Part #2 of "You think this is better. Really?"

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/01/01 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/01/01/10110567.aspx

This is a story of a site. Well, the second half a story about a site. Part 1 is already written, and was published yesterday.

PART 1 can be found right here. If you have not read it, do yourself a favor and either READ IT or skip PART 2.

Looking at the new site, not much was happenng. I think there are like somewhere between 10 and 30 pages that Google and Bing still think are at the old location because it doesn't realize the redirects are there (no 302 inserts?). But that's it.

Anyway, guess what?

I was right. I was freaking right.

And this is where Yuhong Bao's comment comes in.

Go to GlobalDev and find one of the DBCS codepages. On these pages there will be hyperlinks on DBCS lead bytes. Click these links and see what you get

You see, when the site first migrated, they left lots of the old site up.

This was good since most of the stuff that was migrated still pointed to stuff on the old site -- especially keyboards and keyboard graphics and code page tables and code page subtables.

After they started taking stuff down, it did break the keyboards, at the time I helped the site owner get those fixed up.

So if you go to http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/sbcs/1251.htm it will redirect you to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/cc305144.aspx which is where code page 1251 is now.

And now we get to the problem.

If you go from Code pages supported by Windows to 932 (Japanese Shift-JIS) then you get to the Windows Codepage 932 page. All the sublinks there for lead bytes, like 84? They have links to places like:

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/dbcs/932/932_84.mspx

Yes, the stuff that was taken down from the GlobalDev subweb that was taken down.

Note there are places that point to links, like for example a comment from this external blog. We broke any/all of those people. And with the non-human readable links that the new site was migrated to, there is no way for an external person to find the actual link -- the MSDN pages like have no predictable page names (assuming these pages were even migrated). 

And then as I mentioned earlier if you search microsoft.com for "GlobalDev" you will see quite a few  links in KB articles and other places that reference the old site. Only some of them foward; most of them bring up the "can't find that" search page microsoft.com falls back to.

Now subverting a web site's overall usefulness is hard. But obviously it isn't impossible.

Some would argue that this blog's"offtopic" posts destroy its overall usefulness, too. For what it's worth.

But I digress....

Now in theory I have a commitment to provide myself and encourage the core teams themselves to provide new, fresh, and relevant content for GoGlobal, though:

• the bulk of the content I was "providing" was my blog links (which thus caused the GoGlobal home page to show new content every day) and those were taken down, as I mentioned;
• the core teams have uniformly opted (beyond the major exception of the huge MUI bump!) to provide no content of their own.

In practice, I have no real site permissions and am not set up for microsoft.con publishing, and haven't been for years. I have not used pubweb (an internal tool one used years ago to use to publish to Microsoft sites and maybe people still do use it) etc. for years, since the last MSKLC update. And I really only ever managed downloads for MSLU and MSKLC. Someone else is the owner of the GoGlobal subweb, and when bug reports come in on the pages I help her resolve the problem when she asks, or at least triage it. So that's all stable enough. If unsatisfying. I suppose I am on track with this GoGlobal commitment, technically, as well as I can.

For the record, there is at least in theory a chance that I might be no longer working at Microsoft later this year, since I will in all likelihood quit if I am given the job owning this mess despite having neither time to do it nor permissions to it, and would likely not be permitted to do what I want to do: globally move everything back when it was -- GlobalDev -- and tell anyone who complains that THEY can own it themselves or they can shut the hell uppolitely nod at my wisdom and leave me alone about it.

I'll let you know how that goes, if anything happens on that front.

The one thing that may be lost in such a move back to the old siteis the localization framework provided by MSDN (if you look you will see that GoGlobal has been localized into several different languages and it follows the MSDN language settings. This is something that may or may not be set to carry over to the old location (I suspect not; the localization methods across all of the ms.com web properties are not all the same). But it may be a question of working well in one language vs. being broken in several, and besides if the site is going to stay as static as it has been, we could just keep the various languages as separate pages and call it a day....

And yes, as I'm sure you have guessed, I am a little crabby about all of this. Duh.

To summarize the problems/issues I see here:

• The immediate bug with pages that do not work, and any associated bugs like the immediate bug that may exist;
• The lack of forwards from the old site from links clearly still in use;
• The lack of 302's in the cases where forwarding links were entered, so search engines can stop "finding" the old content;
• The lack of links to the most commonly required pieces of the site from the home page;
• The utter lack of new content of any kind (if not my blog for whatever reason, then other blogs were written in 2010, at least!);
• The need for a cohesive strategy for dealing with this site, whether it is going to be updated any more or not (the current site is insufficient for both needs);
• A need to consider whether the old site in fact served us better than the new site does (or can);
• What the localization strategy for a largely static site should be, no matter what the final result looks like or where it sits;
• Whether I should consider hosting some of the data on this blog, directly -- making a piece of it an official place to get information.

I threw that last one in because I have been thinking about whether that might be a way to solve the immediate problem related to keyboards and code pages. Perhaps then I might be tasked with doing the keyboard updates again! :-)

Now that I have put all this up, next week I will send mail to the site owner about the problem of the missing pages, with these other suggestions. And I'll be talking to my manager to about how much the status quo bites and whether or not I can and/or should take a more active role in improving the destiny of the site so many know as GlobalDev.

If you agree or disagree or care in any way at all and wish to say what you think about should be done, plesae feel free to say so, either in comments to this blog or by contacting me. If this information helps build a strategy for how things eventually happen then you can be like that Windows 7 commercial and talk about how much you love the site, and that it was your idea!

If you don't care you can say that as well; all data is useful (if no one has any reaction then that too is valuable data!).

John Cowan on 1 Jan 2011 11:26 AM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 1 Jan 2011 5:23 PM:

Alex Cohn on 2 Jan 2011 2:52 PM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 2 Jan 2011 4:24 PM:

Cheong on 2 Jan 2011 6:26 PM:

Mihai on 3 Jan 2011 4:17 PM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 3 Jan 2011 8:25 PM:

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