At the end change or remove the width property of the table cell, which is set to 50%
- Using tag selector select the element which is holding table with details
Delete or correct the "Width" attribute, because you have more columns and each can't have 50% of width.And there you have it. You're in control of columns now :-)
The cleanest way to build a website is to write clean code. Like that you control the components that usually graphical editors take over. Even though I like the graphicak WYSWYG editing, sometimes I simply have to dig into code and make manual corrections.
If notepad is just a bit not enough for you (like for me), here is an improved version:
Notepad++
Just check the list of features... Tabs, Color coding, auto completion, Code grouping, Macro recording and playback, bookmarks, zoom, multiple views, etc, etc, etc. The guys really made a great product.
When you install the program, it can even replace the default program for viewing source code on the Internet. So super. Next time Internet Explorer will tell me in which line of code I made an error, I'll be able to find it!
Just check the list of languages it has color coding for... The menu doesn't fit in a screen! :)
(in the screenshot above I'm checking a website template from OSWD (I know they write good code)).
Looks like I'm starting to repeat myself... Some time ago I was posting about a very good place to find beautiful pictures and photos for your website - Office online. I have to make again the post about it, because it deserves it. It's renewed - bigger, better, nicer and looks like with a lot more contents.
Thumbs up!
If you're writing longer texts into Windows SharePoint Services lists be careful. By default WSS has a 30-minute security timeout. This means that if you'll click on a New Item and then write in the contents for 30 minutes and 1 second, you'll get an error message when clicking Save and close. If you click back, usually the long text you entered will be lost!
There are 2 ways to avoid this. One is if you're a server administrator:
- In Start Menu click Administrative tools and SharePoint Central Administration.
- Click Configure virtual server settings and select the site you want to configure security timeout for.
- Under Virtual Server Management click Virtual server general settings.
- In the section Web Page Security Validation you can edit or turn off the timeout settings.
 !!!! Warning !!!! - With this you're increasing the security risk of the WSS website so be sure that if you're going to increase the timeout or turn it off, that you know what you're doing. Other - simpler - client wayThere is another way though and it's done by the editor: Before hitting Save and Close - copy the long text you've written into the field, into the clipboard, then refresh the page and paste the long text back. Now you can safely click Save and Close. Too bad this way you can only save the contents of one field, though...
I love the new Microsoft Office 2007. It really has a lot of improvements. But now I have a problem. I'm used to exporting a list into excel, making advanced editing there and then synchronizing the data back to the SharePoint list.
But soon I realized (after a long search) that the button to synchronize data back to SharePoint is GONE!
Thanks to my friend, Pedro Serrano for confirming that fear... Here's a post in his blog. I've already installed a Send a smile tool and sent couple of frowns because of this functionality depreciated. Some of the solutions I'm using are built based on this functionality. Please, MSFT, bring it back.
SharePoint and FrontPage have a very nice functionality of grouping the data in a list data view according to selected group. What in my opinion can be improved, is that you expand or colapse the group with a click on the whole cell rather than targeting that small plus or minus sign in front of a group name.
Not to reinvent hot water again: this is already discovered so let me point it out:
http://dev.collutions.com/blog/Pages/Grouping.aspx
Thanks, Jim Duncan!
Coming from Slovenia I have to face with the problem of slovenian characters in the web applications. Usually FrontPage or SharePoint designer take good care about that for me. The problem arises when I need to use Flash that reads external file.
Example: I need to embed a flash that will read the text that will say "Študija".
If I include in the text file the word Študija, Flash will not recognize this character (at least in most cases). I've found, that you have to use special codes for characters like č, ž, š, etc. But which? After some time searching the net and combining knowlege, I've come up with a table of codes for the following characters:
č: %C4%8D
Č: %C4%8C
š: %C5%A1
Š: %C5%A0
ž: %C5%BE
Ž: %C5%BD
ć: %C4%87
Ć: %C4%86
đ: %C4%91
Đ: %C4%90
ä: %C3%A4
Ä: %C3%84
ő: %C3%B6
Ő: %C3%96
ű: %C3%BC
Ű: %C3%9C
ß: %C3%9F
So in my case instead of Študije I have to use %C5%A0tudije to have Flash spell out the correct word.
Update: Thanks to Jose here's a list of other special characters to use. There are no č, ž, š in that table so it's a nice complement to this post.
http://www.adobe.com/go/tn_14143
I've already posted about where to get free graphics for your website.
Another place that quickly became one of my favourites is stock.xchng. Liked it from the first moment. I've already registered and posted 2 photos to share with the community (click here to see my profile and photos on sxc).
The site is nice, has a community, some real nice tutorials for working with images and when I posted 2 photos it took some time for them to get published. They have administrators checking the quality of the photos and if the photos are appropriate for publishing.
Here are my 2 photos, only after a day of being published they're already rated and commented:
I always like to access our company's SharePoint Document Library via URL. And on the way I like to save every keystroke (can't help it - I'm lazy). To have the url of the document library as short as possible, when creating it make the following:
- Create document library and name it something very short - for example doc
- When the library is created, under Modify Settings and Columns in that document library click Change general settings and now you can rename your document library to the desired nime, like for example Company's Documents
Yeee. Now you can access your document library couple of clicks faster:
http://yoursharepointurl/doc
To make links from SharePoint lists, document libraries, etc. open in new window is usually easy with FrontPage 2003 or SharePoint Designer and inserting a Data View.
But this caused problems. In some cases when you're including xslt data view you can have trouble saving site like template. What worked for me is to put a little script just before the </body> tag, that changed the target window of links inside of document library. The script is based on WSS CSS recognition so you can use it also for other cases.
Below is the code for the script:
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
i=0
while (document.links[i]) //check all document links
{
if (document.links[i].parentNode.className == "ms-vb2" || document.links[i].parentNode.className == "ms-vb" || document.links[i].parentNode.className == "ms-vb-icon") //if is inside of DL webpart, do it:
{
document.links[i].target='_blank'
}
i++
}
</script>
Yeeee! Forgot to post. Recently (18.9.) there was an event for Microsoft's partners in Slovenia. At the end I've also had a presentation with 2 of my friends. We've all come to the finals so we've earned the title Vistaman, to prove that we can present the new Office and Vista. Congratulations to Matjaž Šircelj that won the competition and to Simon Jurič for also a very good presentation!
How did I remember that just now? Because our Ministry of internal affairs - the police today kindly reminded me about that date... More specifically when I was driving there ;)
Guess a prize comes with a price ;-)
SharePoint has a nice feature when it comes to edit the multiple lines of text. That is rich text editor. What I'm missing the most in this is the button for creating hyperlinks.
So only if you typed in an URL like www.b4contact.com this was recognized. What if you wanted to create a hyperlink to some cool site like in this example?
Here's a video I've prepared some time ago and dug it out. If you have FrontPage or a friend with FrontPage, you can enable the hyperlink button.
Thanks to Piflar - multimedia e-learning portal (for now only in Slovene - for now!) for enabling me the tools and hosting of my contents.
If you're like me using SharePoint over the Internet (for extranet, and other purposes) and if you're opening the same site a lot of times, you might want the computer to remember the username and password for that site. But the computer simply doesn't want to remember the username and password...
Although many do not recommend this, here's the way to do it:
In Internet Explorer under the menu Tools click Internet Options. In the open window now select the Security tab.
Next select Local Intranet and click the Sites button.
In the new window click the Advanced button and in the next window type in the URL of your SharePoint site. If the site is not using SSL (https:) remember to clear the "Require server verification..." checkbox. At the end click the Add button and confirm all the windows with OK or Close.
The next time you'll log on to the SharePoint Site check the box Remember my password and that'll be the last time you'll log in to that site manually on this computer.
!!!Important!!!
If you're accessing sensitive data on SharePoint remember to secure your computer account with a password and protect the unauthorized access to this computer, because anyone can access to this site from this computer now!
Some time ago I've had the craziest problem with one of my friend's computer. After she installed one player, everything that she wanted to run (like for example Word, Outlook, games,...) - EVERYTHING started that player with an error message. I went almost crazy looking for solution. That's why I want to point it out here if anyone will ever have the same problem:
What happened is that the .exe extension got associated with that player (like for example some media type like .mp3 associates with windows media player). So basically when we tried to run any .exe - program file it was understanding to run that player and open .exe in it.
Crazy. I couldn't fix the registry, because regedit is also .exe file.
This is what saved me and my friend's computer.
Update: Due to a broken link, I've changed it and added a link to some more xp file association fixes:
Windows XP file association fixes.
There are quite some good vector graphics editors available on the market. But again keeping the stle of free I have to recommend you Inkscape - an open source scalable vector graphics editor.
It has all the features for drawing with vectors that you need. I had to prepare t-shirts and I used this program. The print shop was surprised with the quality of result and also they were happy because I didn't forget to convert text into curves (which Inkscape automatically offered.)
Well FireFox already supports semi-transparent png and the effects with these are super. Also Internet Explorer 7 now has the support for transparency in png. But to wait for everybody to change from IE6? That might take a while.
But if you need semi-transparent effects on your website, here's a very neat optical trick to make it.
Read more here...
Really super. Will use it with my next project.
Wow. This is amazing! You can actually post blogs directly from word! This post is actually made with the new Word 2007! Just click the office logo, select new and from templates select New blog entry.
Although I'm having some difficulties posting to the new blogger Beta, but I'm sure it will be fixed when both word and blogger will go out of the beta.
Not everybody has Flash installed. It's quite easy and free to install it, but still there are some cases that simply someone viewing your website might not have Flash player installed. You can put an alternative content for users that don't have flash player installed. So instead of your flash animation you still can display HTML.
This is super, because if you have your whole site built in Flash you can still make HTML substitute for the ones without the player.
Thanks to Deconcept's SWF Object script file...
Simple to integrate and simply works :)
Windows already has an integrated .zip compressed file support. But I've experienced problem in bigger zip files. And also sometimes I'm receiving lots of compressed files in other formats, such as .rar.
A solution to this problem is:
7-zip file archiver.
It has its own high compression format and also supports
- packing/unpacking to/from 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
- unpacking from: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS
From what I've seen from news it also supports .ISO. What I especially like is the nice Windows Explorer integration. 
I'm probably one of the biggest fans of SharePoint, because it enables me to do virtually anything with a bit of creativity. So you can expect some more of the SharePoint stuff here (by the way: I'm not a programmer, so don't catch me on too technical details.) One thing that was annoying me and some of our customers is that when entering info into rich text field it was simply too narrow. The width is for resolution 1024x768. That's all fine and dandy, but if you like to type a lot the narrow field when entering information just won't do. To expand the field you have to open the NewForm.aspx and EditForm.aspx in FrontPage or SharePoint designer and just before the </body> tag add the following code: <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
document.getElementById('urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office#FIELDNAME_iframe').style.width=WIDTH
</script>Ofcourse replace the FIELDNAME with actual name of the field and WIDTH with desired width in pixels. For the FIELDNAME you have to use the SharePoint name, not the display name (sometimes they aren't the same). You can find the SharePoint name of the field easily if you
- modify settings and columns of the list
- click on the name of the field in the "Columns" section
- check value of parameter Field in the URL (click on image below to see the screenshot)
 Save the file and you'll have the result. Click on the thumbnails below to see larger images. Before:  Code:  After:  There you have it. Not as nice to look at, but nicer to write in :).
My friend, Jose has a good post about where to find free graphics. When in need of graphics for your website, the problem can be the authorship rights. That's why you have to search for royality free pictures.
Or you can check office online.
Check Jose's tip about free clipart.
Through Office online you can find lots of quality photos that you can freely use.
If you're keeping your computer secure and up-to-date with updates, you've probably noticed that in Internet Explorer you have to first click on the flash animation or any other object (such as movie, etc) to be able to interactively use it.
Here's a screenshot of what I have in mind.
I understand that Microsoft is trying to protect us from unwanted actions in our computer but if as a web developer this bothers you, I've found a solution.
Here's one from Macromedia:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/activecontent/articles/devletter.html
And personally I like the solution that I've found on Amara Software site:
http://www.amarasoftware.com/flash-problem.htm
And the flash works... Until next update :)
Here's a problem that I've had:
I'm working on a website and I received a flash animation to put it it. The problem was that the site also included DHTML menu with layers. The problem is, that the menu layers don't want to display above flash animation.
A screenshot of the problem:
The solution is very simple: Just add <PARAM NAME="wmode" VALUE="transparent"> to the flash object tag, like shown below:
And voila. Works for me:
If this blog is also for webmasters and those wanting to become one, I should start addressing this topic.
In the office I'm using FrontPage 2003 and lately the super new SharePoint Designer. But these are the tools we use in the office and are really proffessional.
If you want to create a website at home or with minimum costs, you can use NVU - free web authoring tool.
It has enough if you want to build the website for free, nice features and support for plugins also.
Below is a screenshot of user interface (click on the thumbnail to see bigger screenshot):
It has nice views (HTML Tags is a nice view)  Tag selector: a feature I can't live without when working with web pages. You can find it at the bottom of user interface: 
One nice feature is also that you can see the width and height of the element (table, etc.) in the rulers. Below is the sample of the table. You can see the width in the top ruler (click thumbnail for bigger preview) 
It is XHTML compliant as you can see in the source code view. (click for bigger image) 
Absolutely nice if you want to create web sites for free. Nice also the site manager and possibility to publish the site via FTP. What I was missing is - support for working with layers
- opening non-html files (for example CSS)
Had an old game that you simply loved? Want to play it again? Not all is lost. In the era of superpowerful computers the games are advancing so fast that it's even hard to follow.
If you want to slow your pace and play an old game, the wonder of Internet is super. Just look for abandonware. Tons of all the games you knew or you didn't know.
So if you're looking for something simple to relax, this is an additional option for you. The sure thing is: your configuration will meet the minimum requirements. :)
If you need a program to modify your photographies, images, etc. you have some choices. PhotoShop is really good, but doesn't fit under the free tools category. A free substitute for PhotoShop is the GIMP, but if you're looking for something more light-weight, I recommend Paint .NET. It has enough of the functionalities that you'd require - layers, all sorts of different effects, powerful tools for working with drawings, images. As a Webmaster I find this tool (because of its lightweight and especially because it's for free), I found it really indispensable. Here's a screenshot of the user interface 
The task panes are semi-transparent when over the image 
It has support for layers and some blending modes 
And the color select tool has the hex option! Super if you need this for web development. 
P.S. - what do you think of the picture I was editing in Paint .NET? ;)
Just a quick notice. I've published the links of the tools on the right side so you'll be able to find them all the time. As I get new tools and good stuff, I'll update the linkbar on the right.
If you have to create manuals for the work you've created (regarding software), you'll love this next tool:
Wisdom Soft's Screen Hunter
Already the free version has a lot of good features:
- capture rectangle area / window / full screen
- capture to clipboard or/and a file
- include mouse pointer in a screen capture
Especially that last helped me a LOT. Definetly recomended. On the site you can also find video guides, screenshots, etc.
As promised, I'll start a series of posts in which I'll expose the free stuff on the Internet. You can get really a lot of free stuff even without digging deep. If you have something that's REALLY good please comment it back to me, so I can include (and ofcourse download :)).
Let's present the first pick:
For me to be involved in Internet is almost a must-have a good download manager. If you're (like me) one of the people who don't want to stay alert over your large downloads, you will love the Free Download Manager.
Free Download Manager
It has it all (download resuming, multiple section download, integration with a browser, download basket) and is easy to use.
The name is also promising. You can't expect a Free Download Manager to be for charge in the future :). Congrats and also congrats on not complicating with a name.
I'd like to share an experience with you. It's about a multimedia e-learning portal that we've been developing now for three years. It has undergone 2 major changes. The idea was born when I was driving to a meeting with my boss and we said that it would be great to have a place on the internet where you'd be able to learn by watching videos and listening to instructions.
So little planning, little developing and Clippy's Web was born. It was a great portal and it had videos in slovene language. Super. But the results didn't quite arrive. Why? Because we've decided that only part of contents will be for free and the other part for "premium" - paying members.
With a lot of effort in creating contents, marketing the portal, etc. we simply didn't get as many visits and members as we wished. So we decided for a change - a portal called B4Learning. We've changed the system in a way that each had to be a member and we also offered free membership. Like a benefit for being a member each received his own mini-portal with access to training videos, his own calendar and a place where to publish his/her files online. GREAT... Yeah, maybe for geeks like us. We've had even less visits and even less members!!!
No way! It was a time almost to panic. So at last we saw that the model of Internet is to offer for free. So now we have all the contents available in the new portal - Piflar's Web (meaning a Geek's Web) without any hassle of registration, long processes etc. You enter the portal and you can access the tips you like.
And I'm happy to see that the results are starting to show! So the model of free like the most popular model of Internet (freeware, open source etc.) is the winning model. Earning some money from it? That's a topic for next time. In my next post I'll also share some free tools you can find on the Internet for your computer or the web.
Well the hardest thing is acomplished. The blog is created. All I needed was a liiitle push to create my blog. This is my seccond attempt to start blogging, hopefully more successful.
WebBorG? Well, not CyBorg since I'll be dealing with web here and I'm also a fan of star trek so Borg are cool from there. And also if you use my name - BORis Gomiunik you can also come up with BorG. :)
I've been trying to start with my own blog for weeks now. I have quite a lot to share with you.
So what is this going to be about? Since I'm a web developer for B4Contact - a company that is a great deal specialized in customizing user experience with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), I've come across some tricks, tools, tips, howto-s and similar. And I want to share this with you.
Also: I love JavaScript. Untill now I could make almost all I needed with it. So WSS and JavaScript go together in a perfect harmony. And I'll prove it to you.
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