We’re learning to cross country ski – the Skate discipline in particular. It’s hard, exhausting but very satisfying when it goes right. At this point, descending is absolutely terrifying. Here’s some little things which have helped me so far. Mostly they’re for me to refer back to.

You don’t push off the ski behind you, so much as transfer all your weight in the direction you want the forward ski to travel. This might be the most important thing. Point your whole body – hips, shoulders, head – in that direction.

Use poles to aid forward motion. I find it helps to angle them to point in the direction of the forward ski.

Try to keep the forward ski completely flat on the snow. That way it’ll glide better. As soon as you’re on an edge, you’re limiting your glide.

Try to keep the glide going when you’re climbing. On steeper pitches, pushing the forward ski “out” seems to help.

Slushy snow is really tricky – especially when your poles go straight through it, or you sink on every “push”. It’s easier to stop on the descents though!

Most of the time you can ignore the ruts left by other skis and grooming equipment (except for the classic tracks – don’t vandalise them if you can help it). Nine times out of ten, your ski won’t catch in them – and if it does you just do another “skate” and it won’t be in there any more.

Keep an eye on the sides of the track. If the front of your ski goes into the bank it’ll stick and you’ll probably fall flat on your face.

It’s not as cold as you think. You almost certainly don’t need that down jacket. This is really hard work and you’ll be sweating buckets in negative temperatures.

Just like biking, look where you’re going, not where you are. Don’t look at the front of your skis. No, seriously, keep your eyes up!

That said, bad posture seems to help. Keep your weight in the direction of travel. Going out the back door hurts, and it’s hard to get up again!

Rather than taking massive strides from one ski to the other, make smaller, more subtle movements. Like you’re walking (strolling).

I know descending is hard when there’s no real edges to push against. Relax, you big control freak. Don’t panic. Look where you want to go. Keep the knees apart. Weight the outside ski to steer – right to go left, and vice-versa.

Metrik‘s Gravity has a real classic Pendulum feel to it. The first time I heard it (on Hospital Podcast #402) I honestly thought it was sung by Rob Swire.

I’m thoroughly enjoying 13 Minutes to the Moon, which is a wonderful podcast series from the BBC World Service. Highly recommended.

(Overcast is my podcatcher of choice.)

Chris Coyier’s Make it hard to screw up driven development struck a chord with me. If there’s ever going to be more than one of you working on a codebase, having a style guide for your CSS or SASS or Javascript or whatever makes sense. Having it automatically applied when you hit save means you rarely have to worry about adhering to the style – it just happens for you. I’ve yet to have one of these tools break my code, either.

One thing Chris didn’t mention though was running a spellchecker over your code. It may sound completely bananas, but hear me out. Firstly, it’s a code-specific spell checker. Secondly, I’ve worked on projects before where we’ve ended up with 3 different spellings of the word “palette”, because 3 different people assumed they had it right. It also means you’re implicitly being encouraged to give your variables and CSS classes meaningful names, so when you revisit the code in the future it’ll make a bit more sense. We used cSpell to do this, but I’m sure other similar products are available.

These tools don’t just exist in the development tools, either. We have them set up in our CI environment, so you can’t merge a code change unless it passes all of the tests – and the tests include both spell checking and matching the style guide. The system won’t let you screw these particular things up – leaving you free to concentrate on not screwing up the actual logic.

I’m a big fan of working this way, in case it wasn’t obvious.

I have a browser extension which shows me a lovely image from Unsplash whenever I open a new tab. Today, this one appeared:

The Arashiyama Bamboo Groves were right near the top of my hitlist when we visited Kyoto. It looks reminiscent of movies where they appear to be stunning, never ending bamboo paradise. Indeed, in this photo they look pretty damn cool. In reality, while stunning, they’re disappointly small. That path is usually crowded with thousands of people and the groves end not far beyond the end of the photo. There’s a genuine feeling of “Is that it?”

It’s worth the trip though, because at the far end is Okochi Sanso, the former home and garden of Japanese actor Denjiro Okochi. It’s absolutely stunning, and a haven of calm just minutes from the bustling city below. When we visited it was raining, which doesn’t sound ideal. But the rain made the mossy green gardens positively glow with colour and we practically had the place to ourselves.

If you ever find yourself in the Arashiyama area, take the time to visit. It’s a worthy detour.

I nearly opted for e-tickets when I booked the train but had a gut feeling it was a bad idea. It’s one of my last trips to Manchester for work and the last Christmas ‘do’ I’ll be attending at this job.

I’m glad to have real paper tickets because this morning O2’s entire mobile network seems to be borked. Wouldn’t have been able to get my e-tickets at all.

I’m glad I brought a paperback to read, too. It’s This Is Going To Hurt by Adam Kay. The brilliantly written diary of an NHS junior doctor. I’ve spent the first 50 pages stifling laughter and squeamishly cringing, often at the same time.

Sacha Trauwaen’s OpenForm is a module for DNN which is used for adding forms to a page.

It requires that the OpenContent module is installed first. The configuration is based on AlpacaJS.

Official documentation

• Official documentation
• Discussion / support forum
• Github source code
• Latest release
• Example templates

Creating a new form

1. Browse to the page which will hold the form and switch to edit mode
2. Add a module
3. Choose OpenForm
4. Click Template Exchange
   1. Under Action, choose Copy Template
   2. Under From Template, choose an existing form (e.g. “Site:Contact”)
   3. Under To New Name, type the name of the new form (e.g. “Further Information Request”)
   4. Press Copy
5. When you see Copy Successful, close the modal box and wait for the page to refresh
6. Under Choose a template, choose Site:Whatever-you-just-called-it and wait for the page to refresh
7. Click Template Settings
8. Here you can:
   • Set the Message after Submit that appears after the user successfully sends the form
   • Add Email Notifications (see section below)
   • Add other things (Tracking script / reCaptcha keys)
   • Click Save
9. Hover the module, open the Pencil menu and choose Form Builder
10. Add your fields (see section below) and click Save

Form Builder

1. Edit the page
2. Hover the module, open the Pencil menu and choose Form Builder
3. Give it a moment to load the left column, it can be a bit slow

From here you can add and remove items to the form. The left column shows the form builder, while the right shows a preview (albeit using plain bootstrap styles, so it’s not a true WYSIWYG).

• To add a control, click the Plus icon
• To remove a control, click the Minus icon
• To move a control up, click the up arrow
• To move a control down, click the down arrow
• To edit a control, click its name.

   

  • From here, set the field name (no spaces or special characters)
  • The type
  • The Label, which will appear on the screen
  • Required
  • Advanced (default value, helper text, placeholder text, position if this is a multi-column form)
  • Values (if this is a drop-down, radio buttons, or multi-select checkboxes)
  • Dependencies (this control can be dependent on the value of other controls)
• Save or Cancel your changes

Note: It’s a good idea to press Save often, as it can occasionally get confused when moving new un-named controls up and down.

Form Settings

You can reach the form settings (for email notifications, etc.) by:

1. Edit the page
2. Hover the module, open the Pencil menu and choose Form Settings

Message after submit

You have a WYSIWYG editor to control the content shown after the form is submitted. To include form data in the message, you can use special tokens.

e.g. If your form contains fields named name and email, put this into the WYSIWYG:

Thanks {{ name }}, your email address is {{ email }}.

Email notifications

To make it send an email notification, you need to:

1. Edit the page
2. Pencil > Form Settings
3. Add an email notification

Note: If the emails start failing, you can look at the Admin Logs in the PersonaBar.

The message uses a WYSIWYG to allow you to customise the HTML email you send back. You can use the same tokens as the Message After Submit to customise it, e.g.

Thanks {{ name }}, your email address is {{ email }}.

There is also a special {{{ FormData }}} token, which outputs all of the data submitted. See https://openform.readme.io/docs/getting-started#section-email-messages-and-user-feedback

You can add multiple email notifications. This means you can send a notification back to the person who filled in the form another to the staff members who need to receive the information, and yet another to a CRM system.

Pre-filling the form with querystring data

You can use Javascript to pre-fill the form with data from the querystring. See https://openform.readme.io/docs/prefill-form-with-query-parameters for an example.

Pre-filling the form with user data

If the current user is logged in, you can pre-fill the form with their profile information. Make sure you use the following field names in your form:

• Username
• FirstName
• LastName
• Email
• DisplayName
• Telephone
• Street
• City
• Country

See https://openform.readme.io/docs/getting-started#section-auto-initialization-of-fields-from-dnn-user-when-logged-in

Viewing form submissions

As well as being emailed out, all form submissions are stored in the database. If you have admin or super user access, you can view them by:

1. Edit the page
2. Hover the module, open the Pencil menu and choose Submissions

From there you can download the data in Excel format.

If you have superuser permissions, you can get to the raw JSON data:

1. Edit the page
2. Hover the module, open the Pencil menu and choose Edit Raw Data

At the time of writing, you cannot delete form submission data. (Jan 2020: I believe a subsequent release has now added this feature.)

Advanced features

Certain features can only be reached by directly editing the config files. For instance, some features (such as multi-page forms) cannot be added using the Form Builder. There is also the ability to use custom CSS and Javascript on the module, and a C#/Razor post-submission message which can do more than the regular submission message (with full access to the DNN API).

If you have Super User access, you can get to these by:

1. Edit the page
2. Hover the module, open the Pencil menu and choose Edit Template Files

If you’re developing a new form on your development machine, you may find it easier to find the files on the file system. They’re stored in:

[path to site]\Portals\[portal id]\OpenForm\Templates

So on my dev machine, where I’ve used nvQuickSite to install DNN, they’re here:

C:\Websites\sesame\Website\Portals\0\OpenForm\Templates

And on an Azure App Service, they’re likely to be under:

site\wwwroot\Portals\0\OpenForm\Templates