I discovered an interesting problem.  Any time I come to Orcmid's Live HideOut and I am not signed in, the page serves up and hangs.  The common feature of the hang is that the advertising banner at the top of the page is empty -- there's a big blank there.

This makes it difficult to view my Live Spaces site to verify how it appears to visitors.  (I trust that visitors don't all hang on arrival!)

So I have to manually shut down the browser, or else wait for the not-responding message to come up so I can kill it from there.  I'm currently logged out too.  I wonder what happens when Live Writer attempts to launch the site to show me the results of my posting.

Later: No, the page still comes up with an indication that I am in an Unknown Zone (mixed) and there is nothing in the top ad banner.  Funny, it looks like a security and privacy settings problem.  Definitely funny.

Oddly, I could use the "Edit your space" link in Live Writer to get to a page that did serve up properly.  I then was able to log in.  Now maybe everything will work.  Let's take a look.

Still Later: Well, the launch from within Live Writer worked just fine, even though the site doesn't show me as signed in. I have a theory ... No, that wasn't it.  One more thing to try ... and that wasn't it either.  I have no idea why the problem has now disappeared.

Later than that:  It did it again.  I have no idea what the pattern is.  I will endeavor to stay logged-on to the site as much as possible.

[Update 2007-09-10 I finally repaired it. Operating on the hint from Yuji that it was probably one of my modules, I finally disabled my personal likely suspect: the Radio plug-in that shows my Pandora station list.  I figured it could also be my list of movies, but that seems too popular to be the likely culprit.  Since I "hid" the radio module, I have not been able to cause the page to crash.  If that holds up, I'll be happy enough.  It just means that my station list is visible only on Facebook, which is some sort of karma thing for Windows Live Spaces, it seems to me.
 Update 2007-08-29 This is getting serious.  The crashing of IE7 can happen on any page visit or refresh.  For example, I just went to the Movie List to see the details and then used the back button to come to my main page here.  And IE7 hung.  According to my friend Yuji, in a comment below, IE7 crashed on him too, and Firefox doesn't crash but it shows the page as continuously serving up.  It might be one of my modules, but I am more suspicious of the ad server, which doesn't serve up anything when the page crashes.  Fortunately this blog is an experiment, but it is very annoying to have to shut down the browser, report it to Microsoft, and then re-open the browser (which usually works the second time).]

I already see that the Live Spaces and Live Writer combination is a wonderful way to easily prepare and post blogs with images, text, and other wonderful things.  The ability to populate modules and to perform other customizations very easily is also commendable.

If I had to choose between a Blogspot-hosted blog and a Live Spaces blog, there is no doubt what I would do and what I recommend to others who are willing to have a blog with content in someone's silo: Live Spaces is more fun and is easier to monkey with. 

My "serious" blogs are hosted on sites that I control and back up, so that the content is in my custody.  Even though I use blogger handling the posts, archiving, and creation of the RSS (Atom) feeds, the final materials are all on server accounts that I have control over.  That has a number of advantages for me and it is the only way I want to place serious content on the Web.

The restriction on involvement here is the same as the one I impose on myself on Facebook: I shall not create any content that I am unwilling to have completely disappear at some point in the future.  The tie-breaker in favor of Live Spaces is that the content is visible on the open web and I don't have to induce anyone to be here too (although having a Windows Live ID may be necessary to interact in certain ways, not much differently than via Blogger).  Of course there is no presence and activity river about my friends and contacts here, although I suspect that may change.  It is one more reason I am sticking around.

Appropriately, my throw-away content is going to be about the Windows Live properties and my experience with those and the related software.

I can make it so easy to incorporate images in my main blogs, I won't be so tempted to spend so much time here.  I shall see how much help LiveWriter can provide.

It seemed to me that Windows Live Writer would be optimized for Windows Live Spaces, just as my Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000 has extra smoothness and operability with Windows Live Messenger (or perhaps vice versa).

It was with great anticipation that I fired up my Live Writer 1.0 (beta) and selected Windows Live Spaces for a new blog to author:

You can see what Live Writer favors here.  All of my choices to this point have been for "Another weblog service."  Those work well, but I expect this to be special, especially with the ability to upload images and other goodies.  I'm all set for my new Live Spaces blog to be set up so I can take it for a spin.

  Oh my.  What can possibly be going on here?  If I follow the link, I do get to my Live Spaces page.  That is the URL that shows up in the IE 7.0 address bar too.  I start wondering if my having to create a different nickname has anything to deal with this.

While I am thrashing back and forth in search of a straw to grasp, I see a little message that says I need to give my Live Space a web address for certain features to work.   So I find out that I can be http://orcmid.spaces.live.com.  I set that up.  And then adding the Weblog Account with that URL simply works.  I'm in business.  And I can stop playing Johnny River's "Secret Agent Man" in my head.

Oddly, Internet Explorer does not detect any RSS feed for the My Spaces blog and I had to look it up and enter it manually into RssBandit.  I do that so I can see what my own feed looks like.

There's a little tweaking to have images show up well, and I am still experimenting there.  Oh, and there is one more bonus on the Live Writer - Live Spaces axis of nepotism harmonization.  Using "Another weblog service," the features end with "View your space."  None of the other goodies are available.  Narcissist that I am, I will be clicking the little stats button a great deal, for a while.  Hmm, I wonder if I can get a ClustrMap onto my Live Spaces presence. 

- orcmid

[Update 2007-08-29: My "axis of nepotism" slam was uncalled for.  In a comment below (sorry, no permalink), Microsoft's Joe Cheng points out that the Live Writer plug-in features for space-specific functions are available to all web log providers, as announced with the Live Writer Beta 2 (which I am running).    I also want to point out that it is normal for Microsoft to produce applications that serve as illustrations and encouragement for the adoption of functionality by others.  This goes back to the original Windows Notepad and Cardfile, and it continues with the sidebar gadgets on Vista today.  Finally, I don't see any way to edit a post at my Windows Spaces blog page, but I can do it from LiveWriter, which is very cool.  Being able to monkey with the HTML in LiveWriter is also valuable.]

I went to Windows Live Messenger to see whether the Live Spaces cid that I was told applied to me was different than this one.

I used the connection to "my space" and, unfortunately, it brought me right back here.  I fooled around signing in and out, but none of that made any difference.

Yes, I did set up Windows Live Writer for posting to this blog.  See the purty picture?

So here I am, cid-33894f6489994ba7.  Who knew?

1. One challenge is to use Windows Live Writer with this blog.  Maybe I can put up images easier than with my self-hosted Blogger blogs. 
     
2. Another challenge is to see if I get to be orcmid here and not run afoul of the Live properties bug that insists I can't be orcmid (so they call me orcmid1 or something) because there is another one.  Hey, that's me, dork!
      
3. And then there's wanting to see how this will open up as a social network.  I admire Dare Obasanjo's themes on this topic, but I find it a little difficult to grok the magical association of this endeavor with those ideals.
     
4. I wonder if I could associate a URL that I own with this place.  I bought (well, have a lease with option to extend) orcmid.tv and it would be nice to have a special place for that.

And I must do something about the color scheme.  Pink is just not my color, you know. 

There are other things that have me go ickkk about Windows Live too, but if Herb Sutter can stand it, why can't I?

 - orcmid