At the time of this incident I was travelling at approx 35kmh, wearing a hi-vis jacket and also had my headlight on flashing. My headlight is more for mountain bike / off road and is visible for hundreds of metres. So basically this driver has no real excuse for not seeing me !

The Toyota was committed, it was the boy racer behind it that made no attempt to stop on the orange light.

This image is quite blurry but it is obvious the red 4WD in the left hand lane had not even entered the intersection when the light had turned red.

This intersection (Main North Road & Johns Road, Christchurch) is a common place for people to run red lights. In this one the truck made absolutely no attempt to stop on the orange and had only just entered the intersection when the light turned red for him.

Given the recent publicity of bad driving by the Road Mandess TV series I thought the last image here was quite appropriate - I appreciate the in-truck cameras are highlighting bad driving but from my experience whilst cycling truck drivers are equally the culprits, yet they are not featured that much on the TV program. Something to ponder...

Red Light Jumpers

Whilst these create no risk to me, it is the attitude of such drivers that is of concern. They are obviously too impatient to obey the road rules and stop at a red light. You just have to hope that you never are in close proximity to these people!

The white car was committed but the motorbike and following car blatantly ran the red light.

This was an even worse example of red light running - the Pugeot was completely behnid the line when the light turned red.

My Animal Magnetism

The driver had previously passed me and gave me ample space, I then caught up to her and passed her due to peak hour traffic. Then when passing me again she continued to move to the left whilst passing me, to a point where her left hand wheels were running on the white lines. Flattering that she was so attracted to me, but somewhat disconcerting as a cyclist.

Jay Walkers vs Cyclist

And last but not least this young couple who tried their best to pretend I wasn't there - maybe my hi vis jacket is not visible in broad daylight !.

I was travelling at around 35kmh so any contact with a human of doubtful intelligence would not be pretty. Thankfully the female registered some sense at the last minute and stepped back - the male thought it was a good joke - guess it's a case of too much testosterone and trying to impress his partner at how brave he was ! Just an idiot in my view.

I provided the images to the company concerned - from the feedback provided they were not pleased with the evidence and took appropriate action.

The irony of the situation is that the companies headquarters are located approx. 100 metres past the set of traffic lights, so not sure why the driver couldn't wait the extra few seconds for the lights to again turn green!

Lights furst turning orange, truck nowhere in sight

Truck - enter stage right

Lights are red, truck still hasn't entered the intersection

Look out I am coming through...

Several factors are critical to the level of success achieved in this regard:

• The intuitiveness and ease of use of the administration area. Umbraco has this well covered!
• Help documentation. Non technical users will require assistance in some aspects of ongoing site maintenance no matter how intuitive the administration area is. Notes will be taken on how to do things, notes invariably get lost, the hand writing is illegible or it doesn't make sense when you refer to it 6 months later.

Enter stage right: The Yoyocms Back Office Help Manager

This package installs a custom tree into the Umbraco administration area where help information can be stored.

The data is entered via the standard Rich Text Editor and so all functionality available within the editor is as your disposal, e.g. adding images, links to media files, etc.

You are able to record information about specific document and media types and these will appear by default.

You are then also able to create generic help information (e.g. how to format a table) and then choose which document/media types it should appear on (most proably only those that have the rich text editor available).

For more information and to download the package please visit the Umbraco website.

I'd love to hear from you if you have any feedback regarding this package.

During the development and testing phases it became apparent that there was the need to be able to manage incorrectly entered and/or redundant tags within the site.

Liking a challenge I identified that a custom tree would provide a nice interface for the management of the data.

So thanks to a Corporate Umbraco TV Subscription and perusing the Umbraco Forums I was able to develop a custom tree that lists all recorded Tags within a site.

The package provides the following functionality:

• Branch / leaf view
  Branches are the tag groups, leaves are the individual tags.
• Delete functionality
  This deletes both the tag entry and any associated links to nodes int he content tree.
• Edit functionality
  The ability to edit the tag to correct typos, etc. Also a listing of tagged nodes is listed - these are hyperlinked to enable direct access to content nodes.

The ability to create new Tags has been deliberately omitted from the package - this is due to the built in functionality of the data type where tags are created and the primary purpose of this package is to provide in interface for maintaining tags.

To download the package please visit the Project Page on the Our Umbraco website.

The document type had a media picker associated with it but the document type could be used in both the main column and also the right hand column. The issue was one of which image should be displayed.

Several options existed for a solution, but the one I chose (as I love a challenge) was to see if I could develop a custom datatype that lists all the defined Image Crops for a given Data Type ("Image Cropper" datatype by default).

I had previously come across a Creating Custom Umbraco Datatypes blog post by Tim Geyssens before and it was this I used as my starting point.

I found the image crop data in the cmsDataTypePreValues table stored as a string with multiple delimiters.

I then copied Tim's code for each of the classes and made my necessary amendments.

And so my first custom datatype was born - a healty little dropdown list, weighing very little and with all the right bits (ability to set which datatype, validation within a document type).

One thing I did discover when testing it within an xslt file was that you first needed to assign the value to a variable prior to trying to output the image path. See the following code snippet.

 <xsl:variable name="selectedCrop" select="./selectImageCrop"/>

                    <img>

                        <xsl:attribute name="src">

                            <xsl:value-of select="umbraco.library:GetMedia(./portfolioImage,0)/imageCrops/crops/crop[@name = $selectedCrop]/@url"/>

                        </xsl:attribute>

                    </img>

A possible progression of this datatype would be to incorporate it into a modified media picker datatype so that they work in tandem. Also (and even better) would be to run a check against the selected media item and list only those crops that exist... Now that would be funky !

Here's the source code if anyone is interested - drop me a line if you download it and use it - I'd love to hear from you.

How To Use

1. Download the source code
2. Compile and place the resulting dll in your bin directory
3. Go to Developer - Datatypes and create a new DataType - there will be an option called Image Crop Selector - choose this one.
4. Once initially created you then have a field called "Data Type Name" - enter the relevant datatype name for your image cropper (the default one is called Image Cropper).
5. Add to your document type as required.

Drop me a note if you download this and find it useful. Also I'd love to get feedback on my coding - I am always keen to advance my coding skills.

Overall I feel safer on the bridge than on the open road as the vast majority of motorists are very considerate.

However you always get one to break that bubble, and here are the photos to prove it !

I was 3/4 the way across when this motorist passed me in the face of oncoming traffic, for him to then pull into the garage not 100 metres past the end of the bridge. He just couldn't wait the extra 4-5 seconds for the cars to pass or for me to cycle off the bridge before overtaking me!

As per the first picture he driving his car in peak hour traffic whilst holding a book up with the hand that he was steering with. And then with the other hand he was texting on his phone. 

Impressive effort to say the least !

However, unlike all other humans on this planet, he didn't seem to have a third arm. In negotiating a roundabout further along the road, and then pulling over to the left, not once did he indicate to let others know what he was doing.

Whilst it's not totally clear in the second photo the company is Trinity's Cleaning Services. 

My first thought was - damn and how rude to not have responded and get to know other Umbraco users.

So I did a bit of Googling and found some reference on Codeplex that comment notification functionality is being built, however nothing currently existed.

So I thought I'd come up with a solution to this problem. The following is very much a temporary solution but one that at least helps fill a gap pending release of notification functionality within the core product.

Firstly, I wrote a very short and simple class that generates an email notification and compiled the project into a DLL file.

And then I made changes to the following files:

/usercontrols/Blog4Umbraco/AjaxCommentForm.ascx
Added another AJAX call where oyu specify the email address to send the notification to.

/config/restExtensions.config
Added the /rest extension for the class previously written.

The email generated is a simple one liner confirming a new comment has been added to a blog post. This could be extended to include the comment and the persons details - feel free to adjust to your own needs. 

Feel free to download all the associated code for this change - included in the zip file is :

• The source code of the project I created for the class
• The compiled DLL file to simply drop into the BIN directory.
• The two files mentioned above with inserted code and comments wrapping the changes - I trust it will be a simple task to update your own blogs.

Be good to hear from you if you use this on your site and found it useful.

Cheers

Nigel