Author: David Leedy

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Community

LotusLearns steals community content and future of NotesIn9 on YouTube.

By now most people know that lotuslearns.com – no I won’t link to it – is copying blog posts under the misguided banner that they are somehow saving the people of Africa bandwidth. While I painfully remember the days of modems, I just don’t see how that’s possible as the the site contains things like graphics and ads… It even has a score of “C” if you use YSLOW. Not something that seems optimized for modem connections.

The best thing for a modem user I think would be to get a feed reader and INDIVIDUALLY subscribe to the blogs of interest. That could be done my finding sites of interest from PlanetLotus.org or Chris Miller maintains an OPML feed

Since I don’t write many technical blogs any more, my content is a little different. This site is embedded some of my videos from Youtube. While I wish there were some text to go with the video mentioning and linking to my site, I guess embedding videos are a little different then copying an article’s content. That’s so much worse.

Interestingly, I typically dual post the NotesIn9 shows.. The first to my sites, and the second to YouTube. The last several shows I’ve not put on YouTube. It started out as laziness, but it’s a pain in the butt, and once no one complained I just kinda stopped it for now. I’m not sure what to do going forward. Sure I want to be on YouTube for searching, but so few of my videos get played over there I’m not sure it’s worth it. I’ll never use them as my primary host because I want better control of the content and presentation. But I guess now I’m off topic. 🙂

I honestly don’t want to spend any more time on this subject as it’s already distracted me from some work I’m doing to BETTER the community. I’m more focused right now on building up XPages.TV and improving NotesIn9.com and creating shows. I think those efforts would be a bigger benefit to the community then just maintaining a youTube channel. I fear that some bloggers might get upset enough to stop blogging. What a shame that would be.

I’ll just end with a comment that I posted on the site in question. Just in case it’s not approved by the moderator. This was responding to her post justifying her actions.

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RSS Feeds are consent for an INDIVIDUAL to consume the information in the manner that they want. This could be preferred offline reader or even mobile application. They are NOT a consent for a website to consume and then republish the content of the articles in their entirety.

The better solution, if you want to continue to do this might be for you to MANUALLY post SUMMARIES and LINKS to articles that you find might be of value to the people you deal with.

That’s what PlanetLotus does, and it’s worked pretty well for that site. You ARE STEALING this content by republishing it word for word.

Categories
Ext. Library Notes In 9 Podcast

NotesIn9: 064 Global Custom Controls (Fixed)

In this show Tim Tripcony comes back on the show with an amazing demonstration on how to take an existing custom control and make it globally available to all the applications on your server.

I’ve had many conversations with Tim, and he’s so far ahead of the game I’m usually pretty happy if I understand 50% of what he’s trying to say. But in this demo, which is a more advanced topic I was able to really grasp what was going on.

Hope you like the show!

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Uncategorized

About last night…

I figured I’d blog this just to make it easier to tell the story..

So last night my family and I went over to by brothers for dinner. Near the end of the evening I ended up twisting my ankle pretty bad. This sent a jolt through me which made me dizzy and nauseous. After sitting for a couple minutes I decided to head over to the kitchen to get a little water. I remember cupping my hands under the sick to get water. Next thing I knew I was on the floor. My head was in my wifes lap people were staring at me and there was a pool of blood next to me.

Apparently I passed out while at the sink. When I hit the floor I cut my chin pretty bad. An ambulance was called and got me to the hospital. X-Rays of ankle.. CAT scan of head… blood tests. Heart tests… Maybe some other stuff.. not sure.. 8 stitches to close my 2 inch cut. Kinda felt like a hockey player that lost a fight against Dave Shultz really. 🙂

I guess there’s some kind of vasavagal nerve in the body. When it gets stressed it cuts off blood to the brain. This is what causes some people to pass out from the site of blood. While I don’t have that problem in my case it seems that if I get a quick / sharp pain… This nerve is going to take me down. This happened twice before – where I got quick really bad injuries though I didn’t pass out those times probably because I didn’t try to get up so soon as I did last night. I guess standing with that kind of lightheadedness doesn’t go well together.

Here’s an interesting article on this nerve. Again – I don’t pass out from blood at least I don’t think so. Just quick intense pain I guess. Weird….

Anyway – I’m still a bit shaken up but doing much better then last night.

Categories
Notes In 9 Podcast

NotesIn9: 063 Creating an In View Edit Custom Control

In this show Tim Tripcony returns with the first of a two part series. This first part is about creating a custom control to edit fields on an XPage “in place”. So no opening another page or dialog needed. Really nice UI feature!

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Notes In 9 Podcast

NotesIn9: 050 Improving the Type Ahead Control

Today, for my “50th” show I get to welcome another new contibutor to the show. Dr. Mark Roden contributes a video that not only shows us how to improve the built in TypeAhead feature by adding a visual Indicator to tell the user it’s actually working, BUT he also takes a deep dive into FireBug and show’s us how XPages is constructing the control behind the scenes. I think it’s a fascinating look into the inner workings of XPages and Dojo.

Demo Database
Presentation Slides

Categories
Ext. Library Learning XPages Notes In 9 XPages

NotesIn9: 049 XPages: Login and Logout

In this show I take a look at how to use the Login and Logout node of the Extension Libraries Application Layout Control. It should be noted that currently there’s a bug in the extension library where the logout piece doesn’t actually work. So I demonstrate how to get around that until it gets fixed.

Some code from the show:

Setting the “Can Logout” ability:
sessionScope.put(“extlib.user.canlogout”, true)

A link for the manual logout node:

href = facesContext.getExternalContext().getRequest().getContextPath() + “?Logout&redirectTo=” + facesContext.getExternalContext().getRequest().getContextPath()

Control rendering on the manual logout node:

var uName = session.getEffectiveUserName();
if(uName == “Anonymous”) {
return false;
}

else {
return true;
}

Categories
Community Notes In 9 XPages

Learn XPages anywhere now!

I just wanted to point out a really cool thing that Stephan Wissel did.  He blogged today with instructions for easily download all of my NotesIn9 shows to your hard drive.

Here’s his blog post.

So you can already download and use all my shows offline via iTunes which isn’t to difficult to do. But this should allow you to just do a generic “Get All” and load them onto the device of your choice.

I will add that another great way to learn XPages is Matt White’s XPages101.net site. If you like NotesIn9 his stuff is so much better technically. Though I think I try to get a few more jokes in from time to time. 🙂 And guess what, if you’re a subscriber you can download Matt’s videos as well and take them with you as needed! Score!!

I think NotesIn9 is closing in on 7-8 hours worth of training videos, I’m sure Matt has the same. Hmm.. Wonder if we could fill up an iPad between us. haha

Categories
Learning XPages Notes In 9 XPages

NotesIn9: 048 Applying Themes to Form Tables

In this episode, which concludes the NotesIn9 100,000 views celebration event , a very special guest, Tim Tripcony comes on the show to talk about how to use themes to control your field layout inside the Application Layout Control.

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Notes In 9 Podcast XPages

NotesIn9: 047 Intro to XPages and Relational Data

In this show the amazing John Jardin comes back on to show us how to install the Extension Library and use it to get started accessing relational database content.

Categories
Community Notes In 9

NotesIn9 hits quota. Celebration Finale Postponed

Tomorrow I’m going to Las Vegas with friends for a little vacation. I had planned to queue up 2 more shows to finish up the NotesIn9 100,000 video celebration. I wanted to make tomorrow the first ever double feature day. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen.

Apparently I was a little over active this month and the bad news is I’m now up against my 800MB storage quota and the next show doesn’t fit. That’s never happened before. I don’t think I ever saw it hit red before. The good news is it’s a rolling 30 days, so hopefully some space will free up by the time I get back. The bad news is that it’s Vegas and I might not know who I am when/if I get back. 🙂

Anyway – stay tuned. A great show coming from John Jardin on using XPages with JDBC and Relational Databases. There’s also an amazing brand new surprise contributor on deck as well.