DesignByNumbers

This week, we presented a workshop “How to Make the Web Work for Your Business” for a group of 45 entrepreneurs. When we asked the group to rate their own knowledge of and comfort with the web on a scale of one to ten, they rated themselves from zero to eight. Crafting a message that appeals to a diverse audience is a challenge in any form of communication, but sharing a common vocabulary is critical.

We chose to use a number of commoncraft’s “Plain English” videos. They are know as fantastic tools for simplifying content, but I am even more impressed with how much they cover.  The shorts, which range from 90 seconds to three minutes, serve as fantastic checklists of “what should I remember if I’m ever trying to explain this to someone.

The “Plain English” videos are not only a good resource for the uninitiated, they are a fantastic resource for anyone who finds themselves in a position of  explaining web concepts to clients or colleagues. They are thorough, simple to understand, and amazingly succinct. If you’ve never seen one, go take a look. If you have seen them and dismissed them as “too basic”, take another look. If put on the spot, could you explain one of these concepts as clearly and quickly as Lee LeFever?

One thing that can be frustrating for any developer is when you run into a problem and despite millions of search results when searching for a resolution nothing seems to solve the issue.  I thought I would share some simple solutions to two very frustrating WSS issues we’ve run into this past year.

The first issue is intermittent 403 Forbidden errors on a WSS (Windows Sharepoint Services) site.  We were seeing  anonymous users in our test environment who couldn’t use the website at all until an admin logged in.  After someone had logged in then anyone could use the website with or without a login.  What ended up being the problem was a permissions issue on the bin folder for the website.  To fix this problem please follow the simple steps below.

1. Ensure all sub folders that are virtual directories on the site are using the same application pool as the root site.  (This didn’t help me as everything was set properly, however I read countless posts of this causing problems for others)
2. Add read access on the bin folder for the account IUSR.  (You don’t need to add read access to the files, which is somewhat confusing but none the less that protects the files from being downloaded)
3. Success!

If you have any other problems please post your questions/solutions below.

Continuing on, I also ran into a strange DCOM error popping up in Eventlog on most of our servers with WSS sites running.  The error looks like this…

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1} to the user <serverName>\networkservice SID (S-1-5-21-<serviceSID>). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

Needless to say, getting this error several hundred times a day in Eventlog is not ideal.  The resolution is rather simple but not overly easy to explain.  Please carefully follow the steps below.

1. Copy the GUID (In my case it was {61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1})
2. Open the registry editor by running regedit
3. Click on ‘My Computer’ at the top then select Edit -> Find and Paste the Guid (remove the {})
4. You should see an application name in the right pane when the Guid is found – in my case this was “IIS WAMREG admin service”
5. Close the registry editor and open Component Services from Control Panel -> Administrative Tools
6. Expand Component Services, My Computer, DCOM Config and find the application name discovered above in step #4.
7. Right click on the the application name and select “Properties” then select the Security tab
8. The first block should be set to Customize – select edit on the right side.
9. Now add the service account (in my case this was network service) and add the appropriate access which in my case was “Local Activiation” (which you can see in the error above)
10. Success!

Please share this information as both of these errors can be both frustrating and a waste of time.

Good luck and happy coding!

Recently we had a project where the design required growing vines, a popular analogy for growth.  I had used masks before to create the grow effect but was never really happy with the results or the lack of flexibility with that method.  I searched the internet and found a number of different ways to do it but still it didn’t have the look I wanted so I modified one of those techniques to get what I needed.

I’m using After Effects CS3 in this tutorial.

The most versatile solution I found comes from the stroke effect.  The stroke effect mimics a brush stroke following along a mask path.  You can animate the start and end points as well as the thickness.  This would have worked fine, but I didn’t like how the stroke maintained the same thickness along the length of the path.  I wanted the think point at the top of the vine, getting thicker as it grew upwards. Read the rest of this entry »

Integration of wysiwyg editors into Drupal continues to evolve and we can expect to see even more improvements in Drupal 7. In Drupal 6, the TinyMCE module was discontinued and the WYSIWYG module has taken its place. The WYSIWYG module works as an api for integrating editors such as TinyMCE, FCKeditor, markItUp, NicEdit and Whizzywig.

One important feature that WYSIWYG lacks is the ability to exclude certain form fields. We ran into this issue when we wanted to disable wysiwyg formatting on the comments field. There had been suggestions here and here on the drupal forums about setting a #wysiwyg attribute; this we tried with no success. Another suggestion was to use the Better Formats module, but the thought of adding yet another module for something so simple wasn’t very appealing.

In the end, we ended up writing a small amount of code to achieve this. We added the following function to our custom module. What we’re doing here is removing the ‘format’ entirely from the comments field. If you needed to alter a different form, replace comment-form with the id of your form and comment_filter with your field. You may need to try a print_r($form_id) to find out the id of your form item.

function my_module_form_alter($form_id, &$form) {
  if ($form_id['#id'] == 'comment-form') {
    $form_id['comment_filter']['format'] = array();
  }
}