New home for my Notes blog content

I started blogging about Lotus Notes in the early 2000's. Starting in late 2012, I began to consolidate my several tech and personal blogs into a single site using Squarespace.

I'm in the process of converting / moving the earlier content to this new consolidated site. I can see that people do still get content from the Notes-related blog, so PLEASE, if you are searching for Notes content and a search engine or an older link pointed you here, DO send me an email to jrlitton at gmail dot com ...please include the link that you were trying to open - or the exact search terms that you used. I will do my best to email you the content as soon as possible.

My goal is to get all of the old content converted and migrated here, and for the old links to still work. We shall see how successful I am with the links! And please understand that there's 10 years of content, so it will take me a little while ...but I will get the content on here.

UPDATE 02Jun2014: This week I am hoping to complete the migration of my old Notes content. I am doing a portion each night, and will continue until done. Cheers :)

Thanks!

- Joe Litton

Too predictable

So tonight I come in from mowing the lawn, and as I walk around the corner into the kitchen, I see that my wife has placed a couple of pharmacy receipts where she's sure I'll find them to turn in to the insurance -- right next to the espresso machine. Man, am I that predictable? Yup.

LS for audit trail of all field changes

Today a colleague asked if there was a way to maintain an audit trail of all changes made to all fields of a document. A few years ago I wrote a routine to do that, and finally found the code after hunting around for a while. Since others might find it useful - and mainly so that I can easily find this the next time I need the code - here's the auditDocChanges LotusScript routine. Instructions are in the code comments.

Blogging from Vancouver USA

Volker Weber has an article today mentioning that he tried to use the link in my 'About' block that points to the Vancouver, USA web site. But Vancouver city blocks his IP range from the site!

Often I wonder what logic (or lack thereof) is used in configuring what is or is not allowed through firewalls. At my company I had to go through a few minor hoops to get access to the XMethods site. It's a legitimate site that deals with web services (SOAP, WSDL, etc.). My guess is that because the site's URL starts with 'X', it was flagged as perhaps being a link to naughty pictures or something. But in this case it looks like Vancouver is blocking -- Germany? Wow. There was recent fanfare locally when our nearby Portland airport began enjoying daily direct service between Portland and Frankfurt via Luftansa. I would think they'd want to encourage the browsing of local sites from potential German visitors!

Volker, here's part of what you will hopefully someday be allowed to see:



...and to show that it's not always raining here (only 9 months of the year - honestly), here's a shot of our house on a recent sunny day:

Running on BlogSphere template

As of today my blog is using the BlogSphere template. As far as I know, this is the first blog using the BlogSphere template from an R5 server. Declan had been wrangling with a bit of an odd error with comments in R5, but all now appears to be fine. I'll leave it to Dec to post the details of the fix -- minor differences between R5 and ND6.

I've converted the main posts from my earlier blog (I'd been running from a design I'd modified from Anthony Connell's wonderful FreeDom Blog template). The comments I hope to convert during this next week, but no guarantees.

Other items on my list for site maintenance include:

  1. Adding redirects so links to old postings will still work with the new blog design
  2. Incorporate the CSS buttons described in Mike Golding's article on notestips
  3. Enable RSS links for summaries and for full articles. In an effort to get this up in short order, I've currently got the old RSS address working on this new design, but now sending XML for the full article. There are differing opinions as to whether one should publish an RSS feed of just the summaries, or the full articles, or everything including comments. I tend to side with those who suggest providing RSS feeds for all of the options, and let the reader decide which if any they care to use. But not today.
  4. Activate the Calendar navigator. The BlogSphere template makes this extremely easy to do, but I don't like how Internet Explorer 6 renders the font, so I'm going to play with it a little first.

In fact, there's a fair amount that IE does not render very well. The more standards-based browsers like Mozilla, Firebird, Opera, etc., seem to render things quite nicely. Ahh, the world of cross-browser support :-)

Update: Took a break for dinner, a glass of wine, and a walk with my wife. Then got back to this site and made a couple of tweaks to allow the old site's links to work, so if anyone had bookmarks to articles from the site's FreeDomBlog format, those links should now work again.