MSDN Low Bandwidth View

Richard Rousseau — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:00:02 GMT

Jon Galloway posted an article describing a way to view low bandwidth optimized MSDN pages by modifying the URL.

Try it out...

Simply take the URL - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object.aspx

And add "(loband)" just before the ".aspx" - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object(loband).aspx

The "loband" page provides a link near the top you can use to switch back to full fat version.

Also check Jon's site for a bookmarklet he wrote which you can use to switch this functionality on or off at any time.

This option will be very useful when my laptop's cellular connection has a bad signal (like when on the train). I imagine this will also be helpful to all those smart phone browsers out there. Any smart phone owners care to try it out?

Check out his comments section. The Product Unit Manager for MSDN responded with some insight into what they're doing. It sounds like they might change the way the "loband" option is specified. I was wondering why they didn't just make it a query string item, but I'll bet they've already got some serious url rewriting going on.

Trackback Madness...

Richard Rousseau — Sat, 05 May 2007 01:08:39 GMT

I want to turn this blog into a respectable place for my technical thoughts. Step 1 of that initiative - Get rid of all the trackback spam.

A "clean" sampling of my trackbacks.

Almost all of my old posts have a few hundred spam trackback links. It's absolutely ridiculous. Dasblog has a referral blacklist feature that I'm looking into. Unfortunately, their documentation is a little out of date. It refers to an older blacklisting feature called "Moveable Type Blacklist". I believe 1.7 was the last version this feature was available (I'm running 1.9).

Some light googling gave me some direction on how to enable and configure it. It's a keyword based filter that will send 404's if a site that matches one of your specified keywords tries to refer back to you. Making up the keyword list should be fun.

Omar Shahine's WebLog

In the meantime, I created a PowerShell script to remove all trackbacks from my content files. I'll post that when I get home tonight. But until I get the blacklist feature figured out, I'll be leaving trackbacks turned off.