This is a test of Screentoaster.  I'm also experimentally converting it to flash.

Live Mesh is a service currently in Beta from Microsoft.  I have been using it for quite a while.  I realized that I keep running into issues with sharing OneNote Notebooks between machines.  Live Mesh is the perfect solution for me. 

OneNote allows you to do this but only on a local file share or a SharePoint Server. 

To work around this I save it just to the default location and then add the directory to live mesh on my first machine.

To do this go to the location normally located at c:\Users\username\Document\OneNote Notebooks\.  If you right click on the “OneNote Notebooks” directory you will see an option to “Add folder to Live Mesh”.

On a second, third, forth, etc machine you can add a mesh folder already on mesh and sync it to your local store of OneNote Notebooks.  From your systray you can access the synced folders.

By clicking on OneNote Notebooks Mesh will allow you to select where you want to store it.

Mesh will ask you if want merge your current files if you have any local on the new machine.

Mesh can be used to synchronize other items as well but for the mobile warrior OneNote is a brilliant tool and I need it on all of my 6 laptops.

I am very pleased with the way the 2-Day WPF: Line of Business Applications is going.  We had a few technical issues at the beginning of the day.  I will be doing a summary at the end of the day.  So far we have covered basic WPF concepts. 

The code demo’s have been spot on and simple enough for anyone to follow that has any experience with .Net. 

Karl Schifflet is a great speaker.  I am glad I was able to attend.

Karl’s blog: http://karlschifflet.wordpress.com.

If you were not or are not able to get to any of the events.  The content is available only in a few forms. I recommend http://www.msdev.com/

More to come…..

I am trying live writer as my possible blog entry system.  this is a test.

To Get the HD format in the src urls append &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 To your embedded tags.


Standard Version

HD Version

Last evening I attended the Web Designer Meetup in Milwaukee, WI.  It was a show & tell meeting where anyone could talk about projects they are working on.  I decided I would discuss my issues with the design of Discussion Boards/Forums.  I did get some interesting feedback and will put my new thoughts and design ideas in another blog.  One of the other items I showed off was publishing blogs from Google Docs to Drupal.  I figured I would post how to do that.

As far as drupal configuration you will need the Blog API enabled.  This turns on xmlrpc ability.  All of my screenshots will be on the Durpal 6.X. 

Step 1:  Enable Blog API
    Go to Administrater -> Site Building -> Modules, and enable Blog API
 

This enables XML-RPC blog APIs.

Next configure your settings of the module.  To get to the modules settings go to Administer -> Site configuration -> Blog API

At bare minimal you must have Blog Checked.
 

Once you have this configured you have to configure Google Docs to publish your content.

In Google Docs click Share and Publish as web page.
 

The next step is to configure your setting to point to your blog.  Select "change your blog site settings" on the bottom of the publishing page.
 

Below you will see that I have the settings set to "My own server/ custom".  After playing around for a bit I found that "MetaWeblog API" seemed to work best.  The rest of the information should be customized to your server.  You can leave Blog ID blank it prepopulates after you apply your settings.  Once you've configured all of your settings you can run a test to ensure that it is authenticating and able to get to the xmlrpc.php page. 
 

After you click OK all you have to do is click the post to blog button: 
 

I hope this information is useful.  If you run into any issues you can post comments to this post and I will try to get back to you with some troubleshooting tips.

NOTE:  The title of your document becomes the title of the blog post.
 

Recently I have started looking more and more at design. I by no means am a design wizard but I am starting to think more and more about how systems are designed. One thing I thought of during the last 3rd Ward Interact Lunch I attended in Milwaukee was Forums. The current way forum interfaces are built do not represent the data very well. For instance by design the first reply to a thread is always located directly under the initial thread. The problem with this is by physical location it can be assumed that this post is more important then any other reply.



Here is an example of most forums.

Parent Topic
Reply 1
Reply 2
Reply 3
Reply to Reply 3

Although I understand that the replies are in order of the date they were posted. They really are seperate threads and should be treated at an equal level. Below is my conceptual design for a new forum system. I will be designing a prototype over the next week in Silverlight. My guess is this could be developed in flash or even possibly with heavy JavaScript.

Conceptual Design






The concept is that all replies hold an equivalent level of importance. The concept of time of the post would be the inner circle represents the first replies to the main topic. A second tier would be created with lines tying them back to the main topic. Relevance as far as time would also be represented by the clock concept. Meaning the 12 O'clock position is the first reply and going clock wise then outward would represent the time line. An outward spiral for instance. The interface would also have built in search at each level. As the user puts the mouse over a reply the reply transitions to the center and replies to that post come into focus.

I would like to engineer this Silverlight component to be pluggable into multiple architectures and I will hopefully be able to have a few examples up in the next month. If you are interested in this project please let me know via email at cgibeaut@insomdev.com.