critical but there is definitely ways you can state things that allow you stay positive and relevant. Scott continues to lay down some great knowledge by bringing up the point of saving key strokes. If you think that the email would serve to help more then just the person then make it a blog post. I couldn’t agree this statement more. Get the information out there and let the search engines index it that way when someone needs it today or two years from now it will be there. All this and more in a great interview.

 

Scotts Blog - http://www.hanselman.com/blog/

 

At the outset, I have to confess that I’m not sure if this is a new feature in Windows Live Writer or not.  But it’s new to me as I just discovered it.  Did you know you can enable a real-time word count display in the status bar of Writer?  It’s handy when you’re authoring posts and want to keep them under a certain length.

Why a certain length?

There is some thought going around the Search Engine Optimization community that pages that are too short can get passed over for high rankings. I try to keep posts at least 250 words. Of course there are some posts on my blogs that are shorter, but if I’m writing a post that I want to rank well I try to give it some meatiness in terms of length. On the other hand don’t make it too long either - because in doing so you make it difficult to keep your keyword density up and could end up with a less tightly focused page. Research also shows that longer articles can have a pretty steep drop off rate in readers after the text gets below the ‘fold’ or to the end of the first screen of article.

Post length is not as important as the idea and how you convey it. There are no such thing as exact number of words for web copy.Getting the idea across to your audience is more important, and if you do it in a way they expect most, you are going to build your audience / feed subscribers.

So that being said Here is how you do it

Turning it on is easy, just click on the Tools menu, then Options…, and then click Editing in the options window.  Check the word count checkbox:

Then you’ll see the count at the bottom of the screen:

There are lots of other cool options in Writer.  What have you found?

- Marcus, Windows Live Community Manager

Windows Live Tags: how-to,Writer,word count,length

346 words in this article. LOL