Kim Siever’s Blog

I use the Sage extension for Firefox for my RSS feeds, but a co-worker of mine wanted a reader that could plug into Outlook. We tracked down Blogbot and it seems to be a pretty nifty tool.

RegisterFly is giving away free domain names. I have no idea how long it will last or how long the domains will be good for, but the catch is that they have to end in .be (i.e. wanna.be).

I’ve been making some changes on our website that last few weeks to help improve the usability of our website and make information available in different ways.

Most recently, the feature I added scans a directory for files that have been uploaded in the last seven days. It then lists the filename, adds a link a corresponding profile page and states how long ago it was added.

It doesn’t look like much, but it’s pretty cool.

I have finally joined the 21st century. My new (and first) iPod arrived yesterday. My beautiful wife picked it up at the post office for me.

The iPod is pretty cool, and I used it in my transit commute this morning. I am still trying to get the controls down pat. I keep trying to press down when I want the cursor to go down, but that pauses my music. I think I’m starting to get a hold of it though.

I guess Freepay really does work. Now if I could just get that digital camera.

I came across a cool web-based word processor today. It’s called Writely, and for the majority of the Word document I create, this does just fine. Very cool.

I like to use my six-year-old daughter as a reminder of how basic computer users use the web.

This morning she was trying to use a site that was designed for a 900×600 browser viewing size. Even though we have our monitor’s resolution set to 1024×768 and our browser is maximised, we also have the Firefox and Google sidebars open at all times. This gives us a viewing space of roughly 800 pixels wide.

As a result, the content of the page was cutoff on the right—the precise location where the “Go” link is located. This meant, of course, that my daughter could not continue to the page where she could play the game.

I did not say anything to her because I wanted to see what her natural response would be. Even though there was a horizontal sidebar available, she did not use it. Rather she shut down the Firefox sidebar.

I found this interesting. I have heard people who design for larger page widths state that if users cannot see the content on the right, they can just scroll horizontally. after all, it doesnt take much effort.

Now I am left to wonder if basic computer users even realise there is a horizontal scrollbar in such an event.

Ever since I came across Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits website, I have enjoyed developing icons. With my work on the University of Lethbridge Faculty of Management website, I’ve developed a small set of icons.

I call it the Hot Pepper Silver Icons set, and I am making it public for purchase. It’s a basic set consisting of 15 icons of 11×11 pixel dimension. In order, they are:

• up arrow
• down arrow
• left arrow
• right arrow
• list bullet
• refresh
• calendar
• bulleted list
• document
• star (great for headers)
• plus sign
• minus sign
• exclamation mark
• question mark
• new window

The cost is $9 USD and there is no shipping or taxes. Payment is made via PayPal. Just click on the Buy Now button below. The final icons do not come with red lines on them as they appear above; those lines are an attempt to thwart design stealing. Upon payment, you will receive information on how to get your icons.

I hope to be able to create an extended set in the future.

RSS is rapidly becoming a popular format for providing content. It allows users to subscribe to bits of information, so they can be notified when new information has been posted.

I’ve been tossing around the idea of implementing RSS at work lately, and wanted to do it with ColdFusion. I finally buckled down and put something together. Surprisingly, it was much easier to do that I thought it would be, and I ended up creating RSS feeds for news articles, upcoming events, and job opportunities.

Here’s the process I used to create the RSS feed for job opportunities.

The first thing in my CFM file is a block of code that makes sure no HTML outside of the cfoutput tag gets displayed:

<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="yes">

Then the query:

<cfquery name="qCareers" datasource="xxx">
SELECT * FROM Careers
ORDER BY Position
</cfquery>

Then I implement a cfsavecontent tag. This makes sure that all the content between these two tags is saved as a variable. The closing tag appears later.

<cfsavecontent variable="theXML">

Then comes my output. It is important than the root tag in XML for an RSS feed is “channel”, that the title of the feed is in a “title” tag, feed description is in “description”, a link to the HTML content of the feed is in a “link” tag. As well, every item should be within an “item” tag, which also contains “title”, “description” and “link” tags. Not following that format will cause your RSS feed to fail.

In addition, there must be an “rss” tag, and there must be no white space (including a new line) between the opening “cfoutput” tag and the “xml” tag.

<cfoutput><?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<rss version="2.0">

<channel>
<title>Faculty of Management - Jobs</title>
<description>Current Career Opportunities</description>
<link>http://www.uleth.ca/man/people/jobs/</link>
<cfloop query="qCareers">
<item>
<title>#Position#</title>
<description>#Details# <cfif NOT IsDefined("StartDate") OR StartDate DOES NOT CONTAIN "1999">Commences #DateFormat(StartDate,'dd mmmm yyyy')#.</cfif></description>
<link>http://www.uleth.ca/man/jobs/index.cfm?id=#RecordID#</link>
</item>
</cfloop>
</channel>

Close the cfsavecontent tag, as previously mentioned.

</cfsavecontent>

Then output the variable that contains it all.

<cfcontent type="text/xml">
<cfoutput>#theXml#</cfoutput>

Simply upload this file to your server somewhere, and add the following into the page where you want the RSS feed available.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.uleth.ca/man/rss/jobs.cfm" />

Simple as that.