Flipped around – Content first, tweets second

Now that the Consumer Preview is out, we starting to see far more content on WinRT and Metro-style development. When I setup the site, the intention was to use it to surface new and interesting content. In the first iteration it was focussed more to surface people who were talking about WinRT.

The site is now flipped around so that it’s content first, tweets second. I was already vetting each content item before it was published to the Twitter feed or RSS. Now it won’t appear by default on the site unless it’s been through me. Now when I go through each article I’ll write a very brief precis on each one.

I’ve also started to stop publishing comment pieces and introduction pieces. These were relevant when we – as a community – were getting use to WinRT. We’re now generally up-to-speed, so to get linked the content is going to have to add value as we grow and learn.

Do send feedback – it’s always welcome!

Matt

Problem with RSS item ordering now fixed

We’ve had a problem with the ordering of items in our RSS feeds – well, OK, there was a bug that excluded the sort specification on the SELECT. This was creating problems in some readers with repeating posts.

This should now be fixed. RSS is a key engagement mechanism for us (we’d hope all users of the site subscribed to the RSS). Please let us know if it’s not.

Twitter integration – Phase 1 complete!

You can now logon to the site using your Twitter account. What this gives you in the first instance is the ability to follow or unfollow people direct from the site. (The purpose being that if you see a kindred spirit you can just click “Follow” and it’s done, rather than having to schlep off to Twitter and do it from there.)

Phase 2 of the Twitter integration is to be able to retweet content, respond to people who’ve posted content, etc.

Please do let us know how you find it.

Rough edges – mid-January 2012

We’ve had a good first week with WinRT People – a decent number of followers on Twitter and good levels of traffic. We’ve also noticed a bit of an uptick in surfaces WinRT content, which is good news for the platform.

In terms of the bits and pieces that are a bit rough or that we’re working on:

- The lists on Twitter are not working. The idea of these is that if you want to follow the top 10 WinRT tweeters, you can just follow the list. We’ve got a bug with our API layer that seems to not remove people from this list (hence the top 10 list has 13 people in it atm).

- We’ve got some deeper Twitter integration in the works where you’ll be able to link your Twitter account and follow people direct from the site, retweet articles or reply to tweets. (We’re quite excited about this bit.)

- We’ve got a tagging infrastructure half-built where we’ll be able to give more structure to surfaced content.

- We’ve added a primary keyword of “WinJS”, as people seem to be using this as well as WinRT to tag content for Metro-style apps.

- The top 10 superstars now appear at the top of the home page. You can see the top ‘n’ superstars via the link on the navigation.

Any other thoughts or comments gratefully received!

Hello, world.

Is this thing on?