Man, what a wild ride the last couple of months have been.  As usual we're going full tilt, building out the code that drives the Evangelism Network and the content that keeps people coming back for more. :-)  

It has been a while since I've blogged about what's going on in my life and there has been plenty going on at work and at home.  I figured I'd update you all about work, my life at home is pretty well documented thanks to Flickr and Facebook.  Thanks for the nudges folks, let's see if I can stay on the blogging saddle this time.

For those not following along at home, at work I lead the team that creates The Evangelism Network.  This is made up off five distinct communities for Microsoft, we have 8 for students, 9 for developers, 10 for technology enthusiasts, Mix Online for Web Agencies and TechNet Edge for the IT Professional. This of course all began with our first born child Channel 9.

I can honestly say that when Brynn, Charles, David, Lenn, Sanjay, Vic and I (always have to make sure I give everyone credit ;-)) set out to create Channel 9, we never dreamt that it would result in a network of social media communities. We were just happy to get the site live.  Today millions of customers visit these communities to get the latest news from Microsoft and connect with their peers. It has been an amazing thing to be a part of.

One thing that has been equally rewarding (as much so as the early days of Channel 9) is watching the pieces of our code base that drives these sites come together. As I've blogged previously, we started a build out last spring of the Evangelism Network code. We started basically from the ground, using the code we wrote for Channel 10 as the base.  The goal being to create something that is simple, localized, scales and is instrumented. We also created a set publishing tools that handle encoding, workflow and uploading to our content delivery network. Last, but not least we wanted a templating system so all sites could look different, as necessary.  We really didn't want the sites to be cookie cutters. 

The great news is, we now have Channels 8, 10, Mix Online and TechNet Edge all running on the same code and our publishing system is alive.  You can't imagine how nice it is to have the ability to have bug fixes shared across all these sites. The Evangelism Network grew up pretty organically, so prior to this we actually had four separate versions of the code running. Its a big deal for us as all, to have these now unified as we're a real small team.  I consider myself very lucky to have such a great development team behind all of this with Duncan Mackenzie, Erik Porter, David Shadle, Mike Sampson and Grace Francisco all pulling together to make it happen. 

So what about 9? When is it getting the big update? We're close, so close we can taste it to having 9 moved over as well. Not ready to give the exact date yet, but it will be soon.

On the content side, things are going well too. I often tell our team that Rocketboom got away with a white HTML page and an embedded Quicktime player, so if we're doing this investment in infrastructure our content better be amazing. The last month I think has been our best month ever for content on the Network, it really feels like we're firing on all cylinders in the content department.

Some of my favorites pieces of content recently have included This Week on Channel 9 series which is a weekly show highlighting industry news and key moments from that week's Channel 9 interviews, Tina's what life at Microsoft is really like, a TechNet Edge piece on how to measure your PC power consumption, Max building a PC and finally Nishant's sitt down with Kirupa Chinnathambi who runs the hugely popular Flash and  web development community named after him.

So lots going on, plenty more news to come. Let's see if I can go a week without blogging. ;-)