You can download this here, run an installer and have Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1 running alongside, and without overwriting, IE6. very handy indeed, if you need to start testing in IE7 (which i've been trying very hard not to do!).

I've cleared out a bit more of the remaining pages of the old site, just as a decluttering exercise. Nobody has complained so far of missing content (well in fact nobody has commented on anything at all so far, and there was me worried about having to deal with loads of comments.. hmm.. better check that they actually work!), but if you have found yourself on this site following a listing on google and you can't find what you are looking for, even with the search, please let me know and i'll try to retrieve it.

once again, I have been obsessing about the idea of owning a mobile web device. I'm not sure what my business case is for owning one, other than the desire for something that can be carried around with me most of the time to use for email and full web browsing, smaller and lighter than a laptop and with better battery life than a laptop. The device needs:-

• wifi
• full featured DOM supporting web browser
• decent battery life
• small and light enough to not be noticeable when carried around in my bag (i've always got one with me, to carry various wires, adaptors, chargers, wet wipes, nappys etc. not quite a "manbag", but close.)
• at least 800 pixel width resolution
• integrated qwerty keyboard

Only the nokia 770 comes close at the moment, but doesn't have a qwerty keyboard. I keep seeing other devices crop up, such as sony's forthcoming mylo, but the screen resolution lets that one down. I'm quite tempted by some of the clamshell smartphones, but I don't want a phone that big, valuable and breakable.

Apparently CSS-P stands for "CSS positioning". At least that's what a quick googling google search querying tells me. I came across the term in a job advert I stumbled upon.

PloneCaptcha has been shoved onto my radar by Tom Lazar. read all about it over there because I haven't got anything to add other than that if Tom gets on with it i'll install it on dfr skate zine (currently "offline")(except not really), and enable anaonymous comments, seeing as noone can be bothered to sign up to comment.

I have hatched a plan to satisfy both my urge for expensive coffee variations and the idea of wifi breakfast nirvana on park street in clifton, Bristol. Or near park street, as it seems that there aren't actually many places to get breakfast on park street at 8.30. My plan is to do this once a week (because of time and money constraints)
Here are my criteria:-

• On my route to work (or a slight diversion of)
• Free Wifi (streetnet should cover most of the area, but in-house even better)
• nice coffee
• Somewhere to sit with a laptop preferably away from the gaze of passing pedestrians

Today I find myself in Boston Tea Party. Upstairs is a room with plenty of space, tables, sofas etc. Nice atmosphere - although a bit quiet and library like this time of the morning. Wifi wise I am currently connected to streetnet. I did notice a WEP protected network called BTP, with a much stronger signal than streetnet, but when I asked the staff for a password I was told to use streetnet, they didn't admit that BTP might stand for Boston Tea Party, but I didn't push it. Shame because for some reason the streetnet signal seems to vary and i've already had to reconnect once.

I won't do any ratings because I need to try some other places first to compare it to, but it is definately a contender.

UPDATE: Actually, the streetnet connection in Boston Tea Party is very flaky - I wanted to correct my misspelling of "definately" in the last paragraph, but got booted out (of the wifi, not Boston Tea Party) for the third time. I'm now correcting this from work. The flakiness could possibly be because I was running over an ssh tunnel (too paranoid about transmitting my passwords on a public network), so I was authenticating in one browser, then using another web browser running through a web proxy on another browser, maybe it saw me as inactive and logged me off or something? Either way - park street cafe bars take notice - if you want my massive £2 a week business, get yourself some wifi for customer use ;-)

Another abbreviation(?)/buzzword that i've been hearing for months but I have only just understood what it is. From All in the Head (Drew Mclellan's blog):-

if you're not familiar, JavaScript Object Notation is a method of describing data structures such as arrays and objects and their contents in plain text. On receiving a chunk of JSON you can eval() it to recreate the data structure within your script

Read more about JSON here

I'm experiencing a problem where the Kupu drawer used to select content when in design mode on a compositepack page gets overlapped by elements from the underlying page. I thought it was something I had done with a custom skin I was building, but when I switch back to plone default skin, the problem still exists. I don't think I have come across this before, so my conclusion at the moment is that this is something unique to Plone 2.5

I am seeing this on Firefox 1.5.0.6 (PC & mac) and IE6 PC. CompositePack 1.0 Final

screen shot here (Firefox)
If anyone has a fix for this please let me know!
UPDATE: Fixed

I have now fixed this (thanks Emyr!).

I applied the following to my style sheet:-

.kupu-drawer {

z-index: 3 !important;

}



#region-content .contentActions {

z-index: 1;

}

(the !important is only necessary because of a precedence thing somewhere along the line)

This is just a mandatory "i'm just trying out another desktop blogging tool" post. I've just downloaded flock, mainly to see if the built in blogging tool is a suitable solution for OSX. So far so good - not sure whether this thing supposts categories, although I haven't actually got any categories yet so...

edit: yes it does support categories.

It makes sense really when you think about it, but confused me for several minutes! I was about to blame it on the new pine door downstairs...

As I mentioned before, for the first time in about 6 years i've actually coughed up for some paid-for hosting. This gives me somewhere to host some php/mysql stuff and means that I don't have to rely on favours to get things sorted out, or be responsible for it myself. After having a quick look through some of the more popular "stack em high and sell em cheap" hosts, I signed up with servage.net. Note that link has a referrer coupon attached to it - if you sign up using that link, I get a couple of free months of hosting and so do you - a win win situation :-)

I've held off on posting that link, because I didn't want to recommend anything that i've had bad experiences with, but so far i've been impressed with what i've got - an unfeasibly large data transfer and storage allowance, I haven't noticed any downtime yet and i'm generally impressed with the provided control panel functionality: online file manager - including through the web editing - very useful, phpmyadmin for mysql, cron jobs, ability to set up virtual hosts, email accounts, email forwarders, mailing lists etc.

The only shortcomings so far are lack of access to logs (because of their shared server setup) and lack of shell access. There are some basic statistics available, but nowhere near detailed enough, especially if you were hosting a site for a company who want access to detailed stats for marketing. However, i've just integrated google analytics, which seems to be a more than adequate substitute.

So thumbs up so far - if I experience any problems with the service i'll keep you posted!

I've been using DIYPloneStyle to create custom installable skin products since.. err.. an early version, and the process always went like this:-

1. use the generator.py file to create a new product
2. install the skin product
3. Use the css_registry to deactivate most of the plone style sheets, so that I don't have to overide the styles in my custom CSS

The problem with this is that this can cause complications if there is any skin-switching capability, plus if you provide the skin to someone else to install you also have to send instructions to deactivate the appropriate stylesheets.

Today I downloaded the 2.1.2 version, and I was pleased to see that the blank skin product that it creates takes me to exactly the same starting point as I like to start from, i.e. all the plone default styles are deactivated. I say deactivated, but what I mean is there are blank public.css, plone.css etc files in the product, so when the product is installed, these have higher precedence than the ones in the plone layers. This is a much more convenient way to deal with overiding the styles, not sure why I didn't think of it before!

The BBC ran this article about how the majority of the users of the WAP version of the BBC news site are based in African countries. It reminded me of something I wrote about a few years ago about how there were (are?) more people using the internet via their mobiles in Japan than people accessing via PC's. Although using the mobile internet, even on so-called smartphones is an inferior experience to using a PC, it is actually much cheaper and easier for the "average" person, worldwide to get themseleves onto the net this way than it is to get access to an internet enabled PC - something to consider when deciding whether to provide a WAP version of a website, or at least a sensible seperation of presentation and markup to allow simple HTML browsers to get to your content.

Anyone who has clicked through to dfr skate zine on my case study links might have noticed a holding page. This is probably a bit premature as the site is still running behind it. The site will shortly be upgraded from plone 2.1 to plone 2.5. I don't anticipate any problems, but having just gone way over schedule upgrading from a plone 2.0.5 site (with loads of custiom products) to 2.5, i'm being a bit cautious. I'm also using this opportunity to make some improvements to the site in order to make it better and attract some more contributors.

just for the record, if you were wondering why there are very few comments on this site, it is because I previously didn't have commenting enabled on the old site, so nothing was imported across in the way of comments. I've got it enabled on here since the move to wordpress (with moderation activated to protect against comment spam), so feel free to opine on any of the unsubstantiated claims I make on this site, or question my grammar/ spelling/ complete misunderstanding.

many moons ago, back in february myself and Matt Hamilton of Netsight did a plone demo at the watershed media centre in Bristol. This was the first in a series of "SkillSwaps" as part of the Bristol branch of SkillSwap based in Brighton. I've only just got round to blogging about it now due to my blogging hiatus!

The video feed is online here (note that this link skips forward a few chapters to where I actually start talking - before that is several minutes of people arriving and introductions etc).

here's a example of how you might do a bulk search and replace on unix - here i'm replacing all occurences of old style br tags with xhtml br tags:

perl -pi -e 's@<br>@<br />@g' * (this will replace all instances in all files in the current directory)

find . -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's@<br>@<br />@g' (this version will search subdirectories too)

EDIT: remember that bulk search and replace can be dangerous, and also bear in mind that if you use subversion like we do, the method described above will affect the .svn files too. This appears to be a BAD THING

i've set up some redirects from my old asp xml blogger archives to the relevant archive page on the new wordpress site. This was fairly easy - I have used a custom 404 page on the old site to check for requests for pages in the format YYYYMMarchive00x.asp, then extract the date and month and redirect based on that. The old blog used to be set up into seperate blogs for different subjects e.g. linux, photography etc, but I have now imported all (most?) of the old content into the same blog. I will no doubt have missed something! If you are looking for something in particular that used to be there but you now can't find let me know and i'll have a look for it.

I have to praise whoever wrote the RSS importer for wordpress - this made it incredibly easy to drag content in from the old feeds. It was to my advantage that I didn't have categorisation or comments enabled on the old blog as I guess these would have to be handled seperately but it meant that I could do the migration with no custom scripting whatsoever - one of the reasons for going with wordpress. Quills/ Plone blog developers take note - import tools will massively increase uptake. I think many people like me who have defected to wordpress could be tempted back if there are any one-step import tools in the final product.

on windows itunes seemed to be ignoring my attempts to import a video file. turned out either the file name was too long or it objected to something in the file name. After renaming it it worked fine.

so if all has gone to plan, my hypothecate.co.uk RSS feed should have burst back into life and anybody subscribed to my old RSS should now be reading the feed from www.rickhurst.co.uk, my new personal blog / portfolio site, running on wordpress.

so lets get this right , I spent hours and hours migrating hypothecate to plone then binned it and went for wordpress instead? yep. For the last six years or so I have always used (much appreciated) free webspace from people I know, but this always tied me to a platform - first ASP, then zope/plone. Now I have another personal project running on Plone (www.dfrskatezine.com - ironically currently offline while I migrate it from plone 2.1 to 2.5), I thought I would stump up for some paid webspace so I could run some php/ mysql stuff without relying on favours and harrassing people to install and configure stuff for me.

The new site has a bit of a portfolio on it, as I am pimping myself for a bit of non-plone freelance work (out of hours - i'm still happily esconced by day ploning away at netsight hq), so any bits of web development work you need doing, contact me and I might be able to help you out, and you might be able to help me replace my dying car :-)

Now I have working blog software again, I might even start posting a bit more often - still on the same theme - web technology with random inane drivel thrown in.

The old site will eventually redirect here, and I will do my best to not leave any dead links, by setting up some redirects. In an ideal world I would retro-categorise all the imported content on here.

As for quills etc have I completely given up? no - quills should make an appearance on the skate site in the near future.

I think I might have just had one of those "two problems solved at once" moments. For the last few weeks i've been churning over in my mind how deal with version control and backups and also come up with a solution to allow me to develop my freelance stuff on multiple platforms, on multiple machines, but having it all stored in one place.. Then it occurred to me - one of the ways subversion can be used is to check out a whole project to a local machine to work on, then changes can be committed back to the repository, so as long as I have a machine ready to run a local version of whatever it is I want to work on, I check out the project, work on it on that particular machine (disconnected if necessary) then check changes back in later. Even If I manage to get out of sync by forgetting to check stuff back in svn should resolve any conflicts.

So now I need to change my strategy, rather than relying on shared folders and network drives, I need to set up svn repository and find clients for the different environments I will be working in. and err.. learn how to use it properley beyond adding files and committing stuff.

Just a quick example of how to format a date in ZPT. DateTime is already available within the Plone environment, so you can do something like this:-

item_date item/EffectiveDate;
item_display_date python:DateTime(item_date).strftime('%B %d, %Y');

The above example formats the date in a US style e.g. 3 July, 2006

For the past few months i've been using mainly windows for web development, because I seem to find myself doing a lot of testing in IE, and I was fed up of lugging my powerbook to and from work (on a skateboard), so I nagged netsight into buying me a cheap laptop to use here and to take on client visits. Set up on an iCurve stand with a second monitor it has proved to be a nice little set-up. One thing I have noticed is that it gets into a panic if you do something such as unplugging a cable at the wrong time and I do find myself rebooting quite often compared to my mac. It is nowhere near as portable and robust as the powerbook. Always paranoid of the viruses too..

At home i've ended up running ubuntu linux with windows running as a virtual machine in the excellent and FREE vmware server. The powerbook will shortly be married to an apple studio display as a living-room friendly multimedia machine and workstation. I have probably spent an unhealthy amount of time getting myself in a situation where I can do everything from every machine - using putty in windows to develop on the linux and osx machines, vnc, terminal services, shared folders. I justify this because I am after all a developer and I have my reasons for using all these setups. If I wasn't a developer I would just stick with the powerbook.