This is one of those times when doing things “the right way” also happens to be the biggest pain in the ass…

I spent the last 2 hours messing around with a layout that I created a few weeks ago. I thought, “No problem, I’ll slice it up and throw the pieces in some DIVs and start on a new SharePoint layout.”

In the words of the immortal Vizzini … “You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you?!”

The problem I was having was that the left and right borders (background images) of the “main” div wouldn’t tile because I didn’t (couldn’t) set a height. So I looked ALL over the web, read up on every ‘clearfix‘ known to man, hundreds of X/HTML and CSS help boards, (and accidentally ran across this air tools site, not sure why it was in the search results!) and then FINALLY stumbled across this article on A List Apart. (and considering how long I spent looking for it, it’s titled appropriately! LOL!)

See? I *knew* it could be done, and remembered reading the article, but could not for the life of me remember where I saw it!!

And so now that my pretty layout is behaving, all I need to do is spending the next 3 weeks beating SharePoint into submission.

Ever have one of those moments where you realized you had just done something really stupid?

Yeah, I had one of those moments last night. I was up late playing around on my laptop“>laptop with a SharePoint template and for whatever reason, I decided that it would be a good idea to play around with the MS themes which control the look of the backend (admin) stuff. Really stupid. It overwrote a few things in my template.

Even worse: my backup was a tad bit older than I originally thought. Colossally stupid.

So I am spending today trying to clean up my mess. I knew better than NOT to check my backups before screwing with templates and themes in ANY system, much less SharePoint.

*sigh* Lesson learned.

Thank my husband for the snazzy post title, LOL! I was sitting here trying to think of a title that would encapsulate all of the topics that I wanted to cover, and that’s one of the first suggestions he blurted out.

He has his moments of brilliance …

Friday went pretty well. Jessie had both a dental and eye doctor appointment that morning. End result: she’s getting new glasses thanks to my insurance, and she needs braces and all her baby teeth pulled. So now my mission is to find an area orthodontist that can fit her in pretty soon. Oh the joy. Good news is: no new cavities, and her vision hasn’t changed dramatically so all in all everything went well.

My mother-in-law’s move to Montgomery went pretty well. We arrived not too long after the moving truck left, so Jim helped move boxes and furniture around as I helped out in the kitchen. The kids were exiled to the back yard. (It’s a really pretty house, very modern style … got some really funky bathroom lights in one of the guest b/rooms!) We stuck around and helped unpack a good majority of the boxes that night, and rolled back into B’ham just before midnight.

Saturday was pretty fun. We met up with Captain Fantastic and the Lovely Miranda for some fun at Alabama Training Institute & Pistol Range. Jim had his new rifle and I rented one of ATI’s pistols — a Beresa 380. I like to think I did pretty well considering that it was my first time firing a “real” handgun. (results) We hopped around to a few places afterwards before hitting the Galleria, and finally settling on California Pizza Kitchen for dinner.

Side note to ‘flavored’ martini lovers: their Caramel Apple Martini just totally rocks!

Jess is out of school tomorrow, so I’ll be working from home. Well, I don’t know exactly how much work will get done, but I will at least be continuing my fight with our SharePoint server. I worked a little on it today and have just about gotten the CSS cleaned up enough that I can manipulate the MS ‘core’ to look about the way I want.

Woot!

I was showing my progress to Jim a few minutes ago, and he thought it looked great. However, when *I* look at it, I see the margins are still off a bit in IE (grrrrrr), and SharePoint keeps overwriting my font sizes on certain web parts, and the background doesn’t quite line up the way I want, and … you get the idea.

You know me, I’m not happy unless I’m obsessing.

I have lately taken it upon myself to do some SharePoint branding for one of our SharePoint servers here at work. I swear, I have spent the better part of 3 days just cleaning up HTML code alone! Unfortunately SharePoint uses a lot of attributes that are proprietary to Microsoft, so no chance of it ever validating any time soon.

Here are a few of the things I’ve learned recently:

• Link bars are pretty unforgiving if you screw with their code, better use the GUI in SharePoint Designer to make any changes.
• If the site might need to be updated regularly, the Content Editor Web Part is your friend! (i.e. pass it off to someone else to maintain!)
• It’s always a good idea to test out a template first for bugs first before letting anyone else know you’re almost done — or where it’s located.
• The command line is your friend! (Actually, I knew this already, but in-dept documentation for SP commands were a little scarce until I found this reference)
• If custom controls and/or code is just not possible within the SharePoint realm, the Page Viewer Web Part is your friend! (As much as I despise using frames of any kind, this wp has saved my tail a time or two!)
• Your site’s content could be the best thing since sliced bread or a splog’s “cheap hotel Las Vegas” surf cache. It doesn’t mean squat if your site design looks like ass. (In other words, never EVER use the default SharePoint templates!)

Hopefully I’ll have more to add to this list later. For now, my head is killing me but my bosses are very happy with what I’ve gotten done so far. I think I’m going to ask for permission to cut out a little early today … it is Valentine’s Day after all!

Jim and I exchanged our gifts last night. He surprised me with a gigantic plush frog, a plush Firefox, a few other Firefox goodies, and a TON of my favorite candy.

I gave Jim a very nice golf shirt and some swanky unmentionables. RAWR!

Jessie’s getting a nifty Hello Kitty lunch kit from me, and a gigantic plush doggie and ton of candy from Jim. She’s spent the week with her mother, so we get her back tonight and most of tomorrow. We’re hoping to have her some this weekend too, but that’s a bit sketchy as we’ll also be helping Jim’s mom move to Montgomery, and I’ve got a side project that I’ve got to finish this weekend. I’m hoping to get out at some point and pick up some books … I’ve been working on a SharePoint template for work and am a little stuck (messing around in MS’ proprietary format/code). So we’ll see …

I hope y’all are having a good day/week!