christine ibbitson's blog

Blogging Software and Blog Basics

Interested in starting a blog? Not quite sure what publishing tool you should use?

The University of Southern California: Online Journalism Review has written an article called Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool?

The article explains the differnce between a hosted blog '"where all data and the publishing interface reside on the server of the blogging software company" and an independent blog "software that must be downloaded from the blogging software company and installed on a Web server."

Also included in the article: general information on blogging jargon, appearance and layout, tools, cost and launch time.

As a companion to the article, The Blog Software Comparison Chart outlines different standard features that allows users to compare various blog software such as Blogger, TypePad and Movable Type.

2005 Top Google Seaches

Google shares their top searches for 2005 in their 2005 year-end Zeitgeist.

                   

Google.com - Top Gainers of 2005 1. Myspace 2. Ares 3. Baidu 4. wikipedia 5. orkut	Google News - Top Searches in 2005 1. Janet Jackson 2. Hurricane Katrina 3. tsunami 4. xbox 360 5. Brad Pitt
Froogle - Top Searches in 2005 1. ipod 2. digital camera 3. mp3 player 4. ipod mini 5. psp<

Visit Google Zeitgeist to view results for; World Affairs, Nature, Moives, Celebrities and Phenomena.

SharePoint CSS Reference Guide

MSDN has a set of three articles to help with the customization of SharePoint Sites and Portals. Developers can learn ways you can customize a SharePoint site and an area; manage users, sites, and templates; change the structure of pages in a site; manage user access; and optimize style sheets.

Customizing SharePoint Sites and Portals: Using Templates and Site Definitions, Part 2 outlines how to create and edit a site using templates and site definitions.

Article three, Customizing SharePoint Sites and Portals: Style Sheet Class Reference Tables, Part 3 provides a Web Part compatibility and style sheet class reference tables.

PageOpener Widget: Test Sites/Files in Different Browsers

PageOpener is a Dashboard widget that allows web developers to easily test thier files in various browsers. Just drag & drop a file or a url on it, select the browsers you want open the file and click GO to open it. Instruction Tip: Once you have installed PageOpener, click on the i in the lower right corner to flip to the back of the widget. Next, to add browsers to the list,  use Finder to locate the browser application, while the application is selected click on your defined keyboard shortcut to open your dashboard widgets. Drag the application to the right side of the PageOpener widget. If you try and drag it to the list area, it will not work.

OS X Icons

Bored with the default OS X icons? Just want to add some fun to the desktop? Check out PIXEL GIRL . Some of the themes include; cartoons, tools, food, animals or anime. You name it they probably got it. There are over 400 to chose from. No worries if you aren't using OS X, there are plenty of XP icons to choose from too.

 

CSS dotted borders in SharePoint

One obstacle to over come in Internet Explorer is that it incorrectly shows dashed borders instead of dotted borders. To hack around this issue, create an image 2px by 2px with a single dot in the lower left corner.

Add the following rule to your stylesheet:

 

  .className {
                  margin: 0;
                  padding: 0;
                  border-bottom: 1px dotted #HexValueOfDot;
                }

Browsers, like Mozilla that are capable of implementing a dotted line will adhere to the above CSS rule. To apply the dotted line in Internet Explorer, add the following rule below it.

 

  * html .className {
                  background: url(/image/css-dotted-line.gif) repeat-x bottom;
                  padding: 1px;
                  border-bottom: none;
                  }

Internet Explorer requires a height value to apply the background image, however when you add height: 1px; Internet Explorer ignored the specified 1px. To work around this issue, the padding contains the height value therefore not allowing Internet Explorer to change the size.

CSS Browser & Opperating Rules Chart

To help your CSS to be cross-browser and platform compliant, Centricle.com has created a great quick reference chart that outlines CSS rules and if they are compatible to specific operating systems and browsers.

To assist readability of the chart, users can turn on an interactive highlight that changes the colour of the rules for the selected CSS rule results.

HTML Cheat Sheet

Dave Child of ilovejackdaniels.com has taken the time put together a HTML Character Entities cheat sheet listing the various character codes in HTML. The cheat sheet contains the actual code, the character itself and a description of the character. To learn more and download the sheet, visit ilovejackdaniels.com. It's available in PNG or PDF.

ColorBlender Colour Palette Tool

Composing great colour palettes can be difficult. ColorBlender has created a free online tool for colour matching and palette design.

All you need to do is enter a single core colour and ColorBlender will build a 6-colour palette based around your entry.

No clue where to start? ColorBlender will load a random blend to get you on your way.

Each of the  ColorBlender swatch provides the HTML and RGB numbers for your convincence. Once you find a palette you like, you can download a Photoshop Colour Table (.ACT), Illustrator (.ESP) or name it, save it and email it to yourself.

It is easy to use, great results. Find out for yourself.

SharePoint CSS

One of the frustrating issues when customizing a SharePoint Portal is that not all classes called within the templates are located on one stylesheet. Although, logically you would think that one stylesheet would contain pertinent styles but it is not the case. One must flip back and forth between OWS.CSS and SPS.CSS and the OWSMAC.css file if you are attempting to make SharePoint cross-browser compliant.

Out of the box the OWS.CSS and SPS.CSS stylesheets are more then 25K each. They share a large number of styles. That’s is a lot of classes as well as file size for the user to download.

Sometimes it is suggested to use a custom stylesheet – potentially just a copy of SPS.CSS/OWS.CSS.  This will then always override the default SharePoint styles and additionally will be impervious to being overwritten by an update patch. This method concerns me, due to possible large file sizes. Do users really want to load potentially 100kb of CSS?