Short takes: iPhone broadcasting wrong number; fractions in HTML; Word comment authors

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Another collection of things I found on the Internet that might or might not be useful for other people.

SMS and phone calls using the wrong number on an iPhone

In common with most people who “work in IT”, I get called upon for family IT support. In truth, I get called upon a lot less since my trainee geek (aged 12¾) deals with most of that for me! Last weekend though, he was stumped by the problems my Mother-in-law was having with her iPhone.

She’d bought a new phone and changed providers, then ported her number to the new provider. Although calls were reaching her with the correct number on her SIM, SMS and outbound calls were using the temporary number allocated prior to porting her “real” number.

I found the solution via the Giffgaff forums – where essie112mm describes a combination of steps including turning iMessage and Facetime on/off. The crucial part for me was Settings, Phone, My Number – where I needed to edit the number to the one that we wanted to use.

Writing fractions in HTML

In the previous section, I wanted to write ¾ using the correct HTML. As it happens, WordPress has taken our my HTML ¾ and replaced it with a raw ¾ symbol but I found this article by Charles Iliya Krempeaux (@Riever) useful reading for representing less common fractions in HTML.

Microsoft Word removes the author name from comments

I write a lot of documents in my professional life. I review even more for other people – and I use the reviewing tools in Microsoft Word extensively. One “feature” that was frustrating me though was that, every time I saved a file, my comments changed from “Mark Wilson” to “Author”.

My colleague Simon Bilton (@sabrisual) pointed out the fix to me – buried in Word’s options under Trust Center, Trust Center Settings, Privacy Options, Remove personal information from file properties on save (thanks to Stefan Blom in this TechNet forum post).

Remove personal information from file properties on save

It seems that our admins have set this by Group Policy now so I won’t have the problem any more but it’s a useful one to be aware of…

Redirecting from one website to another

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After almost 15 years working freelance, my wife is in the process of winding up her business, in preparation to start a new job in a few weeks’ time.

Unsurprisingly, that means a few IT requests for the (unpaid) IT Manager… one of which is to redirect the former company website to her LinkedIn profile.

There are a few ways to redirect websites – an HTML meta tag is often used – but with the variety of web browsers out there I wasn’t sure how current that technique is. Some would argue it’s better to sort out the re-write server-side but I don’t have that ability on this hosting platform.

Then I found a really useful thread on Stack Overflow – including this code snippet with HTML, JavaScript and fallback links:







Page Redirection



If you are not redirected automatically, follow this link to example.

That's in place now and working nicely.

Live-editing the DOM to expose graphics on web pages

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I recently wanted to use a graphic of all the current Microsoft datacentre regions for a customer presentation (to be delivered in Microsoft’s offices, in partnership with Microsoft, so copyright was not a concern).  The Azure website has a suitable graphic but there are elements that hide some of the content and saving the picture just saves the overlay with the locations, not the map behind.

I’d seen my sons using developer tools in a browser to change the colours on the page – and that gave me an idea… what if I used the developer tools in my browser to turn off elements, one by one, until I got back to the underlying graphic?

So, by right clicking on one of the elements I wanted to remove and choosing Inspect Element, I was able to view the associated code, delete a <div> or two and peel back the layers.

After that, I was a copy-and-paste away from the graphic I needed to add to my presentation.

This method doesn’t work in all cases – for example it didn’t help me lift the graphics from the Directory of Azure Services (which I find to be more visually appealing than the ones available for public download in the Microsoft Azure, cloud and enterprise symbol/icon set but appear to be in one large scalable vector graphic). Even so, live-editing the Document Object Model (DOM) made the geek inside me feel good!

Short takes: a password generator; cybercrime 101 and an HTML table generator

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Some more browser tabs turned into mini-snippets of blog post…

Password generator and cybercrime advice

The Random number service (random.org) has a useful password generator (though I tend to let LastPass generate mine, this is useful when creating passwords in customer implementations).

And, whilst on the subject of security – Microsoft Researcher Shawn Loveland has written a useful introduction to understanding cybercrime.

HTML table generator

I know that HTML tables fell out of fashion when we started to use CSS but they do still have a place – for displaying tabular data on a web page – just not for controlling page layouts!

I needed to create a table for a blog post recently and I found this HTML Table Generator that did a fair chunk of the legwork for me…

Ad blocker detection

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Ad blocking has become increasingly common on the Internet. We all hate those sites that place obtrusive ads in the middle of content (Forbes, ZDNet, I’m looking at you!) but for many sites it’s fairly passive content – simple images, banners, etc. placed above, below or to the side of the main content. We might not particularly like it – the ads are not always intelligent (how many times have you bought something and then seen ads for the site where you already made a purchase based on the cookies on your computer?!) – but nothing in life is truly free and the websites that offer advice, etc. that help fix our problems are often at least part-funded by ads.

My blog currently has over 2000 posts written over a 12 year period. Some are good, some are bad. Some are rants, some are really useful with lots of positive comments saying words to the effect of “thanks for sharing this”. A few years ago, I used to make about £50 a month from Google ads. With hosting charges of around £100 a year, plus domain name registrations of about £25 a year, that gave me some profit to go towards IT equipment and let me write more blog posts. I even set up a company for my writing and consulting. Then along came Google’s Panda algorithm change which de-emphasised blogs in search results. Almost overnight, I saw 90% drop in revenue.

My company ceased trading a while ago – and my day job now means that I can’t continue it for contractual reasons – but, to be honest it had long since become more effort than it was worth.

I now make about £60 a year from ads and maybe a few more pounds from referrals. The UK Government takes 42% of this in tax. I write less content than I used to (I’m a busy guy but I’m also less motivated to do so). My website hosting costs far outweigh the revenue of the site but the ads help a little. This blog is nothing more than a labour of love.

On the last site redesign, I moved my ads to the bottom of the page. I also added a notice asking people not to block the ads. Now I’ve upped the ante a little by using Pat O’Brien‘s Ad Blocking Advisor WordPress plugin to display a notice when the site detects ad blocking. I’m not ad-blocker-blocking because you can still read the content, but I do ask people with ad blocking software to reconsider:

“It looks like you use ad blocking software in your browser. I devote a lot of time to this website and the advertising doesn’t even cover my hosting charges but it helps a little. Please support this website by adding it to the whitelist in your ad blocker. Thank you!”

Ironically, I had to install an ad blocker to test the website functionality!

Short takes: search for new lines in Word; fix HTML <code> text wrapping in CSS; hidden elements in a WordPress theme

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Another mini-blog post under the “short takes” banner…

Search for new lines when reformatting text in Word

Unix admins will probably scoff at me as they can probably cat, awk and sed this (or something like that) but I needed to take a list of values from a web page and convert them to a list in a single command earlier this week. The basic steps I used were:

  1. Copy text from table on HTML page
  2. Paste into Excel
  3. Delete unrequired columns
  4. Save as text

That gave me a file with a list of values (in this case a list of audio or video file formats) but it was one column and I wanted a row to include within some very long PowerShell commands.

  1. Open in Word
  2. Find ^p and replace with ,

The way that this works is that ^p will search for new lines in Word (actually, it’s looking for new paragraphs, and ^l will find a new line). This worked for me in Word, but not in WordPad.

Wrapping text in HTML code snippets

For years (ever since Garry Martin wrote a one of his guest posts on this blog), I’ve been using a WordPress plug-in called DirtyCode to format code snippets that wrap to multiple lines.

The plug-in is no longer maintained though, and WordPress’s visual editor strips out the <dirtycode> tags so I’ve been wanting to fall back to the standard HTML <code> tag. Unfortunately that doesn’t text wrap in my theme, so I had to find a way to stop long lines of code running out of the frame.

The fix (or maybe it’s a fudge – if I could work out how to make custom CSS stick on theme changes, I would) was to edit my WordPress theme’s stylesheet (style.css) to include the following inside the existing code { } line:

word-break: break-all; white-space: pre-wrap;

Hidden elements in a WordPress theme

On a related note, I had some issues with elements not displaying properly in my new theme either. The WordPress forums came to my rescue though – it seems the tag line that I couldn’t see was there but hidden, until I added the following code to the custom CSS:

.site-description { color: #CCCCCC; display: block; }

Content, typography and geeky stuff (#MKGN)

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As another Milton Keynes Geek Night approaches, I’ve realised what a terrible blogger I’ve been lately… heck, maybe I don’t even qualify as a geek any more! I thought I’d try and make amends with these notes from the last event – which was, as always, an enjoyable evening with a real mix of speakers providing plenty of food for thought.  If these little tasters leave you wanting more, check out the audio on Soundcloud:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/28799053″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

Future Perfect Tense

The first talk was from Relly Annette-Baker (@RellyAB) – bursting with energy as she blasted through her talk on “Future Perfect Tense” – or creating content for in imperfect web. The talk is worth another listen but, effectively, Relly spoke of the separation of content and design so that websites can evolve as technology moves on.

Taking a physical world example, every piece of Lego is built to combine with every piece of past and future Lego, whereas Playmobil have hard-cast mounds.

On the web, our content needs to be structured chunks that build packages (screen sizes, needs, requirements, points). Once we understand what the content is, it can be put in the CMS, and we need to understand how people are using that content.

Additionally, we shouldn’t fork content – pragmatically there are times when we may need a separate mobile site but that’s short term – long term we need to cope with a plethora of devices (from a 1″ watch to a 50″ smart TV – we can’t have a new site for each one). We need to have a plan to move content to new sites.

Netflix is on 100s of devices but only has 3 content formats – short, medium and long.  And, as for the next big thing – Google “iPhone will fail” to see how, in 2006/2007, people were seeing an expensive smartphone, not a cheap portable computer.

None of us know the next cool thing but we don’t need to. Build teams, tools and content that adapt whatever the conduit. Create chunks that can move around and be repurposed. The rest will look after itself…

Knowing you know nothing

Knowing you know nothing was a short talk from James Bavington (@JamesBavington) who started out with a quote, from Socrates no less:

“The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing” [Socrates]

Or, to paraphrase:

“You’re stupid if you think you know everything” [James Bavington]

There are many, many tools available to help us in creating websites (thankfully we don’t have to know them all) but web design concepts can be limited by our technical knowledge and ability:

James used an analogy about how he started investigating the Google Maps API to push his skillset and improve the user experience in a site he was creating.  This led him to a side project using the Google Maps API and experimenting with many features.

James takes the view that expanding your technical awareness (not necessarily ability) gives your creativity more to play with.  As someone who struggles with seeing loads of interesting “stuff” that I rarely investigate as fully as I’d like, I may try James’ advice for expanding my knowledge:

  1. Little and often.
  2. Set project challenges.
  3. Have a side project.
  4. Know that I know nothing.

Distributing the future more evenly, with JavaScript

Jeremy Taylor (@jdt_me) was next up – talking about distributing the future more evenly, with JavaScript.  The gist of Jeremy’s talk was that we’re not using the “slab of glass in our pocket” (i.e. smartphone) properly and that, instead of collaborating and solving the grand challenges of our age, corporations are in battle.

Many socially-ethical businesses will use “free” services that rely on ads – it’s just not healthy, Jeremy believes.

Browser is no longer a document browser but is effectively a hypervisor with each tab running in its own sandbox, and WebRTC peer connections to connect them, making the entire web a giant playground.

Citing the examples of Browserify (introduction) leading to WebTorrent, Jeremy suggests that we need simpler tools to create distributed systems and that JavaScript provides new ways to integrate and collaborate.

Sass: a whistle stop tour

Stuart Robson (@StuRobson) gave another 5 minute talk – about a CSS extension language called Sass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets).  Stu’s slides are on SpeakerDeck and he describes the talk as “a quick blast through what makes Sass an awesome extension of CSS that you should use no matter how marginally”.  It certainly looks useful to me – with variables, nesting, code snippets and more…

One minute talks

Then, there were the one minute talks with the usual bunch of recruitment pitches, conference plugs, and two that made me sit up and listen:

  • A new TechHub co-working space coming to Milton Keynes (although I can’t find any details on the web).
  • Fibe (sp?) are a young startup of school kids who understand they can only do so much (having said that, the speaker was really confident and came across really well). They are looking for an HTML hermit, a JavaScript genius or a database [demon] to work with and help them…

Take your stinking paws off my design you damn dirty developers

Finally, Andrew Clarke (@Malarkey) gave a provocatively-titled but fascinating talk that is intended to help developers udnerstand design issues.  Andrew’s talk normally takes an hour, so he cut it down to just typography (the full set of slides is on SpeakerDeck) and I could have listened for hours. whoever thought that the finer details of lettering could be so interesting?

I learned how it’s important to understand the size of type to be fused and how the measure (the width of the body of type) can be controlled for comfortable reading by reducing column widths or increasing font sizing (2-3 alphabets, i.e. 56-78 characters is ideal). I learned how adjustments to the measure need to be accompanied by changes to line hight and how different styles should be used for reversed out content to improve readability. I learned that the tracking (word-spacing in CSS) can be used to improve readability and that san serif typefaces need looser line heights.

Then there’s the area of typographically-correct glyphs:

  • Hyphens break words over multiple lines, or join-words.
  • En dashes are longer and denote a range (equivalent to the work “to”), for example 1–10 or Earth–Mars.
  • An em dash is even longer — for a pause — or a separate train of thought in the same sentence. Either use no space or a hair space. And two adjacent em dashes can indicate a missing letter in a w——rd.
  • Single and double primes should be used for feet and inches or minutes and seconds. Never for quotations!
  • Quotations use curly quotes: “ ” or ‘ ’.
  • And an ellipsis is not just 3 dots — it’s one entity… which marks a continuation.

[Related reading: 10 HTML entity crimes you really shouldn’t commit]

Moving on, Andrew spoke of markers and margins in lists, and of using CSS relative positioning to place © close to the baseline – and adjusting parentheses too!

In summary: designers and developers need a better understanding of each other’s work. They need to know how to work together!

When’s the next one?

If you think this sounds good, follow @MKGeekNight or check out the MK Geek Night website – MKGN number 9 is coming up on 12 June 2014 and speakers are:

  • Rachel Andrew (@RachelAndrew): Your own definition of success – choosing a profitable side project idea.
  • Dan Donald (@hereinthehive): Designing evolution.
  • Robert Bavington (@RobertBavington): Responsive Web Design Today.
  • Ben MacGowan (@BenMacGowan): The era of gratuitous animations.
  • Mark McCulloch (@wearespectaculr): Are you speaking Scottish in Tokyo?

There’s usually free beer and pizza too… so what’s not to like! 

Remembering the changes made to my blog’s theme

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Every year I need to update the copyright notice on my blog, and every year I forget where to do it in the theme for the site.

I should use a dynamic copyright date, as suggested by James Bavington (@jamesbavington):


Or perhaps this more elegant solution highlighted to me by Garry Martin (@garrymartin) but my late night coding changes just broke my blog, so I did it the old way.  Whilst I was at it, I applied an updated version of the theme, so this post is more of a “note to self” of the things I need to change when theme updates come along:

  • Include the various items in the header.php file that are needed for Google (and others) site verification, Google Analytics, Facebook Like button, Google+ badge, better search results, etc.
  • Put back in the style.css stylesheet amendments that adjust colours, etc.
  • Edit the functions.php file to make sure that the footer_link() function has the correct attribution and copyright notice…

Improving performance; managing expectations; being responsive; work in progress; and fear, uncertainty and doubt (#MKGN)

This content is 10 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I can’t believe that the quarterly Milton Keynes Geek Night is nearly upon us again. I usually try to blog about the evening but I’ve failed spectacularly on recent attempts.  I might fail again with this week’s MKGN – not because I’m slow to get a blog post up but because the tickets “sold” out in something crazy like 2 minutes…

September’s Geek Night was up to the usual high standard (including the return of David Hughes – seems you can’t escape that easily!) but included one talk in particular that stood out above all of the others, when Ben Foxall (@BenjaminBenBen) showed us (literally) the other side of responsiveness… but we’ll come back to that in a moment.

Back to front performance

First up was Drew McLellan (@DrewM)’s take on “back to front” performance. You can catch the whole talk on Soundcloud but for me, as someone who runs a fairly shoddy WordPress site, it got me thinking about how performance is not just about optimising the user experience but also about the back end – perhaps summed up in one of the first points that Drew made:

“Website performance is about how your site feels.”

That may be obvious but how many times have you heard people taking about optimisation of one part of a site in isolation, without considering the whole picture.  As Drew highlighted, performance is a feature to build in – not a problem to fix – and it’s also factored into search engine algorithms.

Whilst many performance gains can be found by optimising the “front-end” (i.e. Browser-side), there are some “back-end” changes that should be considered – sites need to be super-fast under normal load in order to be responsive under heavy load (quite simply, simultaneous requests affect responsiveness – they use memory and the quicker you can process pages and release memory, the better!).

First up, consider hosting. Drew’s advice was:

  • Cheap hosting is expensive (shared hosting is cheap for a reason).
  • Shared hosting is the worst (rarely fast) – think about a virtualised or dedicated server solution instead.  Constrain by CPU, then RAM, not disk space (that should be a red flag – it’s cheap, if not much is allocated it shows lots of people crammed on a server).
  • Consider what your project has cost to build when buying hosting! Use the best you can afford – and if they advertise with scantily clad ladies, they’re probably not very good (or to be encouraged)

Next, the content management system (CMS), where Drew says:

  • Think about the cost of external resources (going to database or web API, for example). Often these are necessary costs but can be reduced with careful architecture.
  • Employ DRY coding (don’t repeat yourself) – make sure everything only has a single representation in code. Do things once, cache and reuse (unless you expect different results). For example, if something doesn’t change often (e.g. post count by category on a blog), don’t calculate this on every page serve – instead consider calculating when adding/removing a post or category (called denormalisation in database terms)… be smart – consider how real-time is the data? And are people making decisions using this data?
  • Do the work once – “premature optimization is the root of all evil” is actually a quote from 1974, when line-by-line optimisation was necessary.  Focus on the bottlenecks: “premature” should not be confused with “early” – if you know something will be a bottleneck, optimisation is not premature, it’s sensible.
  • Some frameworks focus on convention over configuration (code works things out, reduces developer decisions) – can lead to non-DRY code – so let’s make programming fun and allow the developer to work out the best way instead of burning CPU cycles.  “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.
  • The Varnish caching HTTP reverse proxy may be something to consider to speed up web site (unfortunately Drew ran out of time to tell us more – and my hosting provided found it caused problems for some other customers, so had to remove it after giving it a try for me)

In summary, Drew told us to care about front end optimisation; be careful about setting cookies and serve assets from cookieless domains; be smart about server headers; use CDNs to outsource traffic; GZip content; JavaScript at bottom of page and minimise it; test with PageSpeed and YSlow; ignore bits that make no sense for responsive web design.  But, importantly, don’t forget the back end – hosting, CMS, stay dry (do it once), a few minutes configuring up front saves wasted time later, and optimise early. In short – front end performance can’t make up for slow servers!


Related reading: check out Kier Whitaker (@KierWhitaker)’s  adventures with Google Page Speed in my write-up from MK Geek Night 4

Managing client expectations

The first of the five-minute talks was from Christian Senior (@senoir – note the spelling of the Twitter handle, it’s senoir not senior!).  Christian spoke about managing client expectations.  Whilst my notes from Christian’s talk are pretty brief (it was only 5 minutes after all) it certainly struck a chord, even with an infrastructure guy like me.

Often, the difficult part is getting a client to understand what they are getting for their money (“after all, how hard can it really be?”, they ask!) – but key to that is understanding the customer’s requirements and making sure that’s what your service delivers.  Right from the first encounter, find out about the customer (not just who they are, what want, how much money they will spend – but browsers, devices available, etc.) and try to include that detail in a brief – the small things count too and can be deliverables (incidentally, it can be just as important to distinguish the non-deliverables as the deliverables). Most of all, don’t take things for granted.  My favourite point of the talk though, was “talk to customers in a language they understand!”:

Or, to put it another way:

“Work in code, not talk in code!”

The other side of responsive

As I mentioned in my introduction, Ben Foxall (@BenjaminBenBen)’s five minute talk on “the other side” of responsive design was nothing short of stunning. If I ever manage to deliver a presentation that’s half as innovative as this, I’ll be a happy man.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure I can do it justice in words but, as we know from Sarah Parmenter (@Sazzy)’s talk at MK Geek Night 5, responsive websites provide the same content, constructed in different ways to serve to multiple devices appropriately.

  • Ben got us all to go to a site, which reacted according to our devices.
  • He then showed how the site responded differently on a phone or a PC – choose a file from a PC, or take a photo on a phone.
  • He tweeted that photo.
  • He showed us the device capabilities (i.e. the available APIs).
  • He updated his “slides” (in HTML5, of course), interactively.
  • And projected those slides in our browsers (via the link we all blindly clicked).

Actually – Ben did so much more than that. And thankfully he blogged about what he did and how he did it – I recommend you go take a look.

In summary, Ben wrapped up by saying that “responsiveness and the web needs to use the capabilities of all the devices and push the boundaries to do interesting things”.  If only more “responsive” designers pushed those boundaries…

One last thought on this topic (from Brad Frost, via Ben Foxall’s MK Geek Night talk), is contained in these three images (provided under a Creative Commons attribution license):

  

Work in progress

Following Ben’s talk was always going to be a tough gig.  I’m not sure that I really grokked Tom Underhill (@imeatingworms)’s “Work in Progress” although the gist seemed to be that technology gallops on and that we’re in a state of constant evolution with new tools, programs, apps, books, articles, courses, posts, people to follow (or not follow), etc., etc.

Whilst the fundamentals of human behaviour haven’t changed, what’s going on around us have – now we need more than just food and warmth – we “need” desktops, laptops, smartphones, pink smartphones, smart watches.  Who knows what’s in the future in a world of continued change…

Constant change is guaranteed – in technology, social context and more. Tech is a great enabler, it could be seen as essential – but should never replace the message. Brands, experiences and products change lives based on the fundamentals of need.

Hmm…

Interlude

The one minute talks were the usual mixed bag of shout-outs for jobs at various local agencies (anyone want to employ an ex-infrastructure architect who manages a team and really would like to do something exciting again… maybe something “webby”?), Code Club, the first meeting of Leamington Geeks, and upcoming conferences.

Fear, uncertainty and doubt

The final keynote was from Paul Robert Lloyd (@paulrobertlloyd), speaking on FUD – fear, uncertainty and doubt. Paul makes the point that these are all real human emotions – and asks what the consequences of abusing them are. He suggests that the web has been hijacked by commercial interests – not only monitoring behaviour but manipulating it too.

Some of the highlights from Paul’s talk make quite a reading list (one that I have in Pocket and will hopefully get around to one day):

  • Jonathan Harris’ modern medicine considers the ethical implications of software. Even a default setting can affect the daily behaviours of thousands of people.  Facebook asks its designers about the “Serotonin” of new features – i.e. how will it affect how we behave.
  • As the web is largely unregulated, it’s attractive to those who want to increase their personal wealth; so we have to be optimistic that there are enough people working in the tech sector with a moral compass. Arguably, the Snowden leaks show that some people have integrity and courage. But Paul is uncertain that Silicon Valley is healthy – “normal” people don’t see customers as data points against which to test designs – for example a team at Google couldn’t decide on shade of blue so they tested 41 shades (and border widths). Paul also made the point that the team was working under Marissa Mayer – for a more recent example witness the Yahoo! logo changes…
  • Then there are the “evil” social networks where, as Charles Stross highlights, “Klout operates under American privacy law, or rather, the lack of it”.
  • Paul says that The Valley operates in a bubble – and that Americans (or at least startups) skew to the workaholic side of things, viewing weekends off as a privilege not a right. He also suggests that the problem is partly a lack of diversity – The Valley is basically a bunch of Stanford guys making things to fix their own problems. Very few start from a social problem and work backwards – so very few are enhancing society; they’re making widgets or enhancing what already exists. Funding can be an issue but governments are seeing the tech sector as an area of rapid growth and it’s probably good not to be aligned to a sector where you can launch start-ups without a business case!
  • Lanyrd shows that it is possible to start up outside The Valley (although they have been bought by Eventbrite so have to move) [TweetDeck is another example, although bought by Twitter] but Silicon Valley arrived by a series of happy accidents and good luck/fortune – it’s important that the new tech hubs shouldn’t be a facsimile of this.
  • We trust Yahoo! by putting photos on Flickr but they also have form for removing content (e.g. Geocities) – but what happens when your service is closed down? Is there something morally wrong with closing sites containing thousands of hours of individuals’ comments, posts, etc.? Shouldn’t we treat data like it matters, allow export capabilities and support data rescue?
  • Then there’s protecting out data from Governments. Although conducted before the Snowden leaks the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s annual survey asks “who has your back?” – and, although it’s still young, it seems companies are starting to take notice.
  • Choose your services wisely – we (the geeks) are early adopters – and we can stop using social networks too.  It’s easier to change services if data can be exported – but all too often that’s not the case so you need to own your own content.
  • We all have the power to change the web to the way we want to see it, says Paul – all we need is need a text editor, an FTP client and some webspace. In the wake of the NSA revelations, Bruce Schneier writes in the Guardian how those who love liberty have to fix the ‘net.

Paul’s slides are available on Speaker Deck.

So, what’s next?

MK Geek night #7 is on Thursday 5 December featuring:

together with five minute features from:


Even if I don’t manage to get there (or if I do and am a bit slow blogging) you can find out more on the MK Geek Night website on Twitter (@MKGeekNight), or Soundcloud (on the MKGN stream).

Related reading: James Bavington has another write-up of MKGN #6.

[Update 7 December 2013: Added links to Paul Robert Lloyd’s slides and to James Bavington’s post]

Some SharePoint tips/tricks for editing list forms and hiding standard page elements

This content is 11 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve written a few SharePoint-based blog posts as I’ve hacked my way around the company’s infrastructure, trying to get it working the way I’d like it to (creating dashboards, adding the odd bit of workflow and custom columns to pre-populate list data, embedding video, etc.).  There’s a rumour that we might get SharePoint 2013 soon but, for now, all of my hacks/tweaks have been based on 2007.

In the last few weeks, one of the projects I’ve been involved in has taken a major step forward, engaging a real designer and a real web developer, instead of li’l ol’ me.  From my perspective, this has been great news, although there have been some times when I’ve questioned the maintainability of custom code used in situations that have caused problems in the past (e.g. to edit the default forms used for displaying list items).

As you might expect, I’ve also picked up a couple of tips, working alongside some experts – and I thought I’d make a quick note of them here, for future reference.

Editing list forms without using SharePoint Designer

First up, a handy little trick to edit list forms (like DispForm.aspx) without having to resort to using SharePoint Destroyer Designer, which is little more than Microsoft FrontPage (just about OK in it’s day but long past its sell-by date now). Just add ToolPaneView=2 into the query string, for example http://sharepoint.intranet.com/00001/Lists/ListName/DispForm.aspx?ToolPaneView=2.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to work on my Office 365 SharePoint site, so it might be 2007-only but useful nevertheless. In our case, this was used to add a (hidden) Content Editor Web Part with some jQuery and CSS to style up the form.

Hiding page elements

Sometimes, there are standard elements of a page that you don’t want to display and, without access to the templates used on a corporate site, that might be difficult. As it happens, all that’s required is a little in-line CSS, included in a (hidden) Content Editor Web Part:

Just use the Developer Tools in Internet Exploder (or similar in your choice of browser – although, if you’re using SharePoint 2007, it probably will be IE) to find the class of the element to be hidden. In this case, I removed some standard text that was inserted below the breadcrumb trail at the top of the page but I’ve also seen it used to hide the page title and it could be applied to other elements too.

Credits: Thanks to Steve Haxell for sharing these methods with me.