Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

for your viewing pleasure, a poor quality cameraphone video of me skateboarding at st george skatepark in Bristol yesterday.

From Plone 2.1 onwards you can choose to use a content item within a folder as the default view of the folder. By default all the usual suspects are available: page, news item etc, but if you have custom types they will not be available without some configuration. To configure the types that are available to be used as default use zmi -> portal_properties -> site_properties (add type to list in default_page_types)

Incidentally, it took me ages to find this and I eventually found the answer I was looking for by searching my own gmail archives of the plone users list. The post referenced this how to

(The information I needed was actually in the first paragraph!)

zmi -> portal properties -> navtree properties -> (uncheck includeTop)

in case anyone is wondering why you want to do this, in this case I have a site where there is folder in the root called home. Next I have to figure out how to redirect the actual home page there and collapse the breadcrumbs so it doesn’t show home twice, or .. hmmm.. maybe change the home item to display the site name, that would be nicer

UPDATE: to change the first item in portal breadcrumbs, customise global_pathbar.pt (in plone_templates), to set the default page of a plone site, use zmi-> properties tab (change default_page property)

I now get just 9 minutes per charge on my powerbook battery, and today i’ve forgotten to bring my power adaptor out with me. I’m blogging this in caffe gusto with the screen very dim! Just enough time to check me email I hope, before it goes to sleep and I have to stare out of the window for a while (I should have agreed to take a copy of the metro off the insistent vendor today for once).

Being as paranoid as ever I decided that normal ftp was too insecure for my windows server (particularly when developing using dreamweavers ftp-on-save on an open wifi network), so I am experimenting with freeSSHd, to provide me with an sFTP server. This appears to be right up my application, as it has a GUI for managing the users, home folder etc. and a nice easy button to press to start and stop it. It also runs as a windows service.

I tried out a friends pocket pc (or is it windows mobile now?) smartphone recently - a cool little device with a slide out QWERTY keyboard (I think it was a variation of this htc device). It also had wifi support so I thought I would try to blog from it. However, he hadn’t got opera installed and the wordpress gui completely failed to work in pocket internet explorer. I’m sure there is a solution to this, but I was disappointed that the wordpress online admin didn’t gracefully degrade.

This is something to consider when designing web apps - whilst AJAX could potentially be used to provide huge usability enhancements to people using mobile web devices with small screens - the majority of people are going to be using windows mobile with pocket internet explorer - your app should work with no javascript support at all. and then be progressively enhanced with AJAX as a seperate consideration.

i’ve now gone full circle and am using my powerbook (plus second monitor, keyboard, mouse etc) as my main work machine. The windows laptop now sits on the edge of the desk so I can reach over for IE testing. Using windows as my main machine drove me mad. unexplained freezes, random system tray frenzied disco icon action, “insufficient ram” messages, despite me having over a gig of it and only using about 200mb of it. Flakiness.
Being back on the mac feels lovely, even if I do have to skate a couple of miles with it in my backpack to get it here. The battery now only gives me about 30mins - new one on order (wait, did I already blog that?).

Someone else here is using an intel mac mini with a stack of ram and parallels for windows testing. works a treat. need to distract them and steal it!

After applying a whole load of ubuntu updates, vmware server console wouldn’t work - it would try to start then just quit with no error message. After a quick msn chat with netsight linux guru scott (in foreground), It turns out that one of the updates I had applied was a kernel update. to fix vmware I needed to download the new kernel headers:

# aptitude install linux-headers-`uname -r`

then run the vmware server config again:

# sudo ./vmware-config.pl

I accepted all the defaults, and now it is working fine again

free credit today at skype! I just bagged myself “almost 0 hours of calling”. So soon after delivering me a free balance expiration - i’m made up!

When building things from scratch with ASP/Access, I never use any of the “advanced” features of access, such as relationships, as I don’t need the Access GUI to manage this stuff for me, as the logic and relationships are managed by the ASP code, and SQL queries instead. This means that I often forget these things are in place when I extend someone elses web app - I had a full-on fist fight with an Access database that wouldn’t let me delete records from a table because it contained relationships (with itself). In the end I had to go into the access GUI and delete the relationships altogether for that table. Obviously now i’m wondering what the knock-on effects will be…