Regardless, here are the 5 keyboard shortcuts that save my alot of time:

1. Multi-Line text in a cell - ALT+Enter. This is like hitting enter in a word processor to make a new line, but in the same cell.  It’s good for column headings that are a little long and you want to control the wrapping manually.
2. Autosum - ALT + =. This is great for adding in a SUM function under a bunch of numbers.  If you go to a cell directly under a column of numbers and then hit this short cut key it will type the SUM function for you and make an assumption about the cells to add, you can then select the right cells if it didn’t make the right selection, or just keep what it selected and then hit Enter to accept the formula.
3. Quick Formatting - CTRL + SHIFT + 3/4/5.  I use this most often for formatting dates and dollars.  Having highlighted the cells you want to format you can then hit CTRL + SHIFT + 3 or 4 or 5.
   - CTRL + SHIFT + 3 (or #) is to format dates in dd-mmm-yy format.
   - CTRL + SHIFT + 4 (or $) is to format dollars as currency with two decimal points.
   - CTRL + SHIFT + 5 (or %) is to format as a percentage.
4. Select a Row or Column - CTRL + SPACE or SHIFT + SPACE. This is useful if you need to select a whole row or column, or multiple rows and columns.  Move into any cell in the row or column you need selected and then press CTRL + SPACE to highlight columns or SHIFT + SPACE to highlight rows.   Once selected you can then hold down the shift key and use the arrow keys to extend your selection as required.
5. Autofill - CTRL + d or CTRL + r.  In this case you select a group of cells and then press CTRL + d to fill all cells with what ever is in the top cell down, or CTRL + r to fills cells to the right.

Got more that I should know about?  Let me know in the comments.

The computer is actually primarily used by my 5 year old daughter for playing games on nick junior and other websites.  Most of these involve some sort of drawing and printing combination and she is a little upset that she hasn’t been able to print like she used to be able to.

I think the key challenge has been that the printer we have on our network doesn’t have Mac drivers so I have been trying different ways of trying to connect it through post script generic drivers and other mechanisms.  It’s actually a Lexmark X8350 and despite this particular problem I will not be buying a Lexmark again, it’s all a little too plasticy and the quality could be better, but for the price we paid it does a reasonable job.  So with no native printer driver and various attempts at getting to it though other mechanisms I found a somewhat simple, albeit clunky, solution.

So here’s what I have setup now…

• New email address created, specifically for this purpose
• Old computer that I’m using for video rendering on all the time now
• Installation of Namtuk.com’s “Automatic Print Email” software

So how does printing now work?  When my daughter wants to print from the Mac she opens the print dialog box as normal, and from the bottom left of that box chooses PDF and then Send Email.  She puts in the dedicated email address (only one letter required to be pressed) and then hits send.  The Automatic Print Email software polls this specific Gmail account at 1 minutes intervals and is configured to then download the message through POP3 and then print the attachments from any message to the network printer.

Horrible, clunky, but works.  And most importantly my 5 year old daughter is happy she can print again!

It’s pretty simple: sending someone a commercial message when you do not have their permission to do so is spam. It’s a message they did not ask for or request.

The challenge of course is trying to follow the right people and then make sure you are not getting a stream full of SPAM.  There is a way I’ve discovered though that tends to alleviate this issues.  My experience is that spammers are using automation tools to send tweets to twitter on regular intervals.  It’s automated SPAM!  What I have discovered though is that most of these tweets come through the twitter API and the source of these tweets are indicated in the stream as a source called ‘web’.

Now ‘web’ also means someone who went to the twitter web site and updated their status, now to be honest anyone using twitter like that is perhaps someone I don’t necessarily want to hear from, so doing the following filters alot of the automated tweets as well as those using the web to update.

Now to do this you’ll need TweetDeck, an excellent tool for managing your relationship with twitter streams, more on this later.  Then you’ll need to modify your filter on the ‘all friends’ column by adding an exclusion for the source of  ‘web’.

Like so…

1. Backups and double checking backups all round
2. I took a backup of the database and then restored it into a new database
3. I took a complete copy of the site on the file system of the server and pointed it at my new database in the web.config
4. Created a new site in IIS to point to this new folder with a subdomain of staging.newagestore.com

   At this time I now had basically a working replica of the site ready for upgrade.  This enabled me to work on the upgrade (which I had done locally first anyway just to check everything) without disrupting the live site.

5. Upgrade the database using the upgrade script provided

   Initially when I tried this on my local system I found a few problems.  Primarily these problems related to custom indexes I had added to a couple of tables in an attempt to increase performance.  On my test system I removed these custom indexes and was able to upgrade smoothly, so on the production server I dropped these custom indexes prior to the script being run.  It ran without errors, and at this stage I haven’t put the custom indexes back onto the tables… all seems ok for the moment.

6. Copy the new files into the new folder structure as per the instructions.

   This was actually a little messy.  The instructions say to do things like “delete the web parts directory”  the problem of course with this approach is that any custom web parts that you might have built will be wiped out if that is where you happened to store them.  I found that I had custom code in the app_code directory, cmsdesk/modules directory and cmswebparts directory.  So I of course copied this code out first, then deleted folders as per the instructions.

7. Loaded the site to let the upgrade to the database occur.  All smooth.

   When I did this step on my local system it appeared to get through OK however none of the new web parts etc were available in the CMS after the upgrade.  This did not happen on the production system, it all went fine.  So on the test system/local I went into the admin area and ran the import for the 3.1a to 4.0 as per the instructions and everything then came together ok.

8. Added back in my custom code.
9. Turned off the old site in IIS and turned on the new one and then changed the host header to www in the new site (instead of staging) and then changed the license key in the new site also.

So the result is an upgraded CMS website.  The average visitor is not going to notice the difference… yet!

The key reason for our upgrade was to take advantage of the new social networking functions, we were licensed for the enterprise version of Kentico and so are granted a license for the new social networking version of Kentico.  We haven’t turned on these tool on the site yet, we are just playing with a few different ways to bring them into the fold.

A few things to be aware for the upgrade:

• I had a couple of pieces of code that called the ‘executenonquery’ method of the data connection object.  This appears to be gone in 4.0, so in my case I simply converted these to ‘executequery’ with no real impact.
• Make sure you have all your license keys before hand.  I have a license for the main domain, plus subdomains of local, test and staging.  So I have few options for working things out before getting too stuck.
• The menu web part and the breadcrumb web parts appear to have a new property called ‘encode name’.  Maybe it was there in previous version and I just never saw it.  Anyway it doesn’t appear to have been updated correctly during the upgrade as some instances of this part have this ticked and other do not.  I had to go and manually chance the config of that part on those templates, no big deal but didn’t discover it until today.  The problem was that some of my breadcrumbs were being rendered as <span>divination</span> – blah – blah and of course I didn’t want the <span> tags visible.
• The standard blogpostpreview transformation seems to be missing one of the function calls that counts the number of comments for each post.  I have temporarily removed that element from the transformation just to get the blog posts working.
• One of the big changes in version 4.0 is module separation.  Kentico have moved around the structure of modules in the folder structure so that they are isolated from other parts of the site structure.  This is a better design but a little difficult to adapt the 3 custom modules I have built into this new architecture.  At the moment I still have my custom code in the old places and will need to move it all around when I can.

So in all a fairly smooth upgrade. Oh.. one more thing.  The sample community site that has all the social networking functionality is pretty cool, however there doesn’t appear to be a simple way of reproducing this functionality in a new site.  Unlike creating a blog which is a pretty quick process where Kentico does all the hard work of creating pages and webparts and configuring those, creating a social networking site appears to be something you have to do by hand from scratch.  I have a support call into them to see if there is a better way.

I don’t think it’s firefox either, i think this is the actual page.  I loaded in IE with the same result!  I think this goes in the “if you’re not going to do it right then don’t do it all” basket.

But what an ordeal!

Here’s a list of the sites I use regularly and they all had (except for 2) the same password:

• gmail
• flickr
• youtube
• friendfeed
• twitter
• yahoo
• msn/live
• digsby
• timebridge
• skype
• jaymccormack.com
• apple
• emusic
• facebook
• linkedin
• stumbleupon
• toodledo
• tripadvisor
• tripit
• godaddy
• claimid
• yammer

But of course what password, or passwords should I use for all these? Enter RoboForm. I’ve posted about this in the past, it’s a cool password management tool that remembers passwords the first time you use them and then types them for you in the future. But there’s another feature that is a random password generator that creates passwords like “VK3zz44R3&” or “t%FHBj3zN5″. Of course these are had to crack but also hard to type and remember, but with roboform that’s now a snap.

Some experiences with the process: Of all the above sites only one (tripadvisor) decided that the best thing to do after changing the password was to send it to me in a plain text email. Yay! Here I am trying to be all secure and they decide to expose my new password to the world.

Something else with twitter specifically is that because it’s integrated into so many other things I do, I have found out through out the day the number of places that that password was stored. Even wordpress knows my twitter details! So it’s been a little frustrating on that front.

Finally, the iPhone. I use beehive for IM, Tweetie for Twitter and the facebook app, the linkedin app and the yammer app on my iPhone, and each of these needed to be reconfigured. Additionally the synchronisation between my todo list app and toodledo and my travel management app and tripit. Arghhhh!

Finally I had to make one compromise. My Apple password has to be something that I remember and that I can type easily on the iPhone as any app download or purchase on the phone requires you to plug in your password. So in this case I just ramped up the password a little.

So anyway… I think i’m set now. Oh, one more thing, I’ve backed up my roboform passwords in 2 places so that (fingers crossed) i’m not screwed if my PC crashes.

Initially I guess I want to make sure that people know the tools that I use on a regular basis that I believe fall into the web2.0 bucket.  Please note: I will not be defining web2.0 here, there is enough of that going on elsewhere.

So, here’s my list (in no particular order):

• ping.fm
• Tripit
• TripAdvisor
• Digsby
• Delicious
• FriendFeed
• go2web20.net
• LinkedIn Answers
• Google Docs

Suffice to say that there are thousands of examples of sites or services that may be classified as web2.0, so the list above is just a starting point.  I guess see this is a baseline… if someone asked me how to “get into” web2.0 then this is where I would tell them to go.

So a little detail on a few of these:

You no doubt have heard of things like twitter or pownce or jaiku, these are services that allow you post micro-blogs, tiny snippets of information that tell other people what’s going on in your life.  There are elements of this that are useful for business, and some for personal, but people addicted to these services basically post just about anything and everything.  The problem that was realised however was that keeping ALL of these services up to date became a real challenge. Solution: FriendFeed.  See my feed here.  FriendFeed allows you to create a single profile page that scan almost anything you do online at many web2.0 websites and puts it all in one place.  So as an example me feed shows my tweets (in twitter), my bookmarks (in delicious), my blog posts (from this blog) and a bunch of other things.  Plus I can configure how much or how little information I want to see about my friends online. So instead of going to 10 different websites to see what’s going on you can go to one place and scan the hap’nins.

TripAdvisor is probably one of the best examples of true web2.0 in action, user generated content.  I do a bit of travel for work (and leisure) and want to make sure that I’m staying in reasonable accommodations.  TripAdvisor shows reviews from real people who have stayed at hotels around the planet and that have rated and commented on their experience, some upload photos, some upload videos.  I’m at the point now where I almost use tripadvisor exclusively when deciding on hotels to stay in.

Google Docs is another great example of a web2.0 tools, but more targeted at collaboration than anything else.  As an example, imagine being able to open an excel spreadsheet and work on it while someone else is doing the same… AND SEE THEIR CHANGES IN REAL TIME!  It’s the coolest thing!  We’ve used this a couple of times internally at ASI and slowly but surely more people are opening Google accounts making it much easier to share this sort of information.

Delicious is another great web2.0 application, however I use it more for personal reasons that anything else, rather than as a sharing tool.  Del.icio.us is fundamentally a bookmark site, however instead of just a long list of bookmarks you get the ability to ‘tag’ or categorise your bookmarks.  This makes then really easy to find later on.  Additionally you can find things that other people have bookmarked using the same tags, and which of those are new or popular.  Further it has a great Firefox plug, my browser of choice, to enable you to bookmark things you find as well as finding things you’ve bookmarked. My delicious links here.

LinkedIn is slowly becoming the ‘business facebook’ and rightly so.  It’s a well organised, not overly complex site that allows you to keep in touch with other associates.  However something you may not know about linkedin is that they have a great answers section of their site.  If you have a question on a particular topic then you post your question and get answers from people around the globe, for free!  It’s not really designed as a technical resource though, so don’t go looking for the syntax for some bizarre SQL function.  However something really cool happened recently and I wanted to share it with you.

While perusing the questions on databases one night I came across this question, it was basically asking about data quality programs that you could put in your organisation.  Simple enough, and I gave my 2 cents (today worth on 1.4 cents in the US).  A whole of people did the same and I didn’t think about again, until a couple of days ago when Dylan, the guy who asked the question in the first place posted a blog posting summarising what he had found, and he did it with a really cool little interactive graphing tool as well.  Real web2.0 in action, ask, receive, learn, share.

So, in closing you might be asking “Where do I find out about all these web2.0 apps?” well, there’s a place for that too.  Go have a look at go2web20, it’s not the snappiest of sites so be patient but it does have a great search function and tagging function to allow to find tools, services and applications that are all web based and just might make life easier for you too!

Good Luck!

Update: One more thing to check out is crowd sourcing.

One of the things that’s a little time consuming in Kentico is creating documents.  I’ve decided to use a custom document type for a particular type of content on our new site.  The data for this new document type is in a bunch of different tables in the old website and I needed a way to get all that information into the Kentico content tree, and fast.

So… I created a module to do this.  It’s kind of simple and doesn’t look too flash but it works (if you follow the rules).

It takes a spreadsheet, uploads it to a temp folder and then creates documents at the specified path in the tree.  If you need it, it’s yours to do with as you see fit.

BTW: No warranty provided on this of course.

Download

The code is pretty simple:

   1:  While dsImport.Read

   2:      ListBox1.Items.Add(dsImport.Item(0).ToString)

   3:      'add documents

   4:  

   5:      nodTemp = New CMS.TreeEngine.TreeNode("NAS.Card")

   6:      nodTemp.NodeName = dsImport.Item("NodeName").ToString

   7:      nodTemp.NodeAlias = dsImport.Item("NodeName").ToString

   8:   

   9:      For i = 0 To strCols.Length - 1

  10:          nodTemp.SetValue(strCols(I), dsImport.Item(strCols(I)))

  11:      Next

  12:              

  13:      nodTemp.DocumentCulture = "en-au"

  14:      nodTemp.Insert(parent.NodeID)

  15:  End While

The form collects a few things like the document type to create and the name of the columns in the spreadsheet to map to fields in the kentico document.  Looking at this at the moment I have left the document type hard coded, but you could easily change this to be driven from the form.

Additionally you’ll see at line 9 I loop through an array, this is derived from a comma separated list of column names to get from the excel sheet.  Let me know if you use it, just out of interest.

I’ve been waiting for this for Gmail for a while.  I love the interface for Gmail, but get a little frustrated when I don’t have a connection, an offline version would be great.