Creative Web Specialist - An online portfolio and resource site of Warren Buckley

I create sexy websites

Welcome to the home of Warren Buckley's blog a
Creative Web Specialist, who works mainly with Opensource .NET CMS Umbraco to create clean sexy websites that are content managed.

This blog is mainly used for my own perosnal web snippets and things I learn along the way when using Umbraco, but if you find anything useful to read whilst you here then great!

Welcome to Creative Web Specialist - enjoy

Latest Posts

Author
Warren Buckley

Morning all I have just woken up to a boiling hot room checked the window and its real sunny outside, yippee got my shorts, T-shirt sunglasses and my camera ready for a "tourist" day around Copenhagen, i'll be back at the end of the day to fill you in.

All ready to go !

OK so we travelled more into the center of Copenhagen and done a canal tour around the sights, which included the "largest indoor golf center" and the little mermaid. So after we done THE TOURIST thing we had some lunch and then went to pick up Paul Sterling from Motus Connect from the airport and made our way to the retreat.


Credit to Douglas Robar for the photo

So after some informal introductions outside in the glorious sun, we chilled out and discussed our background and experiences with umbraco and had some dinner at a local steak restaurant, we came back and chilled, but hey that was the first informal day over so we could get to know one another.

Author
Warren Buckley

Hello all well this is my first of daily blogs whilst I am away in Copenhagen for a week for the Umbraco Codegaren08 conference.

I have started writing this post from home this morning whilst I am finishing up packing I've checked that I have got all my cables for my laptop and checked my e-mail for my boarding pass, so now I am good to go!

About to leave for Copenhagen

OK I landed in Copenhagen and met the gang at the Metro station dropped off my stuff at the hotel (which I have 4 beds to choose to sleep from tonight - including a top bunk) and was discussing some different things with umbraco and stuff in general, but the coolest thing to me was that Niels made a change to the latest source that allows me to improve the performance of my XSLT macros to external services such as twitter etc in a matter of minutes !! Niels has improved the XSLT extension umbraco.library for GetXMLDocumentByURL which supports caching by providing a value in seconds for the cache time.

Author
Warren Buckley

Hello all,
I thought I would share with you all that I am officially now an “Umbraco certified level 1 developer” and it feels good to have something to show for all the hard work I have invested into Umbraco.

Hello all,
After talking to Nisse Bryngfors, he requested that the URLs in tweets would automatically be made as urls and marked up with anchor tags. In addition to this he requested that @username replies were also automatically generated into anachor tags.

For example:

check out this site http://google.co.uk Nice design @warrenbuckley

would now become

check out this site
http://google.co.uk
Nice design
@warrenbuckley

This has been made possible with a new function in the XSLT Extension CWS.Twitter called FormatURLS.
So to format your tweet use this syntax in your XSLT.



Hello all,
This will be a very brief blog post this evening as I have made an update to my Twitter Umbraco Package from a request from a tweet I received from Nisse Bryngfors.

His request was as follows

@warrenbuckley just tried the twitter package for umbraco.Great!Is there any way to display people you follow,instead of just your own feed?

I decided this was so easy to implement, I would make this quick update to my package and release it as soon as possible.

I have reposted the instructions below for people who didnt use my previous version.

This package installs the following files:

  • bin/CWSHelperTwitter.dll
  • xslt/CWS_twitterStatus.xslt
  • /usercontrols/Installer/CWSTwitter/cwsTwitterInstaller.ascx

The installer usercontrol cwsTwitterInstaller.ascx is used to modify the /config/xsltExtensions.config
to setup my custom XSLT extension to allow us to modify the strange format of the twitter date format.

The actual package installs the following into umbraco:

  • Macro: [XSLT] CWS:Display Twitter Status
  • XSLT: CWS_twitterStatus.xslt

My Skill Set

This is a quick list of my skill set to date

  • XHTML
  • CSS
  • Photoshop (Slicing)
  • XSLT
  • ASP.NET
  • Umbraco .NET CMS

My Last.FM

I am listening to:

  • Dance Hall Drug by Boys Like GirlsBoys Like Girls7 Jan 2009, 13:22
  • My Worst Nightmare by Forever the Sickest KidsUnderdog Alma Mater7 Jan 2009, 13:19
  • Coming January 2009 - The Ricky Gervais Guide To... Natural History by Ricky Gervais7 Jan 2009, 13:02

My Flickr

Check out all my pics from flickr

Warren Buckley is an umbraco MVP 2008/2009 Warren Buckley is an umbraco level 1 certified developer

Photo of Warren Buckley Warren Buckley is a Creative Web Specialist based in Leigh on Sea, Essex , UK.