As I listened to my young neighbors run around the parking lot chanting, "U-S-A! U-S-A!" I glanced at my Twitter feed, and it showed a burst of similar sentiment. On the announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death, Twitter recorded the highest sustained rate of tweets ever, at an average of 3,000 per second. The above shows the progression from 9:30pm to 12:30am EST.
[Image Link via @nickbilton]
Page edited by Ben Shoemate
We had an issue with Websphere portal 6.1.5 and Omnifind enterprise search version 9.1 where searches submitted from search bar in the portal header are not passed to the Omnifind portlet. The page will redirect to the right page but the keyword is not passed to the search portlet and the search is not submitted.
Steps to recreate the problem.
If you follow the steps in the documentation to integrate omnifind with portal (run the install script which creates a portal page and deploys the omnifind portlet and a servlet to encode and submit search keyword) and modify the search bar in the portal theme to send searches to the new page – you will end with a working version of portal where everything works correctly. However, if you modify that page in anyway, it will stop working. The portlet will still submit search typed directly into the portlet but searches typed into the header will not work.
Know ways to break it:
Solution
Step 1: Get the JAR that contains the scripts and files.
Go to the master server where the Omnifind application is running. Find es.wp61.install.jar (note version 7 has its own jar file) and copy it to the portal server and unpack it.
Step 2: with the command prompt (or bash for linux) navigate to the folder you unpacked – es.wp61.install and type the following command (change .bat to .sh for linux) and update the parameters for your server:
wp61_uninstall.bat -WPSProfileDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\wp_profile" -WASDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\AppServer" -WASUser wpsadmin -WASPassword wpsadmin -WPSDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\PortalServer" -WPSUser wpsadmin -WPSPassword wpsadmin -WPSHost "wps1.base22.com:10040"
Step 3: If it runs successful, log in and check that all omnifind portlets and pages were removed.
Step 4: Run the install script from the command line (just press up to get the command from the unistall and change it to install)
wp61_install.bat -WPSProfileDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\wp_profile" -WASDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\AppServer" -WASUser wpsadmin -WASPassword wpsadmin -WPSDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\PortalServer" -WPSUser wpsadmin -WPSPassword wpsadmin -WPSHost "wps1.base22.com:10040"
From the omnifind documentation:
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When you remove OmniFind® Enterprise Edition from WebSphere® Portal, the parameters that you specified for the portlets when you deployed them must be specified again.
To remove OmniFind Enterprise Edition from WebSphere Portal, run the script that is appropriate for operating system and your version of WebSphere Portal or Lotus Quickr for WebSphere Portal:
When you start the script, the script stops the WebSphere Portal server. After the OmniFind Enterprise Edition software is removed, the script restarts the WebSphere Portal server.
To remove OmniFind Enterprise Edition from a WebSphere Portal system:
At a command prompt, run the setup script for your operating system and your version of WebSphere Portal. The following example shows parameters on separate lines for readability; you must specify the parameters with the command:
In version 6.1.5
wp61_uninstall.bat -WPSProfileDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\wp_profile" -WASDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\AppServer" -WASUser wpsadmin -WASPassword wpsadmin -WPSDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\PortalServer" -WPSUser wpsadmin -WPSPassword wpsadmin -WPSHost "wps1.base22.com:10040"
In version 7:
wp70_uninstall.bat \-WPSProfileDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\wp_profile" -WASDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\AppServer" -WASUser wpsbind -WASPassword wpsbind -WPSDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\PortalServer" -WPSUser wpsadmin -WPSPassword wpsadmin -WPSHost "portalserver.ibm.com:10040"
Step 1: Copy the appropriate JAR file from the OmniFind Enterprise Edition server to the WebSphere Portal server, and then use the Java™ JAR command (or the TAR command) to unpack the file.
wp70_install.bat -WPSProfileDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\wp_profile" -WASDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\AppServer" -WASUser wpsbind \-WASPassword wpsbind -WPSDir "C:\\IBM\\WebSphere\\PortalServer" -WPSUser wpsadmin -WPSPassword wpsadmin -WPSHost "portalserver.ibm.com:10040"
Definitions of parameters:
Step 2: Configure the following settings to set up the new portlet or portlets:
The second speaker at this mornings An Event Apart in Boston is Whitney Hess. Here goes with the liveblogging…
Whitney’s talk is about design principles. As a consultant, she spends a lot of time talking about UX and inevitably, the talk turns to deliverables and process but really we should be establishing a philosophy about how to treat people, in the same way that visual design is about establishing a philosophy about how make an impact. Visual design has principles to achieve that: contrast, emphasis, balance, proportion, rhythm, movement, texture, harmony and unity.
Why have these principles? It’s about establishing a basis for your design decisions, leading to consistency. It’s about having a shared vision and they allow for an objective evaluation of the outcome.
But good design doesn’t necessarily equate to a good experience. The Apple G4 Cube was beautifully designed but it was limited in where and how it could be used.
Good design can equal good experience. That’s why Whitney does what she does. But she needs our help. She’s going to propose a set of design principles that she feels are universally applicable.
The basis for all of these principles are Aristotle’s modes of persuasion: logos, ethos and pathos—the rhetorical triangle.
Are universal principles enough? Probably not. Every company is different. Some companies publicly share their principles. Take Google’s “Ten Principles That Contribute to a Googley User Experience†as an example, or Facebook’s design principle …or Windows design principles for a good laugh. Look beyond the tech world too, like Charles and Ray Eames or Burning Man’s design principles.
So what are your company’s principles? Without principles, we don’t know what we’re trying to achieve. Here are some guiding ideas:
Use the design principles at kickoff meetings, when your prioritising features, brainstorming sessions, design critiques, stakeholder presentations, resolving conflict, postmortems and web metric analysis: evaluating the success of the feature or product.
Remember, user experience is the establishment of a philosophy of how to treat people. Help people make their lives better.
Tagged with aea aneventapart aeabos liveblogging conference whitneyhess ux design principles
Way back in the day, you could customize scrollbars in IE (5.5) with non-standard CSS properties like scrollbar-base-color which you would use on the element that scrolls (like the <body>) and do totally rad things. IE dropped that.
These days, customizing scrollbars is back, but it's WebKit this time. It's a bit better now, because the properties are vendor-prefixed (e.g. ::-webkit-scrollbar) and use the "Shadow DOM". This has been around for a couple of years. David Hyatt blogged it in early 2009 and put together an example page of just about every combination of scrollbar possibilities you could ever want.
These are the pseudo elements themselves. The actual parts of the scrollbars.
::-webkit-scrollbar { /* 1 */ }
::-webkit-scrollbar-button { /* 2 */ }
::-webkit-scrollbar-track { /* 3 */ }
::-webkit-scrollbar-track-piece { /* 4 */ }
::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb { /* 5 */ }
::-webkit-scrollbar-corner { /* 6 */ }
::-webkit-resizer { /* 7 */ }
These are the pseudo class selectors. They allow for more specific selection of the parts, like when the scrollbar is in different states.
:horizontal
:vertical
:decrement
:increment
:start
:end
:double-button
:single-button
:no-button
:corner-present
:window-inactiveI'm going to steal this whole section from David's blog post on the WebKit blog because it explains each part well:
:horizontal – The horizontal pseudo-class applies to any scrollbar pieces that have a horizontal orientation.
:vertical – The vertical pseudo-class applies to any scrollbar pieces that have a vertical orientation.
:decrement – The decrement pseudo-class applies to buttons and track pieces. It indicates whether or not the button or track piece will decrement the view’s position when used (e.g., up on a vertical scrollbar, left on a horizontal scrollbar).
:increment – The increment pseudo-class applies to buttons and track pieces. It indicates whether or not a button or track piece will increment the view’s position when used (e.g., down on a vertical scrollbar, right on a horizontal scrollbar).
:start – The start pseudo-class applies to buttons and track pieces. It indicates whether the object is placed before the thumb.
:end – The end pseudo-class applies to buttons and track pieces. It indicates whether the object is placed after the thumb.
:double-button – The double-button pseudo-class applies to buttons and track pieces. It is used to detect whether a button is part of a pair of buttons that are together at the same end of a scrollbar. For track pieces it indicates whether the track piece abuts a pair of buttons.
:single-button – The single-button pseudo-class applies to buttons and track pieces. It is used to detect whether a button is by itself at the end of a scrollbar. For track pieces it indicates whether the track piece abuts a singleton button.
:no-button – Applies to track pieces and indicates whether or not the track piece runs to the edge of the scrollbar, i.e., there is no button at that end of the track.
:corner-present – Applies to all scrollbar pieces and indicates whether or not a scrollbar corner is present.
:window-inactive – Applies to all scrollbar pieces and indicates whether or not the window containing the scrollbar is currently active. (In recent nightlies, this pseudo-class now applies to ::selection as well. We plan to extend it to work with any content and to propose it as a new standard pseudo-class.)
These pseudo elements and pseudo class selectors work together. Here are some random examples:
::-webkit-scrollbar-track-piece:start {
/* Select the top half (or left half) or scrollbar track individually */
}
::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb:window-inactive {
/* Select the thumb when the browser window isn't in focus */
}
::-webkit-scrollbar-button:horizontal:decrement:hover {
/* Select the down or left scroll button when it's being hovered by the mouse */
}To make a really simple custom scrollbar we could do this:
::-webkit-scrollbar {
width: 12px;
}
::-webkit-scrollbar-track {
-webkit-box-shadow: inset 0 0 6px rgba(0,0,0,0.3);
border-radius: 10px;
}
::-webkit-scrollbar-thumb {
border-radius: 10px;
-webkit-box-shadow: inset 0 0 6px rgba(0,0,0,0.5);
}In which we'd get this on a simple div with vertically overflowing text:
Check out the very subtle and nice scrollbars on Tim Van Damme's blog Maxvoltar:
The particularly nice bit here is that the scrollbar is on the body element, yet the scrollbar isn't stuck to the top, bottom, or right edge of the browser window as scroll bars normally are. I made a test page with copy-and-pasteable code to achieve that a similar effect:
On Forrst, they use custom scollbars on code snippets which are also pretty nice. They are less visually intense and so don't fight as much with the code highlighting.
As an early advocate of solid state hard drives …
… I feel ethically and morally obligated to let you in on a dirty little secret I've discovered in the last two years of full time SSD ownership. Solid state hard drives fail. A lot. And not just any fail. I'm talking about catastrophic, oh-my-God-what-just-happened-to-all-my-data instant gigafail. It's not pretty.
I bought a set of three Crucial 128 GB SSDs in October 2009 for the original two members of the Stack Overflow team plus myself. As of last month, two out of three of those had failed. And just the other day I was chatting with Joel on the podcast (yep, it's back), and he casually mentioned to me that the Intel SSD in his Thinkpad, which was purchased roughly around the same time as ours, had also failed.
Portman Wills, friend of the company and generally awesome guy, has a far scarier tale to tell. He got infected with the SSD religion based on my original 2009 blog post, and he went all in. He purchased eight SSDs over the last two years … and all of them failed. The tale of the tape is frankly a little terrifying:
You might think after this I'd be swearing off SSDs as unstable, unreliable technology. Particularly since I am the world's foremost expert on backups.
Well, you'd be wrong. I just went out and bought myself a hot new OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, the clear winner of the latest generation of SSDs to arrive this year. Storage Review calls it the fastest SATA SSD we've seen.
Beta firmware or not though, the Vertex 3 is a scorcher. We'll get into the details later in the review, but our numbers show it as clearly the fastest SATA SSD to hit our bench.
While that shouldn't be entirely surprising, it's not just faster like, "Woo, it edged out the prior generation SF-1200 SSDs, yeah!" It's faster like, "Holy @&#% that's fast," boasting 69% faster results in some of our real-world tests.
Solid state hard drives are so freaking amazing performance wise, and the experience you will have with them is so transformative, that I don't even care if they fail every 12 months on average! I can't imagine using a computer without a SSD any more; it'd be like going back to dial-up internet or 13" CRTs or single button mice. Over my dead body, man!
It may seem irrational, but … well, I believe the phenomenon was explained best on the television show How I Met Your Mother by Barney Stinson, a character played brilliantly by geek favorite Neil Patrick Harris:
Barney: There's no way she's above the line on the 'hot/crazy' scale.
Ted: She's not even on the 'hot/crazy' scale; she's just hot.
Robin: Wait, 'hot/crazy' scale?
Barney: Let me illustrate!
Barney: A girl is allowed to be crazy as long as she is equally hot. Thus, if she's this crazy, she has to be this hot. You want the girl to be above this line. Also known as the 'Vickie Mendoza Diagonal'. This girl I dated. She played jump rope with that line. She'd shave her head, then lose 10 pounds. She'd stab me with a fork, then get a boob job. [pause] I should give her a call.
Thing is, SSDs are so scorching hot that I'm willing to put up with their craziness. Consider that just in the last two years, their performance has doubled. Doubled! And the latest, fastest SSDs can even saturate existing SATA interfaces; they need brand new 6 Gbps interfaces to fully strut their stuff. No CPU or memory upgrade can come close to touching that kind of real world performance increase.
Just make sure you have a good backup plan if you're running on a SSD. I do hope they iron out the reliability kinks in the next 2 generations … but I've spent the last two months checking out the hot/crazy solid state drive scale in excruciating detail, and trust me, you want one of these new Vertex 3 SSDs right now.
Today, we’re going to learn how to set up a website that can be easily edited via your iPhone and the Pagelime mobile app. If you’re unfamiliar with Pagelime, it’s an incredibly easy-to-use CMS that makes the process of editing a website as easy as possible.
Pagelime is unique in that it allows you to design and code your website in plain HTML first, and add the Pagelime editable CSS tags as the last step in the process. Once your site is finished, you can go through the site and add “class=cms-editable†and a unique ID to any elements in your HTML that you want to be editable. Pagelime takes care of the rest.
For this article, I’m you…and you are perhaps a web designer that makes websites for local businesses, law firms, restaurants, etc. So I make a lot of well designed 6-7 page brochure sites.
So I was pitching a restaurant for their web business, and I downloaded a lovely template from ThemeForest with the amazingly descriptive title of “Restaurant Website 01″. It just so happened to have everything our client was looking for.
I’ve decided to use Pagelime because my client doesn’t make many drastic changes, but when he does (let’s call him Chef Tony) he wants to be able to do them himself. Let’s say that I was competing with a few other developers for the contract, and I sold Tony on being able to update his recipe of the month, his employee of the month, and a daily Paella dish photo from his iPhone. Needless to say Tony was impressed. Tony is rarely impressed; so now we have to deliver on our Paella updating promises!
On our template’s homepage, we can see there are quite a few areas on the page that I’ll need to make editable. Since making things editable with the Pagelime mobile app is no different than with the Pagelime web app, we go about adding the editable classes to the different parts we’re interested in.
Here’s the markup for the welcome message.
<div class="headingrow"> <h1>Welcome to our website</h1> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit…</p> </div>
We’re going to make the p tag editable with Pagelime. Since we’re using the mobile app, we’ll also give it a descriptive title.
<p id="welcome" class="cms-editable" title="Welcome Text">Lorem ipsum dolor sit…</p>
Here’s the next section:
<div class="subheadingrow"> <h2>Employee of the month - Jenny Smith</h2> <img class="leftalign"src="images/home-image-sample1.gif" alt="" /> <p>Tasty and fullfiling, … </p> </div>
I want to make the headline, the promo image and the main content itself editable.
<h2 id="eomtitle" class="cms-editable" title="EOM Headline">Employee of the month - Jenny Smith</h2> <img id="eomimg" class="leftalign cms-editable" title="EOM Image" src="images/home-image-sample1.gif" alt="" /> <p id="eomtext" class="cms-editable" title="EOM Text">Tasty and fullfiling, … </p>
The Recipe of the month section mirrors the above format exactly, so we make the same changes to that block of HTML.
Finally we make the image in the upper left corner editable:
<img id="changer" class="cms-editable" title="Changing Image" src="images/changer.png" />
This doesn’t affect the site layout in any way, and only a couple moments to code. Pretty sweet so far! If we open the site in the Pagelime web app, we now see that all of our elements are editable.
Now I’ve delivered the first version of the site to Chef Tony, and he can download the Pagelime Mobile App here:
He can log in with his email and password, and he’ll see his site on the dashboard:
At this point, he has the ability to edit the site, manage images, view documents, use Google Analytics, and even make new pages and templates. For the purposes of this article, we’re only going to deal with editing the Site and Images.
Clicking on Edit Site brings you to the Select Page screen where Tony can choose the homepage for editing:
The next screen provides you with a list of the editable areas we defined earlier.
Clicking on “EOM Headline†will allow us to change the employee of the month text. Tony makes it Chef Tony, because he just so happened to cook a mean Paella today. We tap “Done,†switch to “Preview,†and can now see now the ‘employee of the month’ section has now, indeed, been updated to “Chef Tony.â€
We’re now going to update the Changer Image. To do so, we’re going to use the “Edit†view. We tap the button in the subnav which brings up a preview of the website with green overlays. The overlays show you what’s editable and can be tapped to open that region – similar to the live editing in the Pagelime web app.
This gives us a preview of the image we’re changing. We now have the option of taking a live picture on the fly, choosing an image from our phone, or choosing an image stored in the Pagelime image manager. For this tutorial, I’ll take a picture of a Paella, and then use the auto-cropper tool, which allows us to proportionally scale and crop our image to match the dimensions of the editable image on the site.
We can now check the preview and see how it looks before clicking publish…
When we check the actual website…
… we see that everything has been updated — all from our phone! No real technical knowledge is needed, and you have an awesome bit of client candy to help upsell your clients and make more money. (We won’t tell Tony he forgot to update his Employee of the Month Photo.)
So there you have it: a website integrated with a CMS with the added benefit of iPhone – on the fly – updating! Go make a glass of Limeade, enjoy the spring air, and the smell of all the extra green you’ll be making.
