Siolon

When I started becoming interested in the SharePoint world I was immediately drawn to the end-user adoption of the technology. I came across Mark Miller’s blog EndUserSharePoint.com, and I was instantly hooked in. The articles stay away from the ethereal issues that implementers get caught in and stick with the questions that are pertinent to users that are actually using the application. I contacted Mark to contribute to his fantastic catalog of contributors, and he passed some my way. In the last week I handled questions from two users already! One deals with a technical use of (read more...)

I don’t hate Internet Explorer. I do hate version 6, but 7 was better, and 8 looks blockbuster. But due to the incredible extensions available in Firefox I’m a big fan. The problem is that browsing SharePoint sites in something other than Internet Explorer proves to be a less than perfect experience. With the IE Tab Firefox extension we can browse SharePoint sites inside the Firefox interface on demand without having to open IE. Here is a short screencast on how to do it. (read more...)

A bane of WordPress development for a long time were the awful titles generated for blog posts. When I speak of this I’m talking about the order of the blog title and the post title are put together. An example of this can be found below. And this example is better than other’s I’ve seen. On some sites where the blog/post title is long then the post title is truncated! This is unacceptable when search engines give so much weight to the content of your post titles. For a long time I circumvented this behavior by using the (read more...)

Laying out forms with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a complex topic. In light of many developers doing their first overall CSS layouts they often bail when it comes to laying out forms with CSS and avoiding both tables and line breaks. The code example shows the following: Well-formed, semantic markup CSS for layout and presentation Ensure that the form is both usable (easy to read/use) and presentable No tables or line breaks To avoid the line breaks we simply use the CSS “clear” property. This property says: “clear all floated elements to the x side of me”. So for clear: (read more...)

I hate JavaScript. I mean I really hate JavaScript. Dealing with different implementations of the DOM between browsers is a menace I couldn’t duplicate if I tried. I’ve tried JS libraries from Mootools, script.aculo.us, and so on until recently. I knew jQuery existed, but I didn’t realize how powerful the language was until recently. When I realized I could select and manipulate DOM elements with CSS selectors then I was off to the races! I love how it’s tailored for designers who already understand that syntax. There is no more getElementById(”search”) or other garbage, because (read more...)