Dillors Croft

The Crisis of Credit Visualized.

matt.perry — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:12:00 +0000

Very nice explanation of why we are all in the mire at the moment. Doesn't make it any easier to take in that no matter how you managed your money this mess is the fault of the bankers and the regulators.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Twitter – Some people just don’t get it.

matt.perry — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:55:02 +0000

It’s becoming fairly easy to say you either get Twitter, the online micro-blogging service, or you don’t but rarely does anyone take the time to actually explain it to those not in the know. I’ve been an avid Twitter watcher for nearly a year but heard about it back in May 2007. I did take a look at the service around that time but didn't understand the impact of what they were doing and I admit I ignored it then.

Why do I review my Twitter timeline 10 times more often than email? Simple. It’s a global conversation about the topics I’m interested in.

To the people who deride Twitter with comments about not wanting to know what you had for lunch, I do see you point. However, Twitter is so much more than that if it ever was that at all. Pick a subject and go to http://search.twitter.com Enter the subject and click search. What you are seeing is the live web not an archive of web sites, however recent, it’s what people are talking about all around the globe about your subject at this precise moment in time.

You cannot get a better understanding about trends and topics that are important right now than a search on Twitter. This was immediately brought home to me with the recent plane crash in the Hudson river. I was made aware of the crash before any news channel simply with a pop-up bubble at the bottom of my browser.

There is a certain addiction about not wanting to miss out on the conversation if you are away from a pc or mobile for a while but I’m just as addicted to football/soccer forums and news sites and I wish they were more accessible like Twitter.

What’s all the stuff about following and being followed? Again this is simple……

I’m interested in certain topics so I searched for them and found the most vocal and importantly interesting people talking about the subject. I followed their comments and when I felt knowledgeable enough I added my own thoughts often directly to the main voices. Chances are they like what they see and follow you. You quickly form part of the community and lots of people follow you. You then have a strong voice.

Once you have a voice and getting followers is important you can use Twitter to full effect. Ask questions, pose questions and use the global nature of the conversation to improve your knowledge about any subject you desire.

Rightly or wrongly Twitter can make or break a subject, company or person. Barack Obama famously used Twitter during his campaign. Equally an off the cuff remark from Stephen Fry about a hand held Espresso device has catapulted handpresso.com to the top of the trends in the last 3 hours. Who knows how many orders they’ve taken.

Twitter isn't just another social media site like Facebook it’s a whole new way of communicating and if companies don’t embrace it they are going to feel very disconnected with their customers.

If you want to talk to me about how Twitter can be integrated into you organisation and your web site give me a shout.

Follow me on http://twitter.com/dillorscroft

Umbraco Action Handler

matt.perry — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:21:00 +0000

I had quite a common requirement with a current Umbraco project I'm working on. Each page can have an infinite number of banner ads on the right hand column of the screen. Easiest way is to create a new document type for each banner item and allow them to be added as sub pages of the main text page. In this particular web site each text page can have its own sub text pages so you end up with a nice tree structure of homepage, child pages and grand-child pages.

If each of these pages can have banner items the visual representation of the tree in the Umbraco manager pages becomes very difficult to understand.

What I needed was a container folder in the tree to place all the banner ads so they don't get mixed up with the text pages.

When expanded you can see the banner items

This necessitated creating the banner 'container' sub-folder automatically each time a new text page was created.

The simplest way to achieve this is to use Umbraco Action Handlers

All the code is shown below but the main part of the Action Handler which is simply a Class Library dumped in the bin folder of the Umbraco site.

We are only interested in trapping the event fired when a page is create(d) otherwise leave the function.

// Only work with create event

if (action.Alias != "create") return true;

Similarly we are only interested in the Text Page document type

// Only work with Text Page docuemnt types
if (documentObject.ContentType.Alias != "Text Page") return true;

Create a new document of type banner container and base the location of the current documentID.

Document bannerItem = null;

bannerItem = Document.MakeNew("Banners", DocumentType.GetByAlias("Banner Container"), documentObject.User, documentObject.Id);

I didn't want this container folder showing up in the navigation or any sitemap so I had to set some properties and then save the object.

            bannerItem.getProperty("umbracoNaviHide").Value = "1";
            bannerItem.getProperty("siteMapHide").Value = "1";
            bannerItem.Save();

That's it.....simple but very useful for creating a specific structure of sub-page when creating a new content node.

Full Code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

using umbraco.BusinessLogic.Actions;
using umbraco.BusinessLogic.console;
using umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web;

namespace UmbracoWebsite

{
    public class BannerHandler : IActionHandler
    {
        #region IActionHandler Members

        public bool Execute(Document documentObject, umbraco.interfaces.IAction action)
        {
            // Only work with create event
            if (action.Alias != "create") return true;

// Only work with Text Page docuemnt types
if (documentObject.ContentType.Alias != "Text Page") return true;

Document bannerItem = null;

            bannerItem = Document.MakeNew("Banners", DocumentType.GetByAlias("Banner Container"), documentObject.User, documentObject.Id);
            bannerItem.getProperty("umbracoNaviHide").Value = "1";
            bannerItem.getProperty("siteMapHide").Value = "1";
            bannerItem.Save();

return true;

}

        public string HandlerName()
        {
            return "BannerHandler";
        }

        public umbraco.interfaces.IAction[] ReturnActions()
        {
            return new umbraco.interfaces.IAction[] { new umbraco.BusinessLogic.Actions.ActionNew() };
        }

#endregion

}
}

iPod refresh coming soon?

matt.perry — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 11:51:50 +0000

Kevin Rose has posted a short video on the upcoming iPod changes over the next three weeks. Apple looks to distance the iPhone from the iPod range in terms of price so expect to see across the board price cuts.

Interestingly the next incarnation of the MacBook Pro looks to have integrated Blueray support. No word on if this is OSX only or wether Bootcamp drivers for Vista will exist.

Apologies....

matt.perry — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:18:36 +0000

Sorry about doing this but I often use this blog just to note down interesting links that I find.

Kevin Rose of Digg.com fame tweeted about this site and I think it's quite interesting. How would a social network look like if it was all mapped out? Who speaks to each other in the social graph? The patterns make an interesting visual.

http://socialmediatrader.com/10-amazing-visualizations-of-social-networks/

Blog Re-launch

matt.perry — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:37:00 +0000

I've a strong desire to become more active in the 'blogsphere' and therefore I'm re-launching this site.

My focus now will primarily be on the Umbraco CMS product but I will continue to look into Rocky Lhotka's CSLA.NET framework. Both products are mature stable applications and most importantly for the Small to Medium sized Enterprise (SME) sector that I work in, they are both free or subject to flexible licence agreements.

This site is actually only a temporary one whilst I build an Umbraco version. :-)

I've got a couple of nice Umbraco packages to launch soon as well, so watch this space.

Screen recording software

matt.perry — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:41:50 +0000

I'm shortly going to be recording some short demo's of Umbraco for us on my companies web site. We are looking to show people the great functionality of Umbraco's back office and how easy it is to use.

I've just downloaded Total Screen Recorder and will let you know how I get on.

http://www.totalscreenrecorder.com/download.html

CSLA - SQL Reporting Services

matt.perry — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:32:00 +0000

Quick tip on how to use CSLA objects on a SQL 2005 Reporting Services instance.

http://forums.lhotka.net/forums/post/13747.aspx

Online tutorials for WPF, Blend and Silverlight.

matt.perry — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 10:53:00 +0000

I've been waiting patiently for Silverlight v2.0 and Blend 2.0 before really giving too much time to WPF and Silverlight but the featureset is now getting there and it's worth the time investing in learning resources.

Looking around the web there is great opportunity to be in at the begining of these exciting technologies.

http://www.nibblestutorials.net/

Interesting links

matt.perry — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:44:00 +0000

Instead of using the increrasingly annoying del.icio.us Im just jotting a few URLs down for personal use. Take a look if your interested.

http://www.mythicalmanmoth.com/archive/2007/10/05/csla--step-by-step-complex-data-types--some-gotchas.aspx

http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/201

www.easynews.com

www.skyscanner.net

www.popfly.com

www.publicproxyserver.com

www.techradar.com

Visual Studio 2008 RTM - Available on MSDN now.

matt.perry — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 08:57:00 +0000

The long awaited Visual Studio 2008 was finally released to manufacturing yesterday 19th November.

Highlights of the environmnet built upon .NET 3.5, also relased yesterday include.

Multi-targeting of .NET2.0, .NET3.0 and .NET3.5 all from the same IDE
Built in AJAX support - no seperate download
Extensive changes to the web design component which is based on the expression web designer engine.
Extensive support for CSS developement
Language improvements
LINQ - Language Integrated Query - Built-in Object Relation Mapper (OR/M) - Working with data now as easy as working with a class
Data access improvements

This really is an exciting update to the already formidable developer toolset.

Scott Gutherie - MVC

matt.perry — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 12:46:00 +0000

Scott Gutherie has published the first of his hotly anticipated series on the new MVC architecture for ASP.NET

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/13/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-1.aspx

Umbraco

matt.perry — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:18:00 +0000

It's taken me a while to really take a look at this open source .NET CMS system built in c# but now I have I won't look back.

For years I've built many different CMS solutions for clients where I would target each individual site with specific additions to a basic CMS. This became both tedious and dangerous. Why dangerous? Well apart from being very difficult to manage it ultimately leads to an unhappy client and potential lawsuits! I never quite got that far but it made the projects focus the CMS and not the actual website.

Thanks to Peter Labrow at Labrow Marketing for pointing me in the direction of this great piece of software. It's based on open standards, fully compliant and easy to extend. Just got to brush up on the XSLT which is used to build the templates.