toeinwater.co.uk

New Category

A new category for my blog has been created. Called Tips and Tricks, I will use it to pass on some web design tips and tricks I have picked up over the years in the hope they will help someone else. The first item published is how to tame the DNN search engine!

Taming the DNN Search Function

As most people would agree, the DNN search funcion is a mighty untidy looking beast: it's not very customisable and it looks, quite frankly, horrible. For one thing, the number of the returned search item is not in line with the result. For another, the link that points to the resullt is duplicated. You get the actual page title as a link as well as a huge url string pointing to the same thing. So, your carefully designed skin breaks when the string pushes outside the page boundaries.

Anyway, fed up with this, I decided to get my hands dirty and put it right.

As ever, back up everything first and test this out on a local server. You can use any text editor you like, but you will get better results and gain more understanding by using Visual Studio (expensive) or Visual Web Developer 2008 (free!).

Ok, fire up your program of choice and open up your local copy of your website. In solution explorer, go to admin and open up SearchResults.ascx. This file contains the code that renders the search output on your page. First thing to do is locate the code beginning with:

<asp:HyperLink id="lnkLink" runat="server" CssClass="CommandButton" NavigateUrl=

This is the horrid super long link you get with your resuts. Select the entire <asp:HyperLink> tag and comment it out.

Next, locate at the top of the page the first instance of <asp:TemplateColumn>. Change this to <asp:TemplateColumn ItemStyle-VerticalAlign="Top">. This will sort out the result numbers for you. Save the page, browse to your site and perform a search. What a difference! Next, log in as admin and make sure only Show Description is ticked. Log out and search again. Looks miles better, doesn't it?

If your're feeling confident, go back to the SearchResults.ascx and play about with the properties of any element that takes your fancy (visual studio makes this sort of thing dead easy!). In my case, I added a horizontal line to seperate the resuts, or you could simply specify a colour in the AlternatingLineStyle section. I also centred the page numbers.

Check out what I have done at elegantsimplicity.com 

Examples page added

I have just added a new page - examples - to the site. This gives some details about some of our work and links to the sites themselves.

Elegant Simplicity: Aquatorium

Ok, I will admit that this is a blatant plug for my own band, but what the hell!

Last week, we re-released our 2004 CD of demos, rare and unreleased tracks. Called Aquatorium, it is 78 minutes long and a bargain at £7.99 from the bands shop or direct from the label at proximityrecords.co.uk. The booklet is full colour thoughout, with fully annotated sleeve-notes. In addition, there is a pdf download of the lyrics.

End of plug!

New DNN Theme for Elegant Simplicity.com

I created a new theme/skin for elegantsimplicity.com and it went live last night. It's a bizarre trad/modern hybrid that is mostly pure CSS and XHTML. I think it looks rather groovy!

Scribus

I am a huge proponent of Open Source software and one of the applications that I have been crying out for is a good DTP package. At the moment, and for several years now, I have been using Adobe CS2. I feel that this is the benchmark to which anything else has to aspire, despite Adobe's questionable upgrade and pricing policies!

So, every now and again, I dip my toes in the water of Scribus. I have enjoyed using it in the past but still feel that it is still not ready for primetime use. I design and layout my CD sleeves for my band using using CS2, so I need something that I can rely on to do the job. Scribus is very, very good at the moment, but one or two things let it down for the work that I do. One of them is that I can't seem to create a page and have negative guides. That is, say I layout a page with 240mm by 120mm - actual CD booklet size. One normally requires a 3mm bleed, so in CS3, you simply either bung in a negative guide or enter the bleed amount during the PDF export cycle. Nice and simple and does the job.

Not so in Scribus. I can't find any way of achieving the same thing.

toeinwater.co.uk is now live

After many delays, I am pleased to announce that our new site is finally on the air! I hope you enjoy what is has to offer now and in the future. It will build over time into something you will be pleased to bookmark and return to often.

As well as that of course, I hope you enjoy looking at some examples of my work and would like to employ me!