October 12, 2009 - 13:17, by Dostalek, Kevin
I recently did a presentation at the Indianapolis SharePoint Developers group, nSpin (a SIG of the IndyNDA) on how to use the Community Kit for SharePoint Extended Blog Edition (CKS:EBE) to customize your blog running on top of SharePoint.
Due to other environmental factors outside of our control, we ended up having to compress the 85 minute presentation into 30 minutes. There were also quite a few people that couldn't make it and were asking me for slides. Well, I'm not really a slide kind of guy-- this particular presentation was about 33% Animated MindMap and 66% demos. So anyway, I decided to record it over the weekend as a screencast for everyone!
Hope you enjoy it, it is split into two parts below (sorry Viddler had trouble encoding it as a single file). Please let me know if I got anything wrong- I'm always looking to improve. If anyone out there is wanting a live version of this presentation (speaking engagement) or any others for that matter, now or in the future, please keep me in mind and drop me a line.
PART 1
Customizing CKS:EBE Part 1 Video
PART 2
Customizing CKS:EBE Part 2 Video
August 17, 2009 - 15:45, by Dostalek, Kevin
Well as some of you may notice, I've replaced the blog comment system here on The Kick Board (which had been using a standard SP-Based List) with JS-Kit Echo (the free version at present). So far it seems to be working pretty well although I did have to play around with the order I'm loading and running scripts, but this is more just an issue with my crazy design than any other JS components.
Why?
Why did I do this? Well, there are a couple of reasons, the primary one is that I was tired of dealing with spam. Even though I was using Akismet with the CKS:EBE, it seemed that the spammers had found lots of ways around that. I considered going to an "authenticated only" comment system, but obviously to be effective I couldn't just make people sign up for my blog- so I would have had to use a third party identity provider. I actually got an open facebook widget working in sharepoint, but I wasn't really sure that many visitors to my website would bother auth'ing to FB just to leave a comment. For now I'm going to leave anonymous comments on for Echo and see how it goes, but if things get spammy, then I'll just require authentication-- luckily Echo supports auth'ing to 5 or 6 different open systems.
The secondary reason I really wanted to try Echo out is that it supports a lot of real-time social network connectivity (for example, it can show tweets about your post). This does require an upgrade to the paid version of the control (it's only $12/year), so as soon as I get the free version stable and working consistently then I'll do this. Really I'm using this as a proof of concept platform for an idea I have related to bringing social media content into the SharePoint collaboration space.
For more information about JS-Kit Echo go check out their site at
http://js-kit.com and please give it a whirl here and leave me some comments so I can shake all the integration bugs out. Thanks!
[update 8/17 11:00PM]
Ok, I just couldn't resist... so I sprang for the Echo Live upgrade so I could test the social aggregation features. Also I decided that I'm not going to try and port any of my old comments in-- sorry to everyone that commented here in the past, but I just don't know how I'd do it.
October 26, 2008 - 11:00, by Dostalek, Kevin
Hey everyone! Thanks for visiting my newly re-launched blog now named "The Kick Board". In addition to the new styling, I'm planning on a whole new set of content that I think a wider audience will enjoy, and hopefully more engaging as well (feed me comments please).
(picture originally by Kathy Sierra on her blog)
Please note that this blog was originally an internal blog (at Ambassador Solutions) that has now been made public. Therefore I had to strip out many of the non-appropriate posts from the past as well as removing all comments.
While I'm still shaking out the publishing process for pod- and vodCasts, I will also be "mirror-posting" some of the best audio and video I find on the internet-- much of which in the past I would just email links to folks... It's not that I'm looking to "steal" content and I realize most of you could easily find them yourself on their original locations, but think of this as a pre-Kevin-filtered best-of-the-web one-stop-shop for your multimedia pleasures (or something like that).
DevLife Video
Finally, the design of this website is intended to be a dynamic view of my whiteboard (duh). As such, I'll probably be posting much more whiteboard friendly posts in the future (ie. not a ton of text, but many more sketches and stuff). To be sensitive to those pulling an RSS feed, I'll not go overboard and try to keep the text content as TEXT. The blog engine I'm using is a pretty customized version of SharePoint with the CKS:EBE extensions... the Pingback/Linkback/Trackback functionality is still in need of testing, so please give those a go! Lastly, the "bookmark" functionality (digg, stumbleupon, etc...) could use some shakedown too :)
I'm really excited to start getting some more content up here, but I would very much appreciate feedback in the form of comments to let me know what you think, and what you're interested in hearing about from me. If you want to know more about me personally, click my picture taped to the board. (and to get to the homepage, click the picture of the green house in the upper right corner).
September 28, 2008 - 02:35, by Dostalek, Kevin
So I've jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon... at least for a little trial run. Kind of seems cool that I can slap something out super quick from my cellphone where ever I may be.
Of course, I needed a cool and non-standard way of displaying my tweets on the kick board. So now you should see my last 20 twitters as post-it notes at the bottom on the whiteboard. Random positions and colors, so hit refresh it you want cheap entertainment. Mouse over to see the tweet text, or click to open the tweet in a new window.
Kind of cool technologies at play, including my first real use of JSON, but I'll post about that another time.
September 17, 2008 - 02:21, by Dostalek, Kevin
Well, here's the final installment (3 of 3) in the Making of screencast set. This one is about 15 minutes and focusses pretty much only on how the multimedia embedding was accomplished. Hope you enjoy it and let me know if this is a format (screencasts) that you'd like to see more of.
ScreenCast: Making of The Kick Board Part 3