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

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)

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!)

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...

i've just set up an account with watchthatpage.com in attempt to find an easier way to keep track of sites that have not yet joined the RSS revolution. There are plenty of sites still out there that do not provide an RSS feed for their news pages and blogs. As Robert Scoble pointed out a while back - 98% of people don't use RSS, but that means 2% of users do - which is a hell of a lot of traffic, reading the web via an RSS aggregator rather than actually visiting the site. It seems backwards not to have an RSS feed for frequently (or infrequently) updated news/blog content. I've used this analogy before, but i'll use it again - expecting people to visit your web site just to see if anything has changed is a bit like standing on someones doorstep and not knocking or ringing the bell, but hoping that someone will come and open the door occasionally just to see if anyone is a standing there.

I don't actually use my RSS aggregator (bloglines.com - an online service, so I can keep track of news and blogs from any web device, including my mobile phone) to read all the sites I visit - some sites (scobelizer, register etc) are updated so frequently that I know thay will have updated since I last looked, so I just have them bookmarked (via foxylicious firefox extension - my bookmarks are maintained from my del.icio.us tags), otherwise my aggregator gets full of unread content and this reduces the value of it, as I tend to skim read and dismiss stuff.

I discovered today when I went to make an urgent skype-out call (forgot my mobile and work phone needed rebooting) that my remaining 7 euro balance had expired. Ironically it appeared on my account as a "purchase": 1 balance expiration, status: "delivered". Cheers skype. Yeah I know it is probably in the small print, I did buy my credit over a year ago, but annoying all the same, especially as it only ran out a few days ago and I actually needed it today..

At the end of October, myself and two other Netsight Plonistas will be off to Plone Conference 2006 in Seattle. Looking forward to meeting up with some plone gurus over a beer or several.

As Plone becomes more and more mainstream, it has appeared on the radar of spammers. They are targeting community sites where people are allowed to sign up without moderation, and using scripts to create loads of false members. A weakness in the way user portraits are handled is being exploited to inject javascript redirects in, so that people visiting a profile page (or anywhere else where portraits are displayed?) are redirected to other sites. If you are affected by this, or don't want to be - here's how to sort it out

Thankyou very much for the unprecedented amount of comments I found in my moderation queue over the last few days. Very informative, but just so you know I don't need any of the gambling facilities or drugs you all recommended. I've just activated Akismet to see how that goes - I was very impressed that it comes as standard with this version of wordpress (2.0.3). All I had to do was sign up at wordpress.com to get an api key.

I always forget this - when doing a zope catalog query, you are searching the index contents not the metadata contents. If there is a field in your metadata that you want to be able to use as a variable in a portal catlog query, you need to add the field as an index and then reindex the catalog (or just the new field within the catalog).

For example I was generating some custom tabs for the contents of a particular folder within a plone site and I wanted the catalog query to exclude any items with the "exclude_from_nav" field set to True. It wasn't listening to me. The solution was to go to portal_catalog -> indexes and add a new field index 'exclude_from_nav' (i.e the field name needs to match the meta data field name). Tick the box next to the new 'exclude_from_nav' and hit the reindex button. Now the catalog is aware of this field and which objects in the zodb are set to true and false.

On a custom plone 2.5 skin we found that the livesearch results were getting overlapped by certain elements of the content including action menus and elements within a composite page, in IE6. After much trial and error this turned out to be because I had used absolute positioning on the search form, which obviously confused something somewhere along the line. I also had to remove position:relative from a couple of containing elements to get it to work. As this was a custom skin already fairly heavily modified (both css and template changes), I haven't narrowed down exactly what was happening yet, or if there is a better way to address it, but I ended up moving the form and using floats and margins to get it in position.

The plone livesearch template and CSS code seems a little over-complex to me, and I don't really like the use of an HTML fieldset to render the results, as this is always the first thing I break during a customisation so I may create my own version in due course (in private of course, before I go around claiming I have a better version than the one that ships with plone!).

this is the internet equivalent of trying to organise my CD collection - wait- that's not too difficult, i'm giving most of my cd's to a charity shop as I prefer digital only these days. I think my "readers" are getting a bit confused when I jump between posts about coffee and posts about geekery. no. those two go together perfectly. Anyway, i'm going to add some categories, and try to retro-categorise some of the old posts over time. RSS subscribers may see old posts reappaer for a few days/weeks/months/years

at this rate i'm going to find it very difficult to review anywhere else ;-)

As I have a fresh install of windows on my work laptop, I also have a fresh install of thunderbird. When I started using it, it was underlining everything I typed as if misspelled. It obviously wasn't initialised or didn't have a dictionary installed. I couldn't see anything under options, so I tried installing an extra language to see if that would kick it into life. First mistake, I accidentally installed the language pack into firefox instead of thunderbird - make sure to read the instructions before installing, which does warn you of this -but I hardly ever read instructions.. Anyway that didn't fix it.

What did get it working in the end was pressing the spellcheck button within a message compose window and choosing a language...

with the free muffin with my coffee this morning. Still the only cafe I have found on park street, bristol with free, reliable, in-house wifi. Mind you i've only tried a couple so far...

The more code you hide from me, the more horrible template hacks I will do! (I will elaborate on this later, i'm too busy doing horrible template hacks to get a project out of the door at the moment...)

I needed to reinstall windows on my work laptop as it was getting a bit sketchy and unreliable in that undefinable way, so I took the opportunity to repartition the disk and set it up as a dual boot machine, with ubuntu. I created a primary 15gb partition for windows and installed win xp in the usual way, then used the partitioning tools in ubuntu to create a 15gb partition for data (Ext3 to be shared between windows and linux, by installing these ext3 drivers in windows), and a 6gb partion for the ubuntu install. It all went fine, but the wireless card isn't recognised by ubuntu. I've looked into it - apparently I can get it working using some windows driver voodoo that goes by the name of ndiswrapper. I haven't tested how/if ubuntu handles sleep and dual monitors yet, but will do at some point.

I've recently being doing a bit of "old school" web development, manually creating HTML forms and (classic ASP) scripts to validate and process the forms. I was surprised at how much I have forgotten of my basic HTML, since I have been using a framework (namely archetypes in plone) to do all the form generation, validation and processing for the last couple of years. I even had to go and view some source code on another site to remind me of the correct syntax for an HTML select element (form drop-down).

Whilst doing things manually is very laborious, it does give me a feeling of control back, and I am confident about debugging and modification in a way that I miss when relying on a framework. Wouldn't want to go back to this form of development for any large projects though!

I threw this question out on the underscore mailing list today (typos corrected - at least you can do that with blog posts):-

i'm gutted that my powerbook battery isn't eligible for replacement due to the recent recall, as i'm only getting about an hour out of now, so looking for a cheap replacement. Looking on ebay there are two cheapskate options :-

1. supposedly genuine apple batteries, coming from china
2. non-apple batteries

anybody had any good/ bad experiences with either of these options? anyone been stung for import duty with stuff coming from china? anyone lost any body parts to an exploding battery?

I was then pointed in the direction of coconut battery, a handy little app for analysing your battery. It shoes that mine has about 40% of the capacity that it had when it was new - translates to about an hour of use on a full charge. So it it obviously needs replacing - anyone out there able to recommend or warn me off the cheap batteries I found on ebay, as opposed to forking up twice the price for a genuine replacement from apple?

so far so good although can't be bothered to write much with the on-screen keyboard!

The first site i've had to fix for Internet Explorer 7 is our very own www.netsightmcc.co.uk (Netsight Metropolitan Colocation Centre - the website for our Bristol datacentre). It appeared that in IE7 RC1, none of the content of anything other than the homepage was visible. We were only alerted to this by a potential customer phoning up for more information, which the site seemed to be lacking.

The reason for this appeared to be an even more aggressive version of the so-called peekaboo bug found in IE6, although this site works fine in IE6. By applying a (hack) of a 1% height to a div that contained the missing content, it now appears to be working OK in IE7 RC1. I haven't filtered this hack out into an IE7 specific stylesheet yet, but will if I spot any undesired side effects. Maybe there's a better way of fixing this? Time will tell, or maybe a stranger will.