i am taking a little distraction from my normal writing and including a small brief on someone that i have known for a few years now and someone, while not necessarily conventional, is successful because he exerts all that he is into making whatever he touches successful. now if gary vaynerchuk can just buy the jets. (disclaimer: gary is known for being very animated in his talks and the video snippets i have included here from big omaha are no different. do not play if you are offended by multiple drops of the f bomb)
i just completed making a couple finishing touches to the blog. successfully moved over from graffiti to wordpress (although without a few minor hiccups). i spent some time fixing some character issues in the resulting blogml xml file export (thanks curt) and wordpress finally took it. yes!
i then chose a suitably decorative theme, modified it a little (ahhh… those good ol’ php days), found some clever plugins, made some dns changes, and was back in business in no time at all. you have to love modern technology.
now, with a whole new look comes a whole new me. stay tuned.
this weekend briangorbett.com may or nay not be available. i am preparing to move my blog engine over to wordpress from graffiti. since i have had a few questions on why i would be doing this, i figured i would give you my top 3 here (before my blog possibly gets smoked from the move).
now i am not abandoning graffiti entirely. one of my other projects is still running graffiti (which i will reveal soon) and i just finished up a simple theme for it.
the only challenge i have right now is that graffiti does not have an export feature. it has the ability to import, but not export. so i am modifying some code that curt put together to export from my sql server database to blogml. we will see how that goes.
next week when you return to briangorbett.com it will either have a new look and feel and all the same delicious content, or just a new look and feel with no content at all. i am hoping for the former of the two.
it has been a little while since i posted to this bloody blog, but it has been running on graffiti since the move a few weeks ago and running great. i have to give it to telligent for really thinking through installing graffiti and, most importantly, migrating from another blog engine.
right now i am going through learning how to theme in graffiti (they really made it easy with chalk) and exploring widget development. keep up the good work telligent and i would love to see more documentation for developers and designers. the development site is a good start, but i would love more content.
well, i think i finally have enough info to migrate my blog to graffiti. i found out that both blogengine.net (my current blog engine) and graffiti both support blogml. this is a good thing and i have been wondering how i am going to accomplish the move without busting my posts.
so today i am hoping to be back up running on graffiti… i am keeping my fingers crossed.
i know this is not the best title to start a blog post, but i just finished up a great brainstorming session for our team’s fy09 strategy (msft’s fiscal year ends at the end of june) and we discussed how important it is to have an online connection with the community. I agree whole heartedly, but i just don’t want to do it with a blog.
not that i don’t think that there are some fantastic blogs out there. i have my blog reader filled with great feeds from both my colleagues at microsoft as well as some great ones from the community. however, it is just not where my passion is. i much prefer to be out talking to folks and interacting. however, that becomes challenging when we start talking about scaling to reach such a large audience. there are all kinds of social communities that i participate in and i find the short “status” reach is what i prefer.
as promised, i wanted to follow-up on my post on developing the new briangorbett.com site with what was even more challenging… the design.
first, i believe in simplistic, clean designs and i wanted to echo this with the site launch. once i had my paper-prototype done, i figured it would be a fairly straight forward exercise. boy, was i wrong.
it turned out that the challenges i faced had to do more with the various different characteristics of the browsers and how they varied in rendering design. what is so challenging is the way the different browsers handled styles. one that challenged me was ie’s inability to use css inheritance (except for the direction and visibility properties).
the challenge was the way i wanted the last 5 feeds posted to fade in and out below my flickr slideshow. in order to achieve the fade effect and be a link, the link property has to inherit the color of the text property so that when the javascript fades the text, the link fades too. well in ie, that is not going to happen. so what i ended having to do is detect if the browser is ie (except 8) and use a standard onclick event on the entire div that redirects to the post. you can see this by browsing to the main page with firefox and hovering over the text. this is using a standard link whereas in ie, you can hover over the entire div box and not just the text.
another little trick i am using (although probably not recommended) is using the deprecated “hand” value for the cursor property in the div. the nice thing about this is that firefox and safari does not recognize this so still uses the default arrow cursor. however, ie changes the cursor to the hand (the correct cross-browser value to change the cursor to the pointer hand).
another handy trick is to use a conditional in your html to assign a custom stylesheet for a specific browser (if only this was not necessary). for instance, i am using this in the head:
i am pretty anal when it comes to details with my web properties and my blog is no different. i love the blogengine.net engine because of the ease of customizing some really great templates already available. but one thing has been irking me about my rss feed.
i have added a really cool extension called social bookmarks that use icons to allow readers to quickly digg or kick or just about any other social bookmark. however, the rss feed for my site shows all these images as broken image links because of the was the extension code renders the image src path. so after messing around with the extension code, i finally decided i am going to trick my rss feed into thinking that these images are a part of an actual blog by posting them right here!
so all that is left to do is go into the socialextension.cs file and change the line of code:
strImagePath = Utils.RelativeWebRoot + settingPath.Trim() + “/socialbookmarks/” + settings.GetSingleValue(“style”) + “/”;
to fully qualify the image links to the newly created path of this blog post (something like):
http://briangorbett.com.previewdns.com/blog/image.axd?picture=WindowsLiveWriter/trickingmyrssfeedintousingsocialbookmarks/ + settings.GetSingleValue(“style”) + “/”;
this will get my rss feed to point to the image files that are now actually a part of the post and the rss feed won’t be irking me so much.
i have made a resolution to stop twittering this year and focus on more non-self promoting activities. i also noticed that a facebook friend of mine, molly, also made this resolution since she realized that it was taking away from her always interesting blog posts.
so i am committed to facebook now and trying to sway away from other social networks including twitter. we will see how that goes.