Through the Interface

A member of my team recently asked me to extend this blog's standard RSS feed to include more than 10 entries: he wanted a feed that contained all the entries ever posted to "Through the Interface". It turns out he uses Outlook 2007's RSS capability to download the full contents of items in an RSS feed, so he can then use his Outlook-integrated search capabilities to search his various email archives - as well as this blog's contents - whenever he's researching a technical query. He had a number of the earlier posts missing from Outlook and wanted the full collection.

I ended up creating a new RSS feed containing all posts specifically for this purpose. If you're new to "Through the Interface" and wish to keep an offline archive of the blog's contents, then this feed may prove useful to you.

On a related note, a very cool tool I use to archive this blog's content is HTTrack. This tool sucks down the content from a particular URL or set of URLs, follows the various links and remaps them to relative links on your local hard-drive. Very cool, indeed. In case you're wondering why I bother... I take the archive created by this tool and transfer it across to a colleague in Shanghai, who extracts it on an internal server for our China-based Engineering teams to access. TypePad blogs are apparently all blocked by the Great Firewall of China, and that's the way we've chosen to work around this problem, for now.

One final reminder, if you're interested in catching up on old posts... as mentioned previously, a master post index is now available in this blog's right-hand navigation sash. This proved immensely popular the day it was launched (that day had the highest ever number of page-hits on this blog, although a few days since have now approached it), but I suspect that people have generally now forgotten about it: it's a relatively inconspicuous grey-on-grey link, after all.