Hosted By

Contact Me

Misc Links

OpenNTF BlogSphere LotusGeek CoComment Custom Button

Ads by Google

Welcome to keithstric.com!

I hope you find this site useful in some way or another. I strive to bring you all sorts of geeky information and solutions to your most frustrating of issues with the occasional rant on whatever topic, technical reviews and weblog. You'll also find many products that I've developed and make available for you to use however you like. So, grab a cup of coffee, sit down and visit for a while.

Blog Redesign

11/30/2009 5:42 PM By Keith Strickland

OK, so I stated earlier that the new look wouldn't be active for a couple of days... I lied

But things progressed a bit quicker than I anticipated so it's live today. All the bug fixes mentioned earlier are now in place. As for the bug with Static Pages not displaying properly, well it seems it was a "Page Template" issue and not a code issue

One thing to note about the new layout, if you're using 800x600, it's gonna be all screwed up. According to Google Analytics no one is reading this site with 800x600, so hopefully it won't be a big deal.
{EDIT Image moved to "Read More". Click Read More to see image }

Another thing, I got rid of the Snap Shots functionality, it was starting to annoy me. I also cleaned up the side bar items as they were rather cluttered and weren't really very useful. So, I hope you like the new design and I'll resist the urge to keep tweaking it and wind up breaking something.


Continue Reading...

Blogsphere bugs...

11/30/2009 9:35 AM By Keith Strickland

I've been using the Blogsphere template since it first came out and haven't looked back. BlogSphere and the OpenNTF mail template are the templates that really opened the world's eyes to OpenNTF and the benefits of an OpenSource community for the Lotus faithful. However, since version 3.x of blogsphere there have been a couple of bugs that really bugged me. These bugs didn't really hurt the overall feel of Blogsphere but are really just little annoyances. Now what brought these bugs to my attention is that I'm currently redoing the look and layout of keithstric.com. This current look has been here for a couple of years now and I'm tired of images getting cut off because of the layout being too narrow. Also, because of the set width of the layout, on my big iMac screen I've got an awful lot of wasted realestate. What really inspired this was the new look of Chris Toohey's site. I think the layout and overall look of his site is great. Good work Chris! I hope you don't mind if I steal borrow some of your layout ideas?

The first one is the Download permalink on search results. Seems the TAG_BSPlinkURL function in the RenderEngine.Tags script library had a typo on line #13: "TAG_BSPlinkURL = cfgDoc.cfg_Basic_HomeURL(0) + "/download/" + blogDoc.PermaLink(0)" should read "TAG_BSPlinkURL = cfgDoc.cfg_Basic_HomeURL(0) + "/downloads/" + blogDoc.PermaLink(0)". While this really isn't that big of a deal, it was frustrating at times when looking for something.

Another bug, but not really a bug, but just had to do with the page template. In the search results, it didn't show the content of the post, just a Blogsphere tag, which to the average user doesn't really mean that much. But that tag doesn't exist, hence it only showing that tag and not the content of the found entry. The tag that was being used is "<$BSEntryBody$>". I changed that to use the "<$BSEntryHTML$>" tag instead.

Next up, and this one I can't seem to get to work at all, is the display of all the static pages. Just like with downloads, you should be able to display an excerpt of each static page in a blog like layout. This was returning an error for the comments rss which is something I'll get to in a minute. But, I never could get the static pages to display like I want, but that's certainly something on the agenda before the new layout goes live.

Last one, in the RenderEngineCommentsEntries function of the RenderEngine.RSS script library, line #9: "numofentries = configDoc.cfg_rss_RSSFeedEntries(0) * 5". The field cfg_rss_RSSFeedEntries doesn't exist, so this was causing an error to be returned. For some reason this error occured when you tried to navigate to the view containing the Static Pages. I just changed this to read: "numofentries = 50". Now, I know I shouldn't hard code this, I should just add a field to the configuration document for this, but I guess I'm just lazy and don't want to change too much in the template in order to make upgrading to the next version easier.

Please don't take these bugs as me bashing Blogsphere, I think it's a great product and I look forward to continuing to use it in the future. I just thought folks that are using blogsphere may be experiencing some of these same issues and would like to fix them. But while you can't see these fixes at this moment on keithstric.com, they will be implemented when the new layout goes live in a few days (I'm not very fast with tweaking CSS).


Google Chrome OS - Preview

11/24/2009 11:50 AM By Keith Strickland

I downloaded the Chrome OS image the other day and started playing around with Chrome OS. I installed the image into Virtual Box and it runs fine, I wasn't so lucky with Parallels. So far, the OS is very minimal, not really a whole lot to play with. It's basically just the Chrome browser running everything. If you close all the browser tabs, it relaunches the browser. The OS itself is very clean looking and minimalistic, which seeing as how it's from Google, would you expect anything else? As for the apps, seems that they are only links to web applications but the ability to add more has been disabled, at least from the application menu. I tried adding an icon to the application menu to no avail. There are no right-click contextual menus except your normal browser/web page menu options. As for the speed of the OS, it boots up really fast. I would say only about 5 to 7 seconds from the time I turn on the Virtual Machine until a login screen is presented. Once you login with a google account maybe only another 1 to 3 seconds before you're in the browser ready to work. That kind of start up speed is very impressive and I hope will set the standard for other OSes to follow suit.

There really isn't a whole lot to talk about at this point in time concerning Chrome OS other than I will be following the progress closely as I'm a fan of the Google line of products. But without further ado, here's some screen shots I captured:

[Edit 12/04/2009 - Moved images. Click Read More for images]
Continue Reading...

Private Calendar Folder - Display issue

11/20/2009 11:43 AM By Keith Strickland

I'm not sure if this is a bug with a calendar or with my thinking, I'm sure it's the latter. So, I turn to you oh gentle reader, to guide me to the proper technique or point out something that I've obviously missed.

So, here's the scenario... I've got a Shared/Private on First Use folder that displays as a calendar. Users pick what they want to show in the calendar which kicks off a script that goes and gets the requested documents and puts them in said folder and then displays the contents of the folder. So far, so good, the script is working as expected. The problem comes in though in the display of said documents, which I'll get to in a second. First, here's the design setup... the first column displays a multi-value field which contains date/times and the column is set to show multiple values as separate entries, which it does. Now, the field that is displayed in the first column for the document in question has a value of "11/17/2009 08:15:00 AM EST";"11/18/2009 12:00:00 PM EST". When viewing the contents of the folder from the designer client the folder shows what it is supposed to (see screen shot #1). However, when viewing the folder from the notes client, instead of 2 entries (one on 11/17/2009 and another on 11/18/2009 which is what you would expect) it is showing 4 entries, 1 on 11/17/2009, 2 on 11/18/2009 and 1 on 11/19/2009 (see screen shot #2). I have verified the UNID and it is in fact the same document and I can't figure out why the calendar display is working this way. So, hopefully someone can point me in the right direction, if you can possibly make sense out of what I just wrote.

{EDIT - Screen shots moved - Click Read More}
Continue Reading...

Subscribe to keithstric.com

OpenNTF

Disclaimer

The opinions and ideas posted on keithstric.com are not necessarily the opinions and ideas of my employer. The solutions, techniques and code provided here are not guaranteed or warranted in any way and are free for you to use at your own risk.