Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

Ok, I built something I am excited about. The one biggest gripe I’ve had with blogs is that it’s often hard to sort and filter the posts to find the posts I’m most interested in. In comes Microsoft Pivot. Microsoft Pivot allows for viewing data in an intuitive filterable manner in a completely visual context. Incredibly cool for filtering images, magazines, or even the magic the gathering card collection. Take that single column blog lists!

My idea last night is to view blogs through Pivot. I set about programming the cXML schema into a series of .Net classes, and then built an input mechanism to build a static cXML file with my blogs postings. It’s still in the early phase of just the roughest information, mainly blog title and descriptions, but given another day of polishing will have additional meta data with appropriate blog links. I also realize how terrible my categories are since the Pivot category filtering is very limited with my junk data input.

Below is a screen shot of the very rough data output I created with cXML for viewing in Microsoft Pivot. Now that I have my framework together I can expand the idea to anything with categories.

I will keep the cXML path displayed in the Pivot screenshot so if you’re interested you can also view the generated blog Pivot output as it goes through the transition to getting cleaned up totally.