New blog platform Squarespace

I decide to switch over from Wordpress and give Squarespace.com ago to run our blog and website. Mainly for the simple reason that we were using Wordpress.com to run our blog and running our own separate company website. So I wanted to merge the web site and blog together and Wordpress.com didn't allow many design change options.

So now we are pretty much set up here on Squarespace for now using their 14 day trial account. So far the experience has been very good. I've spent around 2 hours including importing all of our blog posts from Workpress.com and incorporating the content from our website. Design and layout has been very simple you can add and configure pages, a blog and forms all by clicking add and setting a few properties.

One thing that springs to mind is that on going maintenance and refreshing the design to jsut a new colour or layout would only take a few minutes.

So far I'm loving the squarespaces environment, we'll see how it goes over 14 days to see if I upgrade to a paid account but so far it looks pretty promising.

Defensive programming

At kmsystems we try to do as much defensive programming as possible when writing code. One of the most common is the use of "ElseIf" instead of just using "Else" in a If Then statement. Reason being is that it is a lot more specific and helps you really think about the scenarios you will be catching here.

Another one that should be just as common especially in ASP.NET is checking to see if an item already exists in a drop down list before selecting it. The problem here is if a item is programatically selected in a drop down list which doesn't exit the page will crash. This can occur when the user edits an existing record and the code attempts to bind the existing data to the form however the drop down list items may have changed and the item previously record here has changed or been removed.

Dim StrNot_In_List As Integer

StrNot_In_List = ddl_Control.Items.IndexOf(ddl_Control.Items.FindByValue(dr("db_Field"))

   If StrNot_In_List = -1 Then

      ddl_Control.Items.Add(New ListItem("db_Field", "db_Field"))

   End If

ddl_Control.SelectedIndex = ddl_Control.Items.IndexOf(ddl_Control.Items.FindByValue("db_Field"))

In the about code ddl_Control is the drop down list control and "db_Field" is the database field that needs to be selected in the drop down list.

Report Viewer (Processing Mode - Remote)

Hate the yellow header and necessary links when viewing reports directly from the server? Hate is such a strong word maybe dislike.

One option(amongst others) is to create a customised report that runs on your web server, sounds like work to me. Another option is to change the reporting services config file to hide.collapse it, not an option if you share the server since this will affect all users.

Why don't we just run the rdl (report definition file) file from the server through report viewer. Good news, you can!

Did I mention the report runs faster, lets begin.

Report Viewer Configuration

Make sure the processing more is set to "Remote", use the markup below as a guide for the rest.

<ServerReport ReportServerUrl="http://<report server name/ip>/ReportServer" ReportPath="/<folder path>" DisplayName="Returns"></ServerReport>
</rsweb:reportviewer>

Things to Note

• Use ReportServer not Reports when post-fixing the ReportServerUrl


• There is no need to prefix the ReportPath with 'Reports'


• The file type does not need to be specified e.g. '.rdl', leave it out

On final thing, allow your web server (iis) to view the report. Give '<domain name>/<server name>$' browsing rights.

What is our primary focus?

Pure Harmony

KMSystems core business operates primarily in the Business to Employee (B2E) space where we apply a highly effective & harmonious blend of programming, web design and Continuous Improvement disciplines.

Simplify, automate, consolidate, integrate

We are highly skilled and experienced at partnering with the business to identify manual or poorly managed 'cottage industry' processes like, ad-hoc spreadsheets, databases, paper-based and antiquated data capture mechanisms and streamlining them through centralised, integrated web applications that are robust, flexible and scalable.

Long tail, short spend

Long Tail B2E software: Solutions that don’t often get big I.T. spend allocations, but that are critical to efficient and effective operation of individual departments or business units. Whether it be a tool to track marketing campaigns  or a facility that enables more effective collaboration between the sales force and product development department, KMSystems can provide cost-effective solutions to accommodate those discretionary spend budgets.

Below is a diagram that illustrates the Long Tail of software development as it occurs in most businesses; we refer to those areas as ‘Hack’ and ‘Unserved’ and they represent our key areas of focus.

Runs on the board...

...we’ve got plenty of those. We have designed and built over 100 successful corporate web applications including:

·         Employee and Customer facing Innovation Management Systems

·         Project Status reporting tools (activity calendars)

·         Contact Centre call tracking & reporting tools

·         Human Resources reporting and capability mapping

·         Sales performance tracking and reporting

·         Supplier management

·         Learning & Development tools

·         ...etc. Click here to see some examples of some of our recent projects.

Twitter for the Enterprise (Part 2: Page Re-Design)

Back in Part 1 Twitter for the Enterprise (Part 1: The Begining) after being satisfied with the apps functionality, it was makeover time.

I thought it would interesting to take you through my thoughts and what I think is important when giving the app a much needed face lift/redesign.

Layout

The first thing I like to do is a rough sketch of the layout including elements such as header, contents and footer. This allows me to play around with proportions, I decided to have a horizontal header spanning the entire page that was quite thin allowing the content section to stand out more.

Colours

A good place to start when looking for inspiration is COLOURlovers, just create an account and your away. It's amazing how easy it is to create a set of colours that work well together, the website allows you to save and share your palettes with other uses. On this occasion I decided on some very similar colours with a bright or contrasting colour to suit.

DIV Not TABLE

Back in the day when I built my first web page it was easy to just chuck everything in table rows and columns spanning, merging, mashing you name it.

As a rule tables are good for represent data and that's all they should be used for. The use of div is a more  flexible/cleaner approach, I often find myself compelled to clean up a layout done with tables. I've been using div's for a while now and haven't looked back.

Visual Hierarchy

Decide what you want the users' attention to be drawn to, in our case we wanted the users to see the the text box before anything else hence the reason why it's so large and bright. Even colours can serve to create this sense of hierarchy one way to archive this is to place a brightly coloured element on a darker background this gives a sense of the brighter element being on top or at the front. Use of different font sizes can also serve to further emphasize this.

Check out the new look, we haven't decided on the name yet.