Stripping down your Microsoft Windows Life Spaces space to being only a blog

One of the biggest complaints about using Microsoft Windows Live Spaces for "professional" blogging is all of the junk that you get with a "space" compared to a traditional blog. Supposedly you can manually strip off pieces of that junk, but I just found an easier way to get the blog and only the blog.

Here is my Microsoft Windows Live Spaces space URL:

http://jackkrupansky.spaces.live.com/

If you go there, the first things you will notice (or be bombarded by) before you even get down to my blog itself are:

1. The big wide advertising banner (that happens to be empty when I view my space right now)
2. I have no photo, so you see... a dummy
3. Details of my profile that you probably don't care about
4. I have no photo albums
5. I have no music lists
6. My custom list is empty

And then, finally, buried down in the middle of all of that junk you eventually find my blog itself.

Who needs all of that junk for a clean and simple blog?

OTOH, use the following alternative URL to get only my blog:

http://jackkrupansky.spaces.live.com/blog/

Presto! All of the "space" junk is gone (except for the big wide advertising banner which happens to have a big white empty box when I view it right now) and all you see if my blog and nothing but my blog. Yes, there are a few other links, including back to the overall space, but this is a dramatic improvement.

So, just be sure to tack on "/blog" (one slash after ".com") to the end of your Live Spaces URL when you give out your blog URL and you will no longer have to be so embarrassed about using Live Spaces for blogging. Sure, there are plenty of other improvements that Live needs before I will personally switch to it for my main blogging, but at least they are one step closer to winning me over.

Suggestion to the Live Spaces team: Add an option so that I can optionally flip the relationship between the space and the blog so that the raw URL will take the reader to the raw blog and tack on "/space" to the URL to get directly to the space. Always allow "/blog" and "/space" (which you currently do), but allow me to toggle the default for the raw URL. Thanks in advance for implementing this valuable (and necessary) feature.

BTW, I am simultaneously emailing this post to my Blogging blog on Blogger and my Live Spaces blog from Outlook Express.

-- Jack Krupansky