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Grand Central Mercury

January 13, 2012

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Create A Weather Web Part for SharePoint

UPDATE: June 2, 2011
I made some adjustments to the XSLT. If you've had problems getting this to work previously, you might want to try it again.
I wanted to add weather information to a SharePoint site (a "My Site" to be exact), but I wanted something relatively simple. Using the Page Viewer or Content Editor web parts was not really giving me what I wanted since that involved including snippets of markup and javascript which might also require signing up for the privilege. I also wasn't keen on including all of their branding. Just tell me what I'm missing outside when I'm stuck inside.

So I did some messing around with the RSS Viewer web part and got something working. I then found that the RSS Viewer has a 30-minute cache restriction that cannot be changed. I don't want to know how warm it was 29 minutes ago, I want to be able to refresh and know what the temperature is now. So I switched to the XML web part which is what I should have used to sta…

My SharePoint Workflow History Is History!

The other day I had a customer get in touch with me who is using a SharePoint document library with a basic, out-of-the-box approval workflow. The problem that they were having was that the approval status column was not displaying anything where previously it had displayed "Approved" with a handy link to the Workflow Status page. A page that shows a reasonably formatted Workflow History that they were using as proof for auditing purposes.

I'm not going to get into the discussion regarding whether or not this is appropriate or whether SharePoint auditing is the right answer. If you are interesting in a snapshot of that discussion, it has been pretty well covered here.

The reality is that we make these tools available to our customers and they use them (if we're lucky). I needed to figure out what was happening and what our options for resolving things for them were.

The issue stems from the "Workflow Auto Cleanup job" that is scheduled to run for each Share…

Intellectual Property and You

About a week ago, after a very long day at work, I came home and just wanted to relax, eat, hang out and maybe do a little "work" on the computer. Unfortunately I received an email from a book author who had found out that the eBook publisher he was planning on using seemed to have a thing for "borrowing" artwork to be used as cover art. He had decided to match as many book covers to artists as possible and tracked me down in order to let me know that a painting of mine was being used on a book currently being sold on Amazon.com.

*sigh*

I am not a professional artist. I like snapping photos, drawing and playing around in Photoshop. People occasionally like what I do and buy prints or download copies to be used as background for various devices, but never in a million years did I think that I would have to worry about someone actually stealing something from me. The truth is that when listening to or reading various discussions on "intellectual property" …

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