X
Business

As Microsoft moves more blogs off its MSDN and TechNet sites, here's how to stay current

Finding Microsoft-authored product and strategy information is becoming increasingly challenging. Here are a few resources that might help.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

For the past year-plus, I have been noticing a number of Microsoft bloggers posting that their blogs were either shutting down or moving to private/custom sites. For those of us who've come to rely on RSS feeds of MSDN Blogs and TechNet Blogs -- the two main Microsoft product-information firehoses --to stay current, this development was more than a bit alarming.

Not all Microsoft blogs are on MSDN or TechNet. Various Microsoft product teams also use a number of different sites to communicate with their customers.

Some, like Windows and Azure, continue to run multiple blogs on the centralized blogs.windows.com and azure.microsoft.com site. There's also a separate Microsoft 365 blog at and a Microsoft Dynamics blog feed. LinkedIn has its own, multiple blog feeds. And Microsoft's GitHub unit runs its own blogging sites.

This month, a bunch of the Microsoft developer blogs will be moving off MSDN and onto a new custom site (URL still yet to be revealed), but Microsoft officials say their current RSS feeds should automatically redirect to the new site.

The shifting Microsoft blog landscape seems to be the result of an ongoing effort by the company to clean up its blog presence. There are some Microsoft blog sites that haven't been updated in years and some with very little reader activity. Regardless of the reasons, it's increasingly tough to keep up.

microsoftblogsmoving.jpg
Credit: Microsoft

A number of Microsoft's blogs are moving and/or already have moved to the Microsoft Tech Community platform. It's somewhat difficult to find the RSS feeds for these blogs. But there is a way to subscribe to individual Tech Community blogs by clicking on the down arrow next to the word "Options" in the right corner of each site and subscribing to the feed. (Thanks to Richard Hay, @WinObs, for the tip on that.)

An easier way to keep up is by using the master RSS subscription feed for all the Microsoft Tech Community blogs. (Yes, this does exist. Thanks to @rpodric on Twitter who somehow magically knew the URL for this.) And if you prefer your blog feeds in OPML form, Richard Hay at ITPro today has you covered.

And for anyone who doesn't already have a favorite RSS reader, I would recommend my personal favorite, NewsBlur.

Editorial standards