Creative Web Specialist - An online portfolio and resource site of 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.

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.

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!

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.

Hello all,

no I haven't had botox or gone under the knife but instead my site Creative Web Specialist has gotten a major facelift with thanks to ex-collegue and friend Sam Marks who is a great designer. A few months ago I met up with Sam to see how things were going and after a chat we decided to do a little partnership. What we agreed on was that I would help build his XHTML templates and put it onto a CMS for him, of course I recommend my favourite CMS Umbraco. In exchange he would design me a slick identity and a redesign to fit the new ident and so he did !

With this redesign I wanted an entirely new site not just some XHTML and CSS changes, so with this I took on the development task of putting this blog onto Umbraco. This has been quite a long task mainly due to moving the old blog posts and comments over to the site, but the effort was worthwhile doing in my opinion.

Before and after

Lets take a quick look at a before and after screenshot and take a look at how much better the overall site is.

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.