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High on Technology

David Wheeler, technologist and entrepreneur based in Roswell, GA

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Parsing the Sharepoint Site Actions menu with jQuery

On recent Sharepoint (WSS3) sites I use jQuery extensively.  One of the things I often do is to remove the default Site Actions menu and draw those same links at the bottom of each page in the site.  I had found a way to successfully parse the Site Actions menu using some trickery:

$(‘#siteactions ie\\:menuitem’).each(function(){

(Note: my Site Actions Menu lives in a div called #siteactions in my master page)

This seemed to work well until I wanted to take advantage of the latest SPServices release which is now compatible with the latest jQuery.  I suspect (though I haven’t done extensive testing to be sure) is that some of the same issues with the new jQuery that were incompatible with the earlier release of SPServices were causing my issues.  After a bit of head-scratching I decided to sidestep the issue alltogether.  I couldn’t quite find a way to select the ie:menuitem nodes and step through them with an ‘each’ so instead I opted to simply use:

$(‘#siteactions menu’).children().each(function(){

I suppose this may have been obvious to some but for some reason I was determined to get the selector right.  If you know how to select elements with namespaces across-browsers in jQuery 1.7 I would be very interested to hear.

 

 

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Stop the annoying Adobe Dreamweaver prompt for Alt field text

Yes, I still use image maps.  They are nifty, and don’t require Flash to pull off things like interactive maps.  But suppose you are trying to add 70ish links to an image map and Dreamweaver insists on prompting you EVERY SINGLE TIME to add an ALT tag.  Before you slit your wrists or kill your computer, there is hope.  This can quite easily be disabled by:

Go to  Edit menu > Preferences > Accessibility > and remove checkmark from the Images box.

This is not to suggest you should ignore accessibility, just that you don’t have to have Dreamweaver drill it into your skull 70 times to get the point across.

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Downloading past purchases from iTunes (or your other devices)

It has been awhile since I felt the desire to blog, things have been really busy.  But this tip was just too good not to share!

Have you ever wanted to re-download something from iTunes?  I sure have.  One example was a TV Season I bought for the kids a while back, Backyardigans Season 3.  I opted for the HD variety but once we tried to view it, it was awful.  It averaged something like 3 frames per second.    Apple doesn’t exactly make it obvious how to report a problem or get help with such things.  At least it wasn’t obvious to me, and I looked for awhile.

So with the upcoming release of iCloud Apple has introduced a neat new feature, you can download all of your past purchases!  This seems like one of those features that have been there since day one.  But unless you were some high-profile celebrity or got lucky, you couldn’t technically do this in the past.

So here you go, go get those accidentally deleted episodes you have been missing.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2519

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Reset the Windows Home Server (WHS) backup database

I was in the final stages of migrating to a newer, quieter server and was finally ready to move my drives to the new machine.  However, I could not seem to get the old server to remove the old backups.  After trying to get the console to do it for me I still was staring out 30% usage towards backups that should not exist anymore.

This meant I couldn’t pull my two 1.5 gig drives that were slated for expansion in the new rig.

So I figured it was time to purge them manually.  Here is how you do it:

1. Run mstsc.exe to start a Remote Desktop Connection session to your home server.  Or if you are on a Mac (as I am) use the Remote Desktop Connection client for Mac.

2. Open a Command Prompt, Click Start, Run and type CMD

3. Type net stop PDL.

4. Type net stop WHSBackup to stop the Windows Home Server Backup service.

5. Delete the contents of D:\folders\{00008086-058D-4C89-AB57-A7F909A47AB4}.  Do not delete the folder.

6. Type net start WHSBackup to restart the Windows Home Server Backup service.

7. Type net start PDL.

After deleting the backup database, you need to reinstall the Windows Home Server Connector software or run the Discovery.Exe program on each of your home computers to re-establish a relationship between your home computers and your home server so new backups will occur.

Thanks to James Clarke for the instructions.

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Recover NewForm.aspx from the dead in Sharepoint 2007

Have you nuked your NewForm.aspx  page in Sharepoint WSS/MOSS 2007?   This can happen if you remove the default list web part from the page and save the file.  The problem is apparently that any time you create a custom list form web part, it grabs the latest fields from NewForm.aspx not from the list settings.  Go figure.

So without warning you can totally destroy your NewForm page and also cause problems for every custom form you might spawn off of it.  To save yourself from this disaster (which should not be possible in the first place IMO) follow the instructions below (these instructions were originally posted by David Szabo here):

  1. Open NewForm.aspx and EditForm.aspx in Sharepoint Designer
  2. Copy the code for the ListFormWebPart control from the EditForm.aspx. The code in question reaches from
    <WebPartPages:ListFormWebPart runat=”server” __MarkupType=”xmlmarkup” WebPart=”true” __WebPartId=”{YOUR_GUID}” >down to 

    </WebPartPages:ListFormWebPart>

  3. Paste it into the broken NewForm.aspx, I pasted it right below the Line:<WebPartPages:WebPartZone runat=”server” FrameType=”None” ID=”Main” Title=”loc:Main”><ZoneTemplate>
  4. Within the pasted lines of code look up the lines starting with<ControlModeand

    <FormType

    In the “Control mode” tag replace the “Edit” with “New”, in the “FormType”-Section replace the digit “6” with “8”.

  5. Before saving, you have to generate a new GUID for the pasted control in your NewForm.aspx otherwise your EditForm.aspx will be broken after saving!!!There are online GUID generators on the internet so you don’t need Visual Studio, e. g.:http://www.somacon.com/p113.php

    Generate a new GUID and asign it to the “__WebPartId” attribute in the very first line of code of your control:

    <WebPartPages:ListFormWebPart runat=”server” __MarkupType=”xmlmarkup” WebPart=”true” __WebPartId=”{YOUR_NEW_GUID_HERE}” >

  6. Look up the <ID></ID>-Tag further below (it was about 27 lines below in my case) and change a random number in the ID, e. g.Before: <ID>g_092cc5f1_f97c_408b_bf66_c7b235af38f9</ID>After:

    <ID>g_092cc5f1_f97c_408b_bf66_c7b235af38f5</ID>

  7. Save your work…and your done!

Thank you to David for posting the solution.  This definitely helped with some issues we had this week.  I really should have known better but I was operating under the assumption that I did not at any point need to use the standard NewForm.aspx page any longer.  What I didn’t realize was that once you overwrite the file it becomes the new site definition.  This means you cannot simply right-click and “reset to site definition” as you might expect.  You might be familiar with this if you have customized your default.aspx page and would like to restore it.

I also didn’t realize that when you make changes to your list they will not show when you re-add the Custom List Form control (see below).

To ensure this doesn’t happen when you create custom forms in Sharepoint 2007  do the following:

  1. Create a copy of NewForm.aspx (or right-click and select New From Existing Page)
  2. Remove or hide the default list web part
  3. From the menu select Insert->Sharepoint Controls->Custom List Form
  4. Select the appropriate list (the defaults should be for a new form)
  5. Hit Okay

Now you just need to make sure that any links pointing to NewForm go to your new page.  But in this way you don’t have to worry about screwing up your NewForm page and any subsequent custom forms you may derive from it.

Alternatively you can indeed customize NewForm and make it work, just make sure you hide the default part rather than deleting it.

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Akismet, why it is awesome, and why you don’t need it

WordPress is a fantastic platform.  I use it almost exclusively as my CMS and blog of choice for myself and for my clients.    As it has matured the potential is really limitless as to what you can do with it.  But one of the things you might find once you delve into running your own WordPress site is that you quickly become a target for SPAM.

But have no fear, Akismet is here!   What is Akismet?  Well from the Akismet page you would find it described as such:

Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

Why is this important?  Well you don’t want your hard work to be tainted by spammers and bots.  It makes your site look trashy and if you keep it clean religiously then it just means extra work.  You should be writing not policing comments right?  And you don’t want to give spammers free publicity do you?

Well, the folks at Automattic (the authors of WordPress itself) have made this great little plugin available for free for non-commercial use.  So it goes without saying, you should use it because not only is it effective, it is 100% free in many cases.

But what if you are building a site that is a commercial venture?   Well thankfully they have drawn the line such that you only need a commercial license if you pull in more than $500/month from your blog.  To be honest, this doesn’t really make things clear for those that are building websites, not blogs (I will have to follow up with Automattic on this in the future).

Now don’t get me wrong, the $5/month they ask for a commercial license is totally worth it if you are pulling in that much scratch from your blog.  You will easily save yourself $5/month in headaches by using the service as it is very effective.

So why don’t you need it?  Well, as I said earlier, you most certainly should take advantage of it… but, only if you need it.

If you are using WordPress strictly as a CMS then you may not even want comments or trackbacks.  By default WordPress leaves these features on, so you might quickly find your site deluged with trackback and comment spam even on posts you never linked from your site… yeah those bots are that crafty.  The simple solution (if you don’t need these features) is to disable them.

To make your site spam-proof w/o Akismet head on over to your WordPress admin.

  1. Go to Settings
  2. Ensure next to the Membership heading the checkbox for “Anyone can register” is unchecked.  This means only people you create accounts for can login to the site.
  3. Go to the Settings->Discussion page
  4. Under “Default article settings” you can probably just uncheck all of these, though the most important ones here are the “

Now, you might be wondering… why is this necessary when WordPress by default requires you to approve comments and trackbacks?  Good question, well the reason for me is that I don’t ever want to have to pour over a list of spam and read each entry to determine if it is valid or not.  Depending on the traffic your site has this may or may not be an issue.

For my own blog I do allow both comments and trackbacks… but for my clients who are using WordPress strictly as a CMS I follow the directions above to ensure they don’t have to deal with the extra maintenance.

But if you do in fact use comments/trackbacks on your site, Akismet is invaluable.   Give it a try, you won’t be disappointed.