SharePoint Vertical News Ticker

On a recent project I needed to create a simple news ticker do display announcements from a SharePoint list. It was easy to do because I just used some of the code from the announcements slider I built a while back so I did not bother to write a post about it. Yesterday I saw a post on EndUserSharePoint.com about how to setup something similar so I figured I would share my (cheaper) solution.

A few features of the ticker:

• The ticker pulls its contents from the default SharePoint Announcements list using jQuery.
• The title of the announcement links to the display form for the item
• Ticker pauses on mouseover
• For each Announcement the first 500 characters are shown as an intro.

Here is the code it can just be pasted in a content editor web part. The only dependency is jQuery. The code for the ticker came from this post on Net Tuts Plus. I removed the comments but you can see the commented code and an explanation here.
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Image Slideshow with captions

This is a very simple image slide show script that uses jQuery, SharePoint webservices and the default images library to show images with captions. All the content is pulled from default fields in the images library but feel free to add more fields and customize the code to fit your needs. 

Slide show with captions

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Resizable textareas in SharePoint edit forms

So one of the things that I have had end users complain to me about is the size of the text boxes on the new and edit forms of lists like the contacts list and announcement list. On a recent non-SharePoint project I used a jQuery plugin to create a resizable text area so I tried to implement it in SharePoint. Here is what happened.

I downloaded the Textarea Resize JavaScript jQuery plugin, saved in a SharePoint library along with the latest version of jQuery.

Selecting the Element

In order for the jQuery code to work it has to know which elements on the page you want to work with.

Here is the code SharePoint renders for a text box:

<textarea name="ctl00$m$g_3fa2cde8_0ea8_4421_814f_6a6d292fbe54$ctl00
$ctl04$ctl0ctl00$TextField"
rows="15"
cols="20" id="ctl00_m_g_3fa2cde8_0ea8_4421_ctl00_TextField" title="Body"
class="ms-long" dir="none"></textarea>

There are two problems:

1.  ASP.NET creates very long and hard to use IDs
2. The class ms-long culd apply to other elements on the page that I dont want to use the effect on.

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