You’ll need your bit.ly username and API key and then need to grab the URL for the bit.ly API endpoint for link shortenning (below), and then merge it all together…

The bit.ly API url (adapted for tweetie) is

http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version=2.0.1&longUrl=%@&login=aaa&apiKey=bbb

Replace the aaa with your bit.ly username and the bbb with your bit.ly API key.  Then copy the whole thing and paste it into the “Custom…” part of the tweetie settings screen under Link Shortening.  I ended up putting it all together on my PC and then sending it in an email to myself which I then copy/pasted on my phone.

Good Luck!

So if you had to buy some stuff, what would you buy?

Here my list:

• Roboform – US$29.95.  The best password manager, form filler and instant search builder available.  One master password for all your other websites is a dream.  I just counted them up… Roboform is actually managing logins to 457 websites for me!  457!  I probably only use about 30 regularly but still.  Download Buy
• Toodledo Pro Subscription – US$14.95.  As far as todo list management goes this really is a great product, so simple to use and always growing with new features and functions and they just concentrated on doing todo lists well rather than branching out in other directions.  Now you could if you want to get away with using the free version however I only discovered recently that the free one hides your completed tasks after 1 week plus doesn’t include any of the Goal functionality, scheduling functions or stats.  In addition to the website they also have integration to a Firefox plug in and even IM.  Signup Buy
• Toodledo iPhone App – AU$3.99.  An obvious addition to the toodledo pro subscription for todo list management.  The biggest issues for me in managing a todo list is having it available and up to date all the time… and having it on my phone is a bonus.  Instant synchronisation over 3G and Wifi plus the ability to rapidly add tasks makes this a must have.  Of course you still need an iPhone which is not included in the $50.  Buy

So in fact you’ve only spent US$48.18… money left over!

What’s the best software you’ve paid for in the “Under $30” category?

Regardless, here are the 5 keyboard shortcuts that save my alot of time:

1. Multi-Line text in a cell – ALT+Enter. This is like hitting enter in a word processor to make a new line, but in the same cell.  It’s good for column headings that are a little long and you want to control the wrapping manually.
2. Autosum – ALT + =. This is great for adding in a SUM function under a bunch of numbers.  If you go to a cell directly under a column of numbers and then hit this short cut key it will type the SUM function for you and make an assumption about the cells to add, you can then select the right cells if it didn’t make the right selection, or just keep what it selected and then hit Enter to accept the formula.
3. Quick Formatting – CTRL + SHIFT + 3/4/5.  I use this most often for formatting dates and dollars.  Having highlighted the cells you want to format you can then hit CTRL + SHIFT + 3 or 4 or 5.
   - CTRL + SHIFT + 3 (or #) is to format dates in dd-mmm-yy format.
   - CTRL + SHIFT + 4 (or $) is to format dollars as currency with two decimal points.
   - CTRL + SHIFT + 5 (or %) is to format as a percentage.
4. Select a Row or Column – CTRL + SPACE or SHIFT + SPACE. This is useful if you need to select a whole row or column, or multiple rows and columns.  Move into any cell in the row or column you need selected and then press CTRL + SPACE to highlight columns or SHIFT + SPACE to highlight rows.   Once selected you can then hold down the shift key and use the arrow keys to extend your selection as required.
5. Autofill – CTRL + d or CTRL + r.  In this case you select a group of cells and then press CTRL + d to fill all cells with what ever is in the top cell down, or CTRL + r to fills cells to the right.

Got more that I should know about?  Let me know in the comments.

The computer is actually primarily used by my 5 year old daughter for playing games on nick junior and other websites.  Most of these involve some sort of drawing and printing combination and she is a little upset that she hasn’t been able to print like she used to be able to.

I think the key challenge has been that the printer we have on our network doesn’t have Mac drivers so I have been trying different ways of trying to connect it through post script generic drivers and other mechanisms.  It’s actually a Lexmark X8350 and despite this particular problem I will not be buying a Lexmark again, it’s all a little too plasticy and the quality could be better, but for the price we paid it does a reasonable job.  So with no native printer driver and various attempts at getting to it though other mechanisms I found a somewhat simple, albeit clunky, solution.

So here’s what I have setup now…

• New email address created, specifically for this purpose
• Old computer that I’m using for video rendering on all the time now
• Installation of Namtuk.com’s “Automatic Print Email” software

So how does printing now work?  When my daughter wants to print from the Mac she opens the print dialog box as normal, and from the bottom left of that box chooses PDF and then Send Email.  She puts in the dedicated email address (only one letter required to be pressed) and then hits send.  The Automatic Print Email software polls this specific Gmail account at 1 minutes intervals and is configured to then download the message through POP3 and then print the attachments from any message to the network printer.

Horrible, clunky, but works.  And most importantly my 5 year old daughter is happy she can print again!

It’s pretty simple: sending someone a commercial message when you do not have their permission to do so is spam. It’s a message they did not ask for or request.

The challenge of course is trying to follow the right people and then make sure you are not getting a stream full of SPAM.  There is a way I’ve discovered though that tends to alleviate this issues.  My experience is that spammers are using automation tools to send tweets to twitter on regular intervals.  It’s automated SPAM!  What I have discovered though is that most of these tweets come through the twitter API and the source of these tweets are indicated in the stream as a source called ‘web’.

Now ‘web’ also means someone who went to the twitter web site and updated their status, now to be honest anyone using twitter like that is perhaps someone I don’t necessarily want to hear from, so doing the following filters alot of the automated tweets as well as those using the web to update.

Now to do this you’ll need TweetDeck, an excellent tool for managing your relationship with twitter streams, more on this later.  Then you’ll need to modify your filter on the ‘all friends’ column by adding an exclusion for the source of  ‘web’.

Like so…

1. Backups and double checking backups all round
2. I took a backup of the database and then restored it into a new database
3. I took a complete copy of the site on the file system of the server and pointed it at my new database in the web.config
4. Created a new site in IIS to point to this new folder with a subdomain of staging.newagestore.com

   At this time I now had basically a working replica of the site ready for upgrade.  This enabled me to work on the upgrade (which I had done locally first anyway just to check everything) without disrupting the live site.

5. Upgrade the database using the upgrade script provided

   Initially when I tried this on my local system I found a few problems.  Primarily these problems related to custom indexes I had added to a couple of tables in an attempt to increase performance.  On my test system I removed these custom indexes and was able to upgrade smoothly, so on the production server I dropped these custom indexes prior to the script being run.  It ran without errors, and at this stage I haven’t put the custom indexes back onto the tables… all seems ok for the moment.

6. Copy the new files into the new folder structure as per the instructions.

   This was actually a little messy.  The instructions say to do things like “delete the web parts directory”  the problem of course with this approach is that any custom web parts that you might have built will be wiped out if that is where you happened to store them.  I found that I had custom code in the app_code directory, cmsdesk/modules directory and cmswebparts directory.  So I of course copied this code out first, then deleted folders as per the instructions.

7. Loaded the site to let the upgrade to the database occur.  All smooth.

   When I did this step on my local system it appeared to get through OK however none of the new web parts etc were available in the CMS after the upgrade.  This did not happen on the production system, it all went fine.  So on the test system/local I went into the admin area and ran the import for the 3.1a to 4.0 as per the instructions and everything then came together ok.

8. Added back in my custom code.
9. Turned off the old site in IIS and turned on the new one and then changed the host header to www in the new site (instead of staging) and then changed the license key in the new site also.

So the result is an upgraded CMS website.  The average visitor is not going to notice the difference… yet!

The key reason for our upgrade was to take advantage of the new social networking functions, we were licensed for the enterprise version of Kentico and so are granted a license for the new social networking version of Kentico.  We haven’t turned on these tool on the site yet, we are just playing with a few different ways to bring them into the fold.

A few things to be aware for the upgrade:

• I had a couple of pieces of code that called the ‘executenonquery’ method of the data connection object.  This appears to be gone in 4.0, so in my case I simply converted these to ‘executequery’ with no real impact.
• Make sure you have all your license keys before hand.  I have a license for the main domain, plus subdomains of local, test and staging.  So I have few options for working things out before getting too stuck.
• The menu web part and the breadcrumb web parts appear to have a new property called ‘encode name’.  Maybe it was there in previous version and I just never saw it.  Anyway it doesn’t appear to have been updated correctly during the upgrade as some instances of this part have this ticked and other do not.  I had to go and manually chance the config of that part on those templates, no big deal but didn’t discover it until today.  The problem was that some of my breadcrumbs were being rendered as <span>divination</span> – blah – blah and of course I didn’t want the <span> tags visible.
• The standard blogpostpreview transformation seems to be missing one of the function calls that counts the number of comments for each post.  I have temporarily removed that element from the transformation just to get the blog posts working.
• One of the big changes in version 4.0 is module separation.  Kentico have moved around the structure of modules in the folder structure so that they are isolated from other parts of the site structure.  This is a better design but a little difficult to adapt the 3 custom modules I have built into this new architecture.  At the moment I still have my custom code in the old places and will need to move it all around when I can.

So in all a fairly smooth upgrade. Oh.. one more thing.  The sample community site that has all the social networking functionality is pretty cool, however there doesn’t appear to be a simple way of reproducing this functionality in a new site.  Unlike creating a blog which is a pretty quick process where Kentico does all the hard work of creating pages and webparts and configuring those, creating a social networking site appears to be something you have to do by hand from scratch.  I have a support call into them to see if there is a better way.

There’s a nice post here that talks about the services available. But it begs the question of whether Microsoft if catching up on all this web2.0 stuff.

Above is a screen cap of the windows live writer application.  At first I was confused in that I had to actually download this application.  How weird? Then I thought “how weird that I thought downloading something was weird”.  I guess I’m just so used to working with online applications that the concept of having to download an application to make a blog posting seemed foreign to me.  But having downloaded it I kinda see where Microsoft is heading.

This represents one of a series of tools that you can plug into other applications or use independently.  I must say that I’m actually really impressed with this writer, it has a ‘Save draft offline’ function which is nice, and when I first used it it walked me through a simple wizard where it connected to my blog and found out what sort of blog it was (wordpress in my case) and then actually showed me the editing window using the CSS of my blog.  Cool!

There a bunch of ‘insert’ functions to the right that I guess will enable me to add more plugins to the posting, here’s a map as an example:

I guess in general I have seen a few things Microsoft have done recently that show me that they are finally catching on to some of these concepts, it’s a shame that it seems to take so long to get these things up and running however.

More to come on this topic.

UPDATE: You know Microsoft is changing when they build and publish a ‘Blog This’ add in for Firefox.

I don’t see these sort of applications on the iPhone, in fact this article and video report to show some of the business capabilities of the phone, but i struggle to recall the last time i had to zoom into a photo or see the cover art to a sinatra album during a business meeting.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great device and I want one.  But not for work!

On my current phone I can schedule a meeting with a colleague or organise emails into different folders and then synch that back up with outlook on my desktop (and subsequently exchange).

The piece I might be missing is the equivalent business tools offered on the Mac environment.  Do they exist?  Is there an exchange style server for the Mac?