Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Two more handy sites

In the same theme as my last post, here are two other handy sites for web designers:

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Loading Gifs

How many times have you tried finding an animated loading gif for your web application on the web and come away disappointed?! I spent hours the last time and got something that I still wasn't very pleased with. Naturally I found this handy web site several weeks after I had a need for it. I found http://www.AjaxLoad.info. This site allows you to design your very own animated loading gif. You can choose from over 15 indicator types and the fore and background colors. This is a must-have tool for web-app designers.

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Handy Bookmarklet for SharePoint

Some of my projects have forced me into some interesting dilemmas with SharePoint. For example, we are currently replacing the default list item editor web part with a custom list item editor that we wrote in-house. By default, SharePoint does not give the user an option to modify/add/remove web parts on this page. In order to do this, you have to append the querystring &toolpaneview=2 to the url. As with my previous post, it'’s not hard but it can be a tedious chore every time you want to change the configuration of this custom web part.

Thus enters another handy bookmarklet. I have a written bookmarklet that dynamically loads a script tag that points to a js file that I have loaded on my webserver. When this bookmarklet is activated, it highlights web parts with a dotted red border. This allows the user to see what items on a page are web parts. The user can then click on one of the web parts which the bookmarklet will cause the clicked web part to go into edit mode (just as if the 'Modify Shared Webpart' link had been clicked).

This handy little bookmarklet has saved my team and me a ton of extra clicking. It is an awesome little piece of code for making your experience in SharePoint a little bit more enjoyable.

There are two parts that are needed to get this work.
  1. The bookmarklet (only contains javascript to dynamically load the real heavy lifting javascript)
  2. The javascript file that does all the work.

I have the bookmarklet loaded to a publicly available server so feel free to use it. You just need to add the following to a bookmark in your browser:




If you have any suggestions for improvement please let me know and I'll see if I can integrate the improvements.

My Wishlist

I know this isn't a technical post but it will probably help me get technical toys. I don't know about you but throughout the year I can find fun stuff that I would like to own but can't afford (or choose not to afford). As soon as my wife asks me what I want for Christmas or for my birthday, I can't think of a single thing. It's frustrating to the both of us. So I've started using a new service called Wishlistr. It allows me to keep a list of all the cool things that I would like to own. The site is pretty slick too because it uses del.icio.us effects. Another nice feature is that they've created a bookmarklet that can be thrown on your browser that makes it way easy to add something from the web to your list. Give it a looksie.

Thursday, May 04, 2006

Bookmarklets for SharePoint

I've started using bookmarklets to make my life incredibly easier when working with SharePoint. In order to configure webparts on a page, I had to go through several layers of menus. For some configurations, I needed to append querysting parameters to the URL. While these things aren't necessarily time-consuming or difficult, if you do it enough ... it gets old.

I have a bookmarklet that calls the javascript needed to put the Web Part page in the mode that I wanted. Here are a few examples (put the script into the URL field in a shortcut or favorite link):
  • Put the web part page into 'Design' mode
javascript:MSOLayout_ToggleLayoutMode();

  • Put the web part page into 'Browse' mode
javascript:MSOTlPn_ShowToolPane('2');

  • Put the web part page into 'Import' web part mode
javascript:MSOTlPn_ShowToolPane('5');

These shortcuts are great time-savers