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After working with Kentico for some time, I’ve slowly developed a few little tools to help migrate information from our old site to the new Kentico framework.
One of the things that’s a little time consuming in Kentico is creating documents. I’ve decided to use a custom document type for a particular type of content on our new site. The data for this new document type is in a bunch of different tables in the old website and I needed a way to get all that information into the Kentico content tree, and fast.
So… I created a module to do this. It’s kind of simple and doesn’t look too flash but it works (if you follow the rules).
It takes a spreadsheet, uploads it to a temp folder and then creates documents at the specified path in the tree. If you need it, it’s yours to do with as you see fit.
BTW: No warranty provided on this of course.
The code is pretty simple:
1: While dsImport.Read
2: ListBox1.Items.Add(dsImport.Item(0).ToString)
3: ‘add documents
4:
5: nodTemp = New CMS.TreeEngine.TreeNode(“NAS.Card”)
6: nodTemp.NodeName = dsImport.Item(“NodeName”).ToString
7: nodTemp.NodeAlias = dsImport.Item(“NodeName”).ToString
8:
9: For i = 0 To strCols.Length - 1
10: nodTemp.SetValue(strCols(I), dsImport.Item(strCols(I)))
11: Next
12:
13: nodTemp.DocumentCulture = “en-au”
14: nodTemp.Insert(parent.NodeID)
15: End While
The form collects a few things like the document type to create and the name of the columns in the spreadsheet to map to fields in the kentico document. Looking at this at the moment I have left the document type hard coded, but you could easily change this to be driven from the form.
Additionally you’ll see at line 9 I loop through an array, this is derived from a comma separated list of column names to get from the excel sheet. Let me know if you use it, just out of interest.
Google Docs have recently started working with offline functions through the use of Google Gears. Gears is their engine that allows for you to perform some functions while not connected to the Internet and then synchronises when you get a connection again.
I’ve been waiting for this for Gmail for a while. I love the interface for Gmail, but get a little frustrated when I don’t have a connection, an offline version would be great.
Check this out, this must just appeal to a specific generation.
Just a short post, I’ve been using Stock Exchange for ages to get images for presentations and the like. They have a great collection, free (with some conditions) and a nice search engine.
I tend to use this to find symbolic images for PowerPoint presentations I’m preparing. I must admit as a general trend I find myself moving away from bullet slides to great imagery.
I’ve been watching a lot of TED videos recently in an effort to pickup a few things about doing better presentations. While I have picked up a few things (which I’ll talk about here at some stage) I find myself getting caught up in the content of these talks also.
Last night I watched a talk by designer Stefan Sagmeister and his search for what makes him happy. He talked about his life lessons also, which are below:
What a great list!
I need one of these and have decided that I’ll work on this more now.
Have just been playing with a tool called TimeBridge, it’s a meeting planner type application that integrates into Outlook and allows you to setup of a meeting. Sounds simple, but as soon as you add people from multiple companies in multiple time zones it get complex and a down-right waste of time.
Timebridge solves the typical back and forth issue by allowing you to suggest up to 5 time slots from your own outlook calendar and then sending invitations off to the attendees. The attendees then choose the best time slot for them (no registration required) and then once a consensus is agreed the meeting is booked and everyone notified.
It’s a nice solution to a complex problem, and just seems to work. The only thin I’m a little unhappy about is the upsell that happens. “Did you want to book a web conference?” but hey? What did you expect for free?
If you haven’t heard about mahalo.com, go have a look. I personally don’t think much of it but I’m sure it has an audience. Primarily it’s marketed as a human powered search engine. So where Google relies on computations to rank web page search results mahalo gets people to make the same decisions. i can see value in that as long as they have lots of humans (and I think they do).
What interested me tonight though was a search for ‘open office’ at Google, screen shot below.
What surprised me was the mahalo item at the top of the search results, and for a number of reasons:
Now it should be said that I’m not in competition with mahalo in any way, so I have nothing to gain from having a rant except to say that there must be some incredible deal between mahalo and Google to make this actually happen.
Normally Wikipedia appears at the top of these search results, a community driven non-profit, and as much as I don’t think much of the Wikipedia content at times I do recognise that that content is written by the people, you and I.
So how did mahalo get there?
Update: Just realised that this appears in my google search results only because I have installed a sharing addon for firefox… there’s an option for showing the mahalo top 7 in the results. Why didn’t I see it before now I wonder.
I plan on writing a few posts over the next couple of weeks around Google docs, Google’s online document system, but to get started wanted to talk briefly about what the application is attempting to do.
If you think about the average document what normally springs to mind is something like a letter or a proposal and typically you would use a word processor to write it up. Something like Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer are the normal tools you think of too. If you think a little harder though about the actual process you use for assembling a document you may be in a position where you need to move the document around your organisation/friends/family to finalise it… everybody needs to put their 2c in. The problem this presents is that you need to manage this process, you need to send it to each person and then get their responses back into the document. If your organisation is anything like ours then everyone does it in their own way too, some people just change the document, other’s might ‘mark up’ the changes for approval. Some people might add comments inside the document and finally others might just respond in an email with the changes they want made, ahhhhhhhh!
Google docs is designed to make this process of collaboration easier. When you are in a situation where more than one person is building the document then you can open up or share your document with other people and all work on it at the same time. Thankfully Google takes care of knowing who changed what and allowing you to track back through the changes.
It does by providing a web based interface to these tools, so using only a web browser you can open up a document, make changes, save and close.
Right now Google offer three different document types:
So your basics are covered.
Now some people talk about this being a replacement for Microsoft Office, I just don’t think that’s the case. The functionality in these applications is just not rich enough yet to compete with the offline tools. You get the ability to do a lot of what you can do in things like Word, but not enough to through away Word altogether. I think it’s a matter of the right tool for the right job.
If you don’t already have a Google account, you can get one right now and it’s free, and then you can start working online and sharing your documents.
OK, so I find something cool, in this case Atlas, the AJAX framework for .NET 2.0 and I jump right in and start wasting precious time.
Time to slow things down. I need to figure out exaclty what I want this system to do, how it should work. So in an effort to do so I need to figure out the objectives:
The search engine friendly part is probably one of the more important objectives. Most content management systems I’ve seen have some odd mechanism of producing URLs. Like http://www.yadayada.com/index.asp?id=118273&sec=home. Horrendous to say the list. The issue is two-fold, the first being that it is filled with parameters and the second being that is doesn’t allow for any keywords in the url. An example of a good url is something liek http://www.newagestore.com/free/tarot . Google likes it and users like it.
The closest I’ve seen to this is dotnetnuke which has the ability to replace the parameters with slashes, however it only solves one part of the problem, the urls are still not pretty.
One thing that has also struck me which I find missing in alot of content management systems is a true testing environment. It would be nice to be able to ‘publish’ the output to a test site, play with it and make sure it works, prior to pushing it out to the real world.
newagestore.com gets 2.5 million page views per month across almost 200,000 visitors. What this means is that it’s more important now than ever to ‘get it right first time’ when dealing with content.