JayMcCormack.com

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.

Download

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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:

• Documents
• Spreadsheets
• Presentations

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.

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Through a facebook post I managed to get an invite to a service called tripit.com which is still in beta.

There are many services out there that will let you organise your travel with an itinerary. What I specifically like about this though is the ‘email it in’ function.

Here’s how it works:

• Book your travel on the travel website, like orbitz or hotel.com or whatever
• Wait for the email confirmation
• Forward it to a generic tripit.com email address

That’s it!  The result is that the tripit.com engine parses the email, finds out who it came from through the email address and then maps this to an itinerary you have created in your account.  Based on the dates for the booking it puts it directly into the right itinerary automatically.

My family and I are planning a big trip at the end of this year, and so we have all sorts of bookings, the ones that worked smoothly were:

• Alamo car booking
• Holiday Inn booking
• BaySide Hotel booking

It couldn’t figure out:

• Cruise booking - In fact cruises doesn’t seem to be something you can plan yet
• Qantas flights - I would expect that this would be the case, probably towards the bottom of the list of priorities

If you have a need for something like this then let me know, I have 5 invites left.  Right now the service is a little slow in that it’s very ajax heavy and firefox struggles a little.  Also it appears to be in US date format only.  Otherwise, it’s a fantastic tool and worth getting to if you have a busy trip coming up. 

TripIt | We organize your travel

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Great article that shows how to use some simple techniques to do in-cell graphing in Excel.  I find this a really simple way to align data with a graphical presentation of such, sometime it’s just too hard to get the data to align with the information you are graphing when using a true Excel chart.  This appears to be a great little work around.

It uses a REPT function in Excel that I didn’t even know existed.  The purpose of this function is to repeat a string a certain number of times.  The function accepts 2 parameters…

=REPT(string to repeat, time to repeat it)

As is typical in Excel, a string in a function or formula needs to be wrapped in double quotes…

=REPT(”-”,17)

The above would repeat the hyphen 17 times.  Not so useful however replace the hyphen with a bar (or pipe character, it’s the one on the backslash key) and the 17 with a reference to a cell containing the information you want to graph, and you’re all done!

I played with the font sizes a little to get something reasonable. Let me know how you go if you use it.

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Those who know me know that I have to have a new toy to play with most of the time, and right now it’s my new Microsoft mouse.

I bought this mouse 2 weeks ago and have now had the opportunity to have a good play with it.  First off, I love the fact that it is Bluetooth.  I’m really starting to rely on this more and more now as a connection medium for devices and get annoyed when it doesn’t work (which is rare).  I have Bluetooth built into my dell notebook computer and so this mouse is great, no wires, no plug in USB adapters, you just turn it on and start using it. I exclusively hook my phone into my notebook using Bluetooth also.

The second thing I like about this is oddly enough the power switch.  I have had a Microsoft wireless notebook mouse in the past and it’s power switch was controlled by the USB adapter that you fitted in underneath it.  The problem though is that the little switch that the adapter pushes in gets worn out and for the last 3 months or so have been going through batteries with that old mouse as it was typically always on, regardless of the power saving device.  This new one however has as actual power switch on the bottom, nice.

I think the other major feature I like about this mouse is the size.  I’ve grown to really like small mice, I have a Logitech mouse on my desk at home also but my hand gets tired due to the size of the mouse.

This new mouse has a couple of extra buttons which I will probably never really use, however it does a have a cool ‘presenter’ mode.  What this does is disable the left and right mouse buttons and allows you to turn the mouse over and use the buttons on the underside.   There is a forward and back button, an increase and decrease volume button and a button to blank out the screen.  These all work well in PowerPoint as you would expect.  I exclusively use PowerPoint for presentation work so no problems there.

Finally it also has a laser pointer.  I actually bought the mouse the expectation that I would never actually use the laser pointer, it’s a little 1983 isn’t it?  However last week at a technical meeting I used the pointer to highlight different parts of an architecture diagram, so you never know it might just come in handy.

All in all, happy.  Plus I bought it in July and at the time they had a cash back offer of $30.  It’s a little pricey for a mouse, but I probably only buy one about every 2 years or so, so it’s worth the investment for something you’ll like.

Currently Listenning To: Mika - Life In Cartoon Motion by PoLiNi_46 - 10 - Happy Ending

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I’m writing this post using something called Windows Live Writer.  This is one of many new services offered by Microsoft under the new windows live platform.

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.

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