Ohhh thats not a bug, it's a

Complements of Global Nerdy

How to add a Social Book marking Button to Blogger.

If you want to include the social book marking button to the end of each post you do in Blogger then follow the below steps:

1. Login into Blogger Dash Board
2. Go to Settings
3. Click on the template tab.
4. Hit the Edit-HTML button, this displays the HTML for you blog.
5. Check the "Expand Widget Templates" check boxes.
6. Copy all the HTML to a text editor (e.g. Notepad, or whatever) and save a copy.
7. Search for the tag <div class='post-footer'>. Note: If you cant find this, go and make sure you've clicked the 'Expand Widget Templates' checkbox first. When you are done, click 'Save Template'.

To add the new Add This drop down copy + paste in the following

<!-- AddThis Bookmark Post Dropdown BEGIN --> <div><script type='text/javascript'>addthis_url='<data:post.url/>'; addthis_title='<data:post.title/>'; addthis_pub='NiallMulhare';</script><script src='http://s7.addthis.com/js/addthis_widget.php?v=12' type='text/javascript'></script></div> <!-- AddThis Bookmark Post Dropdown END -->


Or to copy in the original button copy and paste the following


<!-- AddThis Bookmark Post Button BEGIN -->
<div><a expr:href='"http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?pub=NiallMulhare&url=" + data:post.url + "&title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Bookmark using any bookmark manager!'><img src='http://s9.addthis.com/button1-bm.gif' width='125' height='16' style='border: 0px; padding: 0px' alt='AddThis Social Bookmark Button' /></a></div>
<!-- AddThis Bookmark Post Button END -->


And Badabing, your hit rate will be through the roof…… maybe...

FogBugz World Tour Dublin Ireland

I've just been to Joel Spolsky's "FogBugz World Tour" in Dublin, Ireland.

I'm a pretty big fan of Joel's blog, his products and mostly his management style and as for the world tour this morning and his Demo of the FogBugz software... Impressive stuff.

With some complementary tea and coffee to warm\wake my self up before heading into the demo (a nicely sized room packed with a combination of smartly dressed business men to obvious developers) the setting was relaxed and not as formal as it very easily could have turned out to be.

The demo of FogBugz 6.0 jumped straight into the product, no slides and no obvious script with more of a structured walk through of the product being the mode of presentation. As he launched up FogBugz and started hitting off some of the new and existing features, some of which Joel himself is understandably proud to parade around it was obvious there were going to be two main features that were going to take the spot light for me.

The first of which being their WYSIWYG enabled wiki editor. This for all intent and purpose is a web based text editor capable of rivaling the basic features of MS Word. With rich formatting features such as table editing, a built in spell checker and user customizable style sheets, this is one wiki which doesn’t require you to learn any new mark-up or syntax language to be able to get full use out of it. The first thing that occurred to me with this feature was "What a nice way to keep all our A&D docs", this was further strengthened with the built in version control allowing you to see all the changes made to date and whom and why the were made.

The second Feature and the piece de la resistance of the product is the "Evidence-Based Scheduling" feature. A fully automated feature which can give a probability curve of ship dates taking into account your teams ability at giving realistic estimates for work based on the previous history of estimate times based against actual times and also taking into account holidays/weekends and buffer times. From this curve you can tweak the overall project to see where needs to be cut and sliced in order to make a desired ship date. This feature is pure quality, and with out a doubt would make a excellent addition to a development team.

I must admit, while I'm only highlighting two main features, these are my two personal favorites. The product it's self is awash with useful, necessary functionality which cover the a full development life cycle plus some little bits and bob's which when you hear about them you think "Awh how handy is that". This and the fact that one of my pet hates is having twenty different tools to do twenty related jobs, this system is a one stop shop covering A&D, Development, Testing and support in a manner which doesn’t leave the product feeling crammed and cluttered but still feeling like it's a small piece of software.

If you can, try make a trip to one of these demo's if for no other reason than to get another perspective on how very common jobs can be done differently

How to hide the nav bar in Blogger

While Blogger is great, Thanks Guys, one of the things that used to bug the living hell out of me was that pesky Nav Bar that is at the top of ever page. However as you can see its now gone from this page thanks to the joys of CSS 8 )

To remove the nav bar from your Blooger based Blog then follow the below instructions to remove the nav bar.

Removing from Blogger Beta
- Log in to blogger

• - On your Dashboard, select Layout. This will take you to the Template tab.
• - Click Edit HTML. Under the Edit Template section you will see you blog's HTML.
• - paste the CSS definition in the top of the template code:

                
#navbar #Navbar1 iframe {
display:none;
visibility:none;
}

• The Nav bar has now been removed. To display the nav bar again removed this code.

Removing from classic Blogger:

- Log in to blogger

- On your Dashboard, select Layout. This will take you to the Template tab.

- Click Edit HTML. Under the Edit Template section you will see you blog's HTML.

- Search for #b-navbar and replace it with #navbar-iframe

And Badabing the nav bar is gone!

It has to be said fair play to Blogger how giving the ability to remove this in the first place!

Golf for Software Engineers

I've recently decided to take up playing Golf (Mainly because both my brother, father and A LOT of people I work with play so I though I'd have a go too). The main thing I've noticed about this decision is not anything to do with the game it's self but the manner in which I have decided to go about taking it up.
I think as a logical minded person and software engineer at heart, I don't have the mentality to just think "Sure, what the hell I'll give it a go". No, the first thing I decided to do when I took this sport up was research, research, research. I researched the kind of clubs I was using, the kinds of clubs I should be using, I read dozens of articles on how to hold, swing and care for clubs, I researched golf shoes and what to look for in them, I even researched the type of cloths that could be worn that could benefit my "swing"!!
Only when all this was done did I allow my self to hit the Driving Range, it soon occurred to me that I still needed more research....
After another week of pure reading, with my clubs left firmly in the jeep I hit the driving range again and this time I though of it like taking up programming for the first time, I didn't jump in and write some swanky application, I wrote "Hello World" a nice simple test to get me used to some syntax and more import get my confidence up. In the end this is also the approach I took with Golf, I went to the driving range with one club (my Pitching Wedge) got 100 balls and just kept on hitting them, starting at a very basic swing then adding to it over and over....

I think most people in the IT industry have this approach to most things in life, were calculated, logical and generally like to put meaning and understanding behind the things we do. Personally I don’t think it's a bad thing, just a time consuming thing.

PS, The golf still needs more research 8(