October 2004 - Posts

• Review: Seth Godin's The Big Red Fez: How to Make any Website Better

  The Big Red Fez is based on a simple yet effective analogy of a monkey (wearing a big red fez) being trained to jump into a vat of lime Jell-O, but to do so the monkey must be rewarded with a banana.  If the search for that banana is not obvious, the monkey will lose interest and not complete the Jell-O jump.  So to the monkey, its all about the banana. I posted a detailed review of the book on a personal blog post here, along with 10 points on improving web site design and the user experience.     Posted Oct 30 2004, 04:21 PM by daveburke with no comments Filed under: Digital Musings

• Implementing CAPTCHA. Easy AND fun.

  It took less than an hour to implement captcha on my personal blog, based on the work of Chris Kunicki, BrainJar, and CMU nerds.  Details, links, and code excerpts on my personal blog here.   Posted Oct 29 2004, 01:57 PM by daveburke with 2 comment(s) Filed under: .Net General, .Text

• Bypassing SharePoint Document Library Security to retrieve documents

  I needed to provide external access to items from selected folders in a SharePoint Services 2.0 Document Library. I couldn't give read access to the entire library (our only option in WSS 2.0) because allowing them to browse the entire folder tree was not an option.  I found the best solution was to retrieve the binary directly from the WSS SQL database using the item's GUID.  Code and details on my personal blog post located here.    Posted Oct 29 2004, 09:08 AM by daveburke with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Sharepoint

• Series Collections added to my personal .Text blog

  I added Series Collections to my personal blog at http://dbvt.com/blog.  Series are in essence subcategories, which focus on a specific area within my primary categories.  This keeps categories pertinent and their growth in check and allows for a large number of subject-specific subcategories, or Series. The functional value of .Text Series may not be obvious to fellow bloggers, but it was another opportunity for me to work with ScottW's most excellent .Text 0.95 source. This post describes the functions four components (sidebar menu, separate page to display Series, Series Administration, and Post Entry with Series.)  I detail the code changes and additions to .Text for each of the four components in separate posts.  In general, I treated a Series object as a LinkCategory object but with a new CategoryType.SeriesCollection value, extended the LinkCategory data object to include ParentCatID and ParentTitle properties, and went from there.   Posted Oct 14 2004, 12:08 PM by daveburke with no comments Filed under: .Text