Please upgrade your web browser now. Internet Explorer 6 is no longer supported.
Zac Smith
SharePoint, WSS and MOSS development.
When developing against lists, column names with spaces can be rather annoying. Internally SharePoint encodes spaces with the characters '_x0020_'. This isn't the end of the world but is a bit of a pain when writing code that uses the column names. Over the past few months I have found that I got into the habit of always creating columns without the space, and then renaming them.
 
As an example if I wanted to create a column named 'Account Number' I would first name it 'AccountNumber'. The internal name is set only once and is based on what the column is called when it is created. After the initial creation I can then safely rename the column with the space and still reference it as 'AccountNumber'.
 
I have developed the same habit for naming lists. With lists I think it is even more important to not have spaces as you end up with urls that look like this: http://site/lists/my%20task%20list/allitems.aspx. This is not particularly nice to look at and may even cause problems for some search engines. This is also makes it hard to read the URL and ends up as a bit of an accessiblity negative.
You can use the exact same technique as described for naming columns.

Categories: Accessibility, MOSS, WSS, SharePoint

The Mechanics Car

by Zac Smith 4-Jun-09, 5 Comments
As a web developer, building your own website can be one of the most challenging jobs you have. There can be a lot of pressure and expectation, not so much from your clients and peers, but from yourself. As a result the proverbial mechanics car situation seems to occur and the website gets poorly neglected. Either that or you are just really busy.

At any rate we finally have a website that we are somewhat happy with. I still have a huge list of improvements to roll out and I hope to talk about some of these enhancements over the next month.
 
As far as providing SharePoint services go, creating public websites is definitely one of Trinkit’s specialties, so we want to showcase some of our skills on our website and blog. Our website might not look hugely different but a lot has changed under the covers. The main difference is that the site is now built on our new SharePoint web framework. The framework provides a lot general plumbing and optimisation which allows us to spend more time focusing on the development of actual functionality.

I hope you like our “refreshed” site :)
 
Categories: Accessibility, MOSS, SharePoint, Trinkit

FullCodePress 2009

by Zac Smith 30-Apr-09, 0 Comments

UPDATE: Congrats to the NZ team for taking out this event. It's always enjoyable beating the Aussies and this is no different. However the great thing about this competition is that both charities will get a fully operational website, not just the winner.

Check out the NZ site: http://www.fcp-nz.com/
and the AUS site: http://test.fcp-aussie.com/

There are more details about the results over on the fullcodepress blog.

- - -

Exciting news .... my wife Kate Insoll Smith was just selected to represent New Zealand in the FullCodePress web competition. What is FullCodePress?

 “The concept is simple. Web teams take each other on, at the same location, to build a complete website in 24 hours. No excuse, no extensions, no budget overruns.”

Kate will be taking the role of designer in the competition, but I’m sure her information architecture, UX and HTML/CSS skills will come into play at some point. The competition is in Sydney so we will both be heading over to check it out. Incidentally Kate is also the other half of Trinkit.

Read more on the FullCodePress website and see the rest of the NZ team.

Go the CodeBlacks!!

Categories: Community, Trinkit, Accessibility

The details of the first ever NZ SharePoint conference have been finalised.

This will be the New Zealand conference to learn about SharePoint 2007 with expert local and international speakers presenting on topics that will help you understand and succeed with your SharePoint implementations and add real value to your organization and businesses.”

I’m quite excited to be presenting a session on Web Standards and accessiblity. This is something I’m quite passionate about and have done a fair amount of research on over the last couple of years. I plan to focus on public websites and the basics of accessibility and W3C compliance.

I wrote a blog post on this almost exactly two years ago. Some of the techniques are a little outdated now but I’ll be addressing that in my session.

The actual session brief is something along the lines of .....

Title: Web Standards, SharePoint and Accessibility - Yes you can.
Description: Web Standards, Accessibility, SharePoint. Many people are under the impression that these words don’t go together. In this session Zac will demonstrate how a public web site in SharePoint can be both accessible and adhere to W3C recommendations. A number of available tools will be evaluated including AKS 2.0 and ARF. Zac will also provide many tips and techniques for anyone looking to build a web standard compliant site in SharePoint.

Attendees should have a basic understanding of SharePoint Publishing Features and NZ Web Standards.

Session Type: Technical
Session Level: 300
Time:  4:15 – 5.15
Location: Chamber Room 1

The conference is pretty exciting stuff for NZ’s SharePoint community  - so don’t miss it!

Categories: Community, SharePoint, WCM, Accessibility