Enhancements to the Blog

Hi all

In view of enhancing the blog, I have upgraded the blog theme (Comfy Pro) to the latest version with the following enhancements.

• Nicer font and styles
• Optimization of Javascript Calls
• Improved page loading time and overall performance
• Added Tweet this button to blog posts
• Added Twitter integration to display latest tweets
• Added configurable Facebook Like box

Apart from the look and feel of the blog, I have also added a new section in my blog called “Blogs I Follow” which is available in the menu as shown below.

This menu provides details of many popular blogs by the community for Dynamics.

The interesting part is that clicking on these links does not open the actual website, but opens a cached section inside this blog itself. I have enabled indexing of the articles from the other blogs which can be viewed from this blog itself, and each article has a link which tracks back to the original post. The advantage is that we can search on other blog articles in one place.

Click on the Continue reading link to read more information about this article which has been cached, as shown below. There are trackbacks within the article view, which links back to the original article.

Since there are many blogs around the community, I am just grouping the blogs into sub sections like Blogsphere – I, Blogsphere – II etc, just for the purpose of making the menus look a lot neater.   This indexing works based on the concept of RSS feeds and this is automatically scheduled to update frequently, so that any blog articles posted in any of these blogs are cached back automatically into this blog.

Right now, the indexing only includes recent posts and all posts going forward. However, I am working on caching all existing posts in all these blogs as well. Will keep you updated as that target is achieved as well. In the mean time, please take a look and let me know any blogs which is missing in that list (which I am sure is the case), so that I can add them here as well.

Note: Based on a valid point mentioned by Vaidy, I have ensured that going forward the syndicate will only post an extract of the main article in my blog and with a link to the original article. This will ensure that there are hits to the original article through the referring syndicate in this blog. Thanks for the valuable comment Vaidy.

Keep watching for more updates…

Until next post…