Finding the Distribution of Column Types in a SharePoint List with SPServices

I just went through a little exercise that was simple, but fun, and I thought I’d share. As part of building my new SPXmlToJson function for SPServices, I wanted to spin through some of my lists to see what the various types of columns were and count the occurrences. Sure, I could have probably just…

Adding JSON Capability to SPServices

For quite a while, I’ve gotten requests to offer some sort of JSON conversion capability in SPServices. The requests have often been fairly non-specific, meaning that they haven’t mentioned a particular Web Service operation, like GetListItems or GetWeb. However, I think that most people want to be able to get convert the XML they get…

Why Marketers Should Learn To Program – But Wait, There’s More

Image via Wikipedia A little while ago, Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet) retweeted a link to an intriguing blog post from Scott Brinker (@chiefmartec) entitled Why marketers should learn how to program.  Scott’s main points center around the idea that for Marketers to be truly successful these days, they should learn at least the rudiments of software…

Rotating Announcements with a Data View Web Part and jQuery

Oftentimes people go searching for plugins and already-written code to accomplish their goals. I find that it often gets people into more trouble than it’s worth as they usually don’t understand what they have deployed and it doesn’t work well in their specific situation. Of course, here I am posting something that those of you…

jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services (SPServices) v0.7.0 Beta 1 Available

Tonight I posted the first (we always hope the only) beta for SPServices v0.7.0. Initially I was calling this release v0.6.3, but when jQuery 1.7 was released and it caused problems with SPServices, I decided to bump the version so that the sevens matched. Get it? 1.7 and v0.7.0? Such are the complex decisions we…

Base Your SharePoint Database Architecture on Business Requirements First, Database Concerns Second

Sometimes when I’m speaking at SharePoint events, I’ll mention something about the fact that “the geeks” make decisions about Site Collections and database boundaries that are a detriment to the users. I got a question about this the other day: …you mentioned something that I wanted to follow up on: basically it was a warning…