I wanted to title this post “NotesIn9 is Canceled?” but thought that might be too sensational and distract from the much more important discussions that have been going on.
Well, I haven’t been actually been canceled, but it sure feels like it at the moment. My “network” has cut me off. This means that the embedded videos in my posts won’t play and I assume any new iTunes subscriptions won’t work either.
Yesterday I recieved an email from the provider that I use to actually host my files, LIBSYN.COM. The letter stated that my account is suspended due to being deliquent. I can only assume that my credit card that I had with them expired and I need to update it.
I say “assume” because that’s all I know at the moment. I got a suspension notice. I did NOT get a “You have a problem coming up” notice. I can’t even log into my account because it’s been suspended. ARGH!
My only recourse is to email them, which I did yesterday and not heard anything back yet. I’ve emailed again this morning.
How’s that for customer service?
So until I can get this sorted, hopefully getting the problem fixed in the short term and in the long term looking for a new host for my videos – all the shows can still be found on YouTube:
In this demo I talk how the ability to do a lookup inside a view control or repeat control allows us to do some different data modeling that has never been possible in traditional Notes development.
I’ve created a little example that allows you to link contacts to each other and assign relationships between them. As a bonus, I show an example of using a view control and also a repeat control. In addition I have an example of reversing it to show who is related to a particular contact. Similar to “My followers” in Twitter.
The goal of the show is really to demonstrate that XPages allows us to re-think how we design our data.
In today’s show we’re going to go back to XPages and look at how to a scoped variable, Partial Page refresh, and the Rendering property to control with something is written to the browser or not. For Notes Client developers this is going to be like working with “Hide-When’s” in the Notes Client.
This concludes “NotesIn9 Week”. I hope you liked the shows. I did 3 XPage shows, 1 End User, and 1 traditional Notes Client. So hopefully there was something for everybody.
While this show ended up being a little rushed, due to several late night phone calls with my accountant over taxes, I am particularly fond of this content. You see, many of the things I present, I’ve not really discovered myself. Many of them I learn by reading the blogs or the wiki’s and figure out how I would use them and then create a show around it to try and teach others so they save time. I always try to give credit when I can.
But this topic, an “Agent Framework” is something that I came up with all on my own. I started doing this years ago and even wrote an article about this is the magazine, “Lotus Advisor”. The point of this, which I hope comes across in the show, is that if you have agents in Notes Application, and users are going to running the agents from the Actions menu, then, in my opinion, there’s a better way for us as developers to give them that option. They we need to make sure our apps have the best User Interface possible since that’s what people expect now a days.
Anyway – I hope you like the show. I’ll post the database file shortly.
In the show I also discuss the need to improve our user interfaces and link to Scott Good’s Lotusphere 2010 session – “You Can’t Fix Ugly“. This slide deck should be required viewing for all Developers, but especially all NOTES Developers.
In today’s show I do my first one that’s geared to the End User and not the Developer. There were a couple of people on Twitter recently who had some issues with Notes. The first wanted to know how to tell Notes to use Chrome as the browser and the other was having some problems searching his Email database.
In the very first episode of Notes In 9 I discussed the new XPages Repeat control. There’s so much you can do with this control I guess it was just a matter of time until I had to come back to it. I’m sure I’ll be talking about this again and again in the future I’m sure.
This show was born on the Notes 8.5 Forum. Judy Kilpinen was posting a question about multi-value fields in XPages. A comment was made that most of the Repeat Control examples only showed repeating views or document collections.
So in today’s show I’ll demonstrate two ways to repeat a multi-value field. The first from a document and the second from a view. The interesting thing about the view is to pull it off I’ll nest a repeat INSIDE a repeat.
How crazy is that? 🙂
This week marks the last couple of days of Wiki Madness. In celebration of the end of what I think was a great event I’m celebrating with a weeks worth of new shows.
In today’s show I talk about XPages and especially the need to start becoming comfortable with the source window. Unlike traditional Notes Development where you only have an IDE, XPages allows you to access the actual XML source of the page. Watch how you can use that to your advantage and do a couple of simple things that can not be done in the IDE alone.
May the source be with you!
Also in this show is a couple of shout-outs to some recent additions to the Lotus Notes screencasting and podcasting world. Tips In Two The X Cast XPages101.net
One note about this show. It’s my first attempt using a new microphone. It’s called a Yeti. I’m not sure if I have it set right just yet. Certainly the keyboard came across too loud in this one. I think it’s better in tomorrow’s show.
Next week will be the last week of WikiMadness. In celebration of the very successful event Notes In 9 will attempt to do something special.
There will be a new show on Monday.
And Tuesday
And Wednesday
And Thursday
And Friday
That’s right a whole week of Notes In 9’s. At least that’s the plan. 🙂
Monday and Tuesday will be XPage Focused. The rest? We’ll you’ll just have to tune in and find out!
It’s still not too late to get in on WikiMadness. We have SUPER gifts for contributors. An iPod and Amazon.com gift certificates, awesome software!, books, Lotusphere backpacks, lots of “Swag”. All you need to do is contribute and register the link.
Before I get to Episode 12 details let me say that I’m beyond excited to announce the community event that Chris Toohey and I have been hinting about on Twitter for a little bit.
It’s called “Wiki Madness”.
Wiki Madness is an event that will run from now until the end March 2010. The purpose of this event is to attempt to raise awareness and visibility of the excellent content that members of the Lotus Community create on a daily basis.
Here’s what happened. I’ve been meaning to get my screencasts cross posted to the Domino Designer Wiki for a while. Not all of them of course, just the ones with the relevant tip or technique. Finally I found some time and with the help of Amanda Bauman of IBM, I got episode 11 posted to the wiki.
Then the most interesting thing happened. I’m not one to watch my stats that much, but since I was playing with this new embedded player for the wiki’s I happened to check my stats and to my surprise, the traffic that I got from the IBM servers quickly eclipsed the traffic I got from iTunes, notesin9.com and YouTube combined. I can only believe that these people are viewers who might not have been aware of my show.
I learned that there’s an audience that knows about the Product Wiki’s but maybe not PlanetLotus. And since I didn’t really know that much about the Wiki’s maybe the PlanetLotus contributors are not aware of this additional audience. So I was talking to Chris Toohey of dominoguru.com about this and we jointly came up with the idea to try and bring the communities closer.
The gist of it is this:
There’s a ton of great content that is being posted to personal or group blogs. Why not simply cross post this content to the the relevant wiki? You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. Add an “About the Author” to the end of the wiki article with information about yourself and links back to your site. Now both the PlanetLotus audience and the Wiki Audience has a chance to see your content and recognize you as a contributor. It’s a win for all participants.
Then we thought, ok but how do we try and get this going? How to we promote this idea? Well, I had brought back a few things from Lotusphere to give to Chris for giveaways for his site. My wife does the Blogger of the Year award and I needed to ship that to him anyway. He decided it would be better to use the swag items I brought back for this project as an “incentive” to get the ball rolling. We then started asking around to see if we could gain some other items and Lisa Duke from STS and TipsinTwo immediately answered the call by sending us a tremendous “goodie box”! Since then we’ve been talking with various other people in an effort to increase our stash. More details of how this works will be announced by Chris on the community call today, and later on his blog and we’ll be talking about this off and on as the event progresses.
So that’s the Event. Please check out wikimadness.com for further details. If you’re so inclined, show your support by placing out article submission widget on your own blog.
Ok so what about Notes In 9? Well I sub titled this episode “Wiki Wonka and the Collaboration Factory”. This episode talks more about the wiki’s, why you might want to participate, how much traffic do the wiki’s get, and then I do a demo of how to create a wiki article and use the Wiki Markup language to make it look good.
I hope you like it and I hope you take some time to add content to the wiki. It’s really not more then copy and paste.
In this show I present my material from Lotusphere’s “SpeedGeeking” session.
The point of the show is at the end where I combine XPages, CSS, Blueprint Framework, Themes, and Custom Controls to create a layout (header, sidebars, etc…) that you can easily include on every XPage.
I hope you like it.
UPDATE: Since BluePrint CSS is a dead project I recommend focusing on Bootstrap instead.