Turn on Ratings Feature in SharePoint 2010

Having just installed a fresh copy of SharePoint 2010, I of course wanted to immediately use the new Ratings feature (i.e. Netflix style ratings on list/library items). However, for some reason I could not find any reference to ratings in central admin or site settings. No way to turn it on, activate it, add a column, nothing. So what did I do?

Powershell to the rescue.

I wanted to enable a feature, so I did:

get-help *enable* and found the cmdlet called "Enable-SPFeature"

then I looked up the ratings feature identity online and found this blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mcsnoiwb/archive/2010/01/07/features-and-their-guid-s-in-sp2010.aspx. Cool! Now I have my command:

enable-spfeature -identity 915c240e-a6cc-49b8-8b2c-0bff8b553ed3 -url http://servername

Voila! Now I have "Rating Settings" in all lists/libraries. Still wish I knew why Ratings wasn't there in the first place, but this is a good example of using some of the built in Powershell cmdlets for SharePoint.

Building libRETS 1.2.5 on OS X 10.5.6

Apparently it is really hard to get libRETS to successfully build on OS X. So, I'm posting how I got it to work here as a future reference for me, and maybe others.

1. sudo port selfupdate
2. sudo port install boost +st
3. sudo port install expat
4. sudo port install antlr
5. sudo port install curl
5. sudo port install swig
6. Download and extract libRETS
7. In the extracted folder, run the ./configure script. I only wanted the ruby bindings, so mine looked like this:

./configure -with-expat-prefix=/opt/local -with-boost-prefix=/opt/local --disable-java --disable-perl --disable-php --disable-python --disable-dotnet --enable-examples --enable-shared_dependencies

8. make
9. sudo make install
10. run "ruby search.rb" inside project/swig/ruby to test

The "+st" option when installing Boost was what made it work for me after many failed attempts.

Most of what helped me solve this was buried in the libRETS mailing list - and I thought it might be more accessible here. Also, http://tzetzefly.com/2007/09/01/building-librets-on-mac-osx/ was a great start.

Good luck!

Me Meme

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture

Have fun.

erubycon 2008

Yikes - it's been a while since my last post. Anyways, I'll be attending erubycon this year along with 2 of my coworkers. Looks to be a great time - hopefully we can learn a lot and meet some more Ruby programmers :)

View twitter '@' replies directed at any user

Often, someone on twitter will ask a question. I'll see the question, but I have no way of seeing the replies. Here are two websites that can do that for you:

http://quotably.com/
http://tweetscan.com/

Quotably tries to put topics into a thread style layout. Sometimes it gets messed up, but I'm not worried about it :)

Tweetscan is also useful for finding the replies to a specific username. I'll be keeping these bookmarked to use now when I see questions that I want to see the answers to.

Pragmatic Studio - Ruby on Rails - Day 1

Wow, it's been a while since my last post. Today, I'm starting my second day at the rails studio workshop in Denver, CO. The weather here is spectacular.

Yesterday, we reviewed a lot of the core functionality that rails provides to web developers. I say "reviewed" since most of what we talked about is covered in the Agile book, but it is all stuff that you need to know backwards and forwards in order to effectively develop on rails. For example, an overview of the Ruby language and MVC architecture, using scaffolding to get a quick beginning look at how the application might feel, using and customizing helpers, validation, migrations and much more. So, it was very good to review and talk about it more.

Overall, it's been great and has given me a better understanding of the process used to develop rails apps. By the end of the third day, we'll have gone entirely through the development process all the way to running a production app. I'm excited to see what the next two days bring.

Codemash Evening One

One of my goals for Codemash this year was to find out about more great blogs. Incredibly, during the first evening's expert panel, one of the questions asked was, "what are your favorite blogs to read?" I grabbed for my pen and immediately began scribbling down the responses. Here is the list I got:
Neal Ford (mentioned multiple times)
Guido van Rossum
Bruce Eckel (also mentioned more than once)
Dianne Marsh
Bill Wagner
Techcrunch
Josh Holmes
Scott Guthrie
Scott Hanselman

Also some podcasts were mentioned...
The Java Posse
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders
Google Developer Podcast
.NET Rocks!
Parleys
Seth Godin

Hopefully, I didn't get any wrong. I'm looking forward to reviewing these after Codemash.