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Hands-on OOP With Mach-II at BFusion/BFlex

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0500

I attended the BFusion/BFlex conference in Bloomington, Indiana at Indiana University. I particularly enjoyed the all-day session, Hands-on OOP With Mach-II conducted by Peter Farrell and Kurth Weirsma.

Adding support for automated tweets with OAuth

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0500

I commented on Ray Camden's blog entry, Adding support for automated tweets with OAuth
Ray, I've been struggling with this for a few days and really appreciate you posting your solution. I had looked at twitter4j, but rejected it in favor of working with the OAuth project on RIAForge (http://oauth.riaforge.org/). When I saw your blog post I looked at twitter4j again, this time using javaloader and was able to solve my problem. I may still continue looking at OAuth, but my production app is back up and running. Thanks again! -Ed

Renewing SSL Certificate on IIS 7 Woes

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 09:54:00 -0500

One of our Windows 2008 IIS 7.0 webservers had an SSL certificate on it that we renewed. I thought I had it taken care of: I had generated the request, we submitted it to the authority, paid for it, received the new certificate and completed the request. All good. Right? Wrong.

Thanks Alagad!

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 10:58:00 -0500

Alagad recently had a contest tied to cf.Objective to win one of their fine backpacks and I have been honored as one of the three winners. Congratulations also goes out to Steve Withington and Wil Genovese, winners of the other two backpacks. Details can be found here: Backpack Contest - We Have Winners!

Creating a Twitter Background Image for all Resolutions

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 17:09:00 -0500

Twitter doesn't give much space in the profile section, but I've seen a few people who have used the background image to provide more details about themselves. I decided to create a new background image for my Twitter account, http://twitter.com/edbartram, in the same vein.

My Notes from Google Search Appliance Seminar

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:55:00 -0500

On Thursday, November 12, 2009 I attended a seminar at Google's Chicago office given by Bob Segal of Fig Leaf Software on the Google Search Appliance (GSA). The following are my notes from that two hour presentation:

Multiple Instances in ColdFusion 7

Wed, 20 May 2009 15:02:00 -0500

I've always been aware that you could create multiple instances in ColdFusion, but I always thought it would be some complicated arcane process. So up until recently, I never felt compelled to attempt it. In reality I found it to be rather easy and have successfully created multiple instances in ColdFusion 7.0 using both Apache 2.0 and IIS 6.0 webservers (Yes, I know, there are newer versions out there, but we can't all be cutting edge). In my research, I noticed that while the documentation available on the internet was sufficient, it was a little sparse. So I hope by sharing my notes that I will help someone else as well.

Converting Model-Glue Docs to HTML

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:39:00 -0500

I saw Ray Camden's Friday Puzzler - Helping the Model-Glue Team from March 13th today and noticed a solution had not been posted yet. I gave it some thought and had visions of recursive CFCs parsing out each HTML tag using Regular Expressions initially. But then I realized the task wasn't to create a tool to parse the HTML out of any webpage, but to parse the HTML out of these specific webpages.

jQuery DatePicker w/Multiple Date Fields

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:56:00 -0500

I needed a replacement Datepicker tool for a legacy application so I headed over to jQuery.com to see what all the excitement was about. I ran through a couple tuturials starting with How jQuery Works by John Resig where I learned about the ready event, basic syntax, and chainability. Next, I jumped over to the jQuery UI Download section to grab a copy of the Datepicker widget.

Missing MAX 2008?

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:36:00 -0500

Are you missing Adobe's MAX 2008 conference this year? I know I was. But then I decided that I didn't need to. Even though I wasn't there physically, I could still be inspired from it and learn a few things. There are a lot of generous people out there who are sharing their experience and willing to bring us less fortunate souls along for the trip.

Radio Buttons Require onclick in Lower Case for Flash Forms

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:56:00 -0500

When I originally started working with ColdFusion in 2000, I wrote all of my tags in upper case, both CFML and HTML. I don't believe I was the only one to do this, I think I carried this technique over from an old HTML standard. Anyways, times have changed and I've attempted to keep up. For instance, when typing Javascript event handlers such as onClick, I try to use the appropriate case making the C upper and the rest lower.

Blogger Labels in CF Part 2

Tue, 13 May 2008 19:11:00 -0500

A few days ago I posted a simple solution for listing Blogger Labels in a classic template using ColdFusion. I wasn't happy with just listing the Labels though, I wanted to know how many entries were in each Label. The code that follows is my solution:

Labels in Blogger Classic Template using ColdFusion

Sat, 10 May 2008 10:23:00 -0500

Blogger finally got its act together a while back and introduced Labels as a way of tagging or creating categories for blogs. However, they only half-way implemented it for Classic Templates. Each posting lists the Labels that have been assigned to it, and a folder called Labels stores a file listing all the entries for each Label exists. BUT, Blogger doesn't have a $BlogLabel$ tag to display the list of Labels in the navigation column. What's a ColdFusion developer to do? Roll his own!

Why I'm dumping my Yahoo email

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 12:00:00 -0500

I've had my Yahoo email account for about 10 years, but am now abandoning it. Why? To simplify my browser experience.

Welcome to the Internet

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:00:00 -0500

I registered EdBartram.com recently to establish a (semi) professional site for myself. Last weekend I started working with a template to get the ball rolling. I didn't want to publish my email address because I knew I'd get spammed pretty quickly, so I built a contact form in ColdFusion. Four days later I receive a single email from the form containing a whole bunch of links in what appears to be Russian, in other words spam. Mind you, I'm still building the website, I haven't submitted it to any search engines. As far as I knew the site was completely off the radar. Just to prove it while writing this entry, I went to Google and ran a quick search on my domain. My site is listed! How and when did that happen? I checked Google's cached version, it says it was retrieved on the day after I put up the template!

Wow, that's quite a welcome to the Internet for my new site! It is on Google day 2 and received its first spam on Day 5! I can't wait to see what is next...

Submit CFCALENDAR onchange

Tue, 29 May 2007 09:22:00 -0500

I'm building an application that needs a calendar picker tool and I decided to check out the CFCALENDAR form control. It turns out that since it is a flash component, the onchange event uses ActionScript rather than JavaScript. This proved a bit frustrating for me since I knew zero ActionScript going into this and I was initially unable to find any help online. I eventually came across a page, Passing Variables Around - Flash to HTML and Back that talked about how to emulate a METHOD="GET" submit in ActionScript. I then learned about how AS names fields and some basic date functions and came up with the following code:

Development Directory Structure

Wed, 16 May 2007 10:06:00 -0500

While implementing version control, I changed several things in my development environment. One of those things is the directory structure. I did some reading online, especially ColdFusion MX Coding Guidelines - Structure: Application, Component, Tag etc (scroll down to the Directory Structure For Applications section). Most of what everybody else talked about referred back to this guide. The big question that I had as a developer was; how to handle multiple sites? The apparent consensus is to place each application in wwwroot whose parent is cfmxroot. Each application has its own webroot where the .cfm files go and other non-web folders. The overall development environment then has folders for supporting files within the cfmxroot. The following is the expanded structure including some folders which I probably won't use, but are there if I need them:

Implementing Subversion w/ TortoiseSVN

Wed, 16 May 2007 09:37:00 -0500

I've known of the benefits of version control especially Subversion for a while now, but for whatever reasons, I hadn't made "the leap" until now. I bookmarked the series Configuring a Development Environment with Apache, Subversion, TortoiseSVN, and Subclipse most recently, but like many of my bookmarks it sat unread for a while. What is different is that Monday evening I began reading it and implementing it as I went along. I've read and worked through Parts 1-3 augmented with The ACME Guide and am now using a repository with one of my current projects. While the articles are great and were able to get me up and running, I have found I have a need for a quick reference while I am still getting comfortable with the process.

New in CFMX 6&7: What did you miss?

Thu, 10 May 2007 14:15:00 -0500

At lunch today I attended Charlie Arehart's CFUnited preview presentation, New in CFMX 6&7: What did you miss? online a la the ColdFusion Meetup Group. It looks like I'm really going to miss out by not attending this conference! Charlie has provided a loooooong list of both major features of CFMX 6 & 7 as well as not so major enhancements in CFMX 6 (no list for 7). Being only 30 minutes he was not able to go into detail on any of these items, but he sure wetted my appetite and gave me a lot to research. He started with an example of an enhancement that came out way back in ColdFusion 4.01 that is not widely known: ListQualify(), for example, can convert a list such as "red,blue,green" to 'red','blue','green' for use with a SQL clause WHERE IN(...)

ColdFusion 8 Preview

Thu, 10 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Ben Forta came to the cccfug on May 7 as part of his Scorpio User Group Tour to present a sneak peak of ColdFusion 8. The gathering was quite crowded and very enthusiastic. Ben spoke for 2.5 hours on the following key items grouped into 3 categories: