December 2011 – Corrie Haffly

This is not something you want to learn while in the middle of a couple intranet branding projects for high-profile clients, but IE9 and SharePoint 2010 are not compatible for team sites. So say goodbye to the pretty intranet designs with CSS3 shadows and gradients and rounded corners and beautiful HTML5 code. Use CSS3 and HTML5 all you want on publishing public-facing sites, but for now, they just won’t work on the internal pages.

The main issue is referenced in this short SharePoint Forum post, SharePoint 2010 dialogs with rich-text controls don’t work in IE9. Basically, if you take out the meta tag that forces IE8 compatibility (<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8″ />) the dialog windows with rich-text controls stop working. You can’t edit the rich text fields, and you can’t “save” at all even if you don’t touch the rich text field. This obviously causes problems when you are trying to have an IE9-branded experience on pages such as calendars, tasks, etc. that use the rich text field editor.

I’m truly surprised that this hasn’t been fixed yet by the SharePoint team. If anyone has any ideas on how to circumvent this issue, I’d love to know it. (Besides the obvious and annoying answer of reverting all our pretty designs back to IE8, of course.)

Props to Heather Waterman for helping to pinpoint the issue.

NaNoDrawMo 2011 is over! I ended one day late, inking in my last drawing early this morning.

This year I did 30 “My Day” drawings – sort of like tiny daily journals, in picture form, in my 3.5×4.5 Moleskine notebook. It’s fun for me to look over them and see the many milestones that have occurred – from the demolition starting on the outside of our house for our upcoming house addition, to Matthew being completely weaned, learning to push himself on the toy car, and starting to walk a lot. It’s also interesting to have proof of how poor my sleep quality is, thanks to children waking up at odd hours and my own messed-up biorhythms, and other work-at-home parents can relate with that tough balance between being productive and being there for your kids.

To my surprise, I didn’t hardly create any of the realistic pencil sketches that I’m most comfortable with, but I ended up doing a lot of sermon notes and writing/illustrating quotes that I wanted to ponder. Below are some of my favorite ones, but you can see the entire set on Flickr.

My one pencil sketch:

My one non-Moleskine drawing:

I had one recipe:

All of my Moleskine ink drawings were done freehand – no pencil sketching beforehand.

Some of the “My Day” drawings:

Example of sermon notes:

My favorite drawings from this year have been the quotes.

And, I had a few random comics and drawings here and there.

Finally, this is my favorite drawing from this month, and maybe one of my top favorite comics of all time that I’ve created.

Now that NaNoDrawMo is over, I can reclaim my early mornings and late nights of scribbling furiously in my Moleskine. Steve can heave a sigh of relief that I’m not asking him constantly “what time did we go to bed last night?” and “hm… what else did we do yesterday?” I didn’t feel like I was able to put quite as much effort this year into exploring different art forms, but I’m very happy with this body of work, as they all ended up fitting an overall theme of documenting my life and thoughts.