JQuery cheat sheet

Posted on August 21, 2008
Filed Under JQuery | Leave a Comment

I’ve been using a lot of jquery lately, and the official jquery doco site seems to be up and down like a yo-yo. Very frustrating when all you want to find out is some syntax and keep moving.

Initially I went in search of an entire downloadable version of the jquery documentation so I could browse it offline. Instead I found this very nice 1-page cheat sheet.

Looks great, easy to follow and has already saved me a lot of frustration! Many thanks to the author.

Notepad++ the best lightweight CF editor

Posted on July 24, 2008
Filed Under ColdFusion | 2 Comments

Every developer needs a trusty text editor that does more than just Notepad - something that’s lightweight, loads fast, has good searching features and some syntax highlighting. Eclipse is indispensible, but there are plenty of times I just can’t be bothered firing it up - or if it’s open, the file I want to edit isn’t in an Eclipse project. Eclipse is “heavy” and resource hungry. Sometimes you need something just the opposite.

Enter Notepad++. It has been my tool of choice for a while now - it has excellent multi-file searching, loads in a flash and supports a boat load of languages with syntax highlighting (js, xml, css, asp etc). What I’ve always missed is syntax highlighting and dictionary support for CF.

Well I cracked today, did a bit of googling and found a solution! Howard @ DelayedInstantiation has put together language support for Notepad++ so big kudos to him for developing the plugin!

I installed it today and works like a charm - the little catch though (if using Vista) is to install the plugin in the %AppData%/Notepad++/ directory, not in the %ProgramFiles%/Notepad++/ directory.

So if you’re on the lookout for a quality, lightweight editor for CF, take a squiz at Notepad++. It seems to be regularly maintained (up to v5!), and now it has CF language support, it’s an indispensible tool in my armoury.

Mango blogging - more choice is what we want!

Posted on July 24, 2008
Filed Under ColdFusion | 2 Comments

I only just stumbled on the Mango blogging engine via a post on fusiongrokker - it’s great to see another CF powered blogging engine out there. I’ve played with BlogCFC in the past but didn’t quite meet my requirements for various reasons.

When I re-established this blog, I went with Wordpress which was evolved into a best-in-class blogging and general web publishing engine. One of the best things about WP as a platform is the sheer amount of community support for it via plugins and the like.

However recently I’ve been tasked with setting up a blog for our company project, and since we are a CF shop it’d be nice to keep the server as tidy as possible and stay strictly within the CF world. I could install PHP and setup Wordpress, but there it isn’t the most ideal option, regardless of how awesome WP is as a blogging engine. Alternatively, installing a CF-powered blog is just too easy - if it fits the bill features and maturity wise.

Adam’s post on FusionGrokker piqued my interest - moving from WP to Mango would suggest that Mango is mature enough to justify moving platforms.

So, I’m off to install Mango on our dev server and see what it’s like. The feature set certainly looks nice and since it’s CF I might get stuck into developing a plugin or two. I’ll report back on my thoughts regarding Mango after I’ve had a play.

CFQueryParam Tips

Posted on July 23, 2008
Filed Under ColdFusion | Leave a Comment

Usually I don’t unneccessarily link off to other blog entries that are syndicated on the same aggregator, but this post at Rabidgadfly regarding the use of LIKE and IN and CFQUERYPARAM is just too useful to pass up.

I was just about to look into how to pass params LIKE and IN params via CFQUERYPARAM and this post popped up on the mxna aggregator - the timing couldn’t have been more perfect!

This is why I love the CF blogging community. Makes life as a developer much better!

ColdFusion syntax highlighting in Wordpress

Posted on July 15, 2008
Filed Under ColdFusion, Wordpress | 1 Comment

So this is a code blog and every good with a lot of code needs a good code plugin. A friend put me onto a nice little plugin for WP called SyntaxHighlighter Plus - it leverages off a googlecode project that highlights for a whole swag of languages all in javascript. Pretty slick.

Unfortunately there is no language support for ColdFusion built in. Happily, a few helpful blog posts later, I found a ColdFusion “brush” drop-in for SyntaxHighlighter. You can download the JS brush here.

Just drop it into the wp-content\plugins\syntaxhighlighter-plus\shlfiles directory and either modify the syntaxhighlighter.php file with references to ColdFusion or you can download my modified php file. You can either reference the language with either “coldfusion” or “cf”.

I will contact the plugin authors and see if they will agree to add the CF language file permanently to the distribution with the permission of the original brush file author.

Wordpress 2.6 rocks

Posted on July 15, 2008
Filed Under Wordpress | 27 Comments

Ok I’ve installed Wordpress 2.6 that was just released today. For only a minor version number increment there are some pretty slick new features bundled in.

Google Gears support is included and while it’s not there to support offline blogging (yet?) it does speed up the admin by caching a lot of javascript locally - nice!

A few other highlights that stand out for me in particular:

Big ups to the WP team - this platform has really matured into a wonderful web publishing platform!

Are you a remote desktop fiend? RoyalTS is your saviour.

Posted on July 8, 2008
Filed Under Random musings | 1 Comment

If you’re anything like me, you’re firing up remote desktop about a thousand times a day, and more often than not, two or three terminal windows to different servers.

In our production environment we have 4 (actually 5) servers deployed - web1, web2, encoding, db and storage - and keeping track of those RDP sessions can get pretty crazy.

Then one day you happen upon a tool that just makes you life easier and you can’t help but wonder how you lived without it.

RoyalTS is one of those tools - if you manage RDP sessions daily, you have to go and check it out - it helps keep track of your RDP sessions, usernames, passwords, connection status and lots more.

Farcry 5 just keeps getting better…

Posted on July 8, 2008
Filed Under ColdFusion | 1 Comment

Farcry has been going for quite a long time now. It’s a huge credit Geoff and the guys at Daemon that they have not only maintained but continually improved upon the Farcry framework for so many years.

Version 5 has just been released (I have been using Farcry for various projects since v2 - I think - if memory serves correctly!) and while I hadn’t really played with Farcry since v3, I’ve recently installed v4 and was pretty impressed with the improvements. V5 seems like another solid step forward yet again, particularly on the UI front.

One of the things I like the most about v4 is the reworking of the architecture - plugins and the like make the learning curve far less challenging for newcomers. The extensibility lends itself naturally to community contributed plugins and even “core” like objects such as dmNews, dmEvent etc are setup as plugins and makes more sense to me than the previous architecture.

I haven’t had a chance to play with the new Formtools yet, but I am looking forward to dabbling a bit more as time permits. Farcry really is one of the most powerful and (IMO) under-rated opensource CF projects out there. The simplicity is right up front, but the power that can be leveraged through the framework is very impressive - even more so in the latest two releases.

Oh and to celebrate the v5 release, the Daemon guys have relaunched the website!

If you haven’t played with Farcry yet, go check it out - it’s more than just a CMS now - it really is a very powerful web application framework.

CS3 licensing - a pleasant surprise

Posted on June 29, 2008
Filed Under Adobe | 4 Comments

To be blunt, for the honest, hardworking developer, Adobe’s CS3 licenses are expensive.

Sure you get an amazing toolkit of applications in any of the CS3 packages you choose (be it Web/Design, Premium or Standard), but the price of entry to the CS3 world is prohibitive to say the least.

Having been developing using the Allaire Macromedia Adobe toolset for over 8 years now I have been lucky enough to not worry about the licensing cost of the tools I have come to rely on like Fireworks, Photoshop and Acrobat etc - the organisations I have worked for have purchased or already owned licenses.

However recently that changed. I desperately needed these applications and didn’t have the luxury of company owned licenses. I felt like I was pulling my hair out getting by without them. So I took the plunge, shelled out my hard earned and bought a license for CS3 Web Premium… and now I’m much more productive I’m happy to say.

I now need my toolset available on my other laptop, and I discovered (very pleasantly) this afternoon that the Adobe CS3 license permits installation on a 2nd PC/laptop for home use. Fan-bloody-tastic! Thank you Adobe!

It’s nice to feel like with all the hard earned sunk into the CS3 license, that I’m actually being thrown a bone by Adobe.

I love Photoshop and Fireworks - they’re amazing tools in their own right - I regard them as “best-of-breed” in their product spaces. Using other image editing tools lately has made me appreciate just how good they are. Acrobat is just starting to come into its own as a genuine development platform and I don’t use Dreamweaver - hate it in fact.

So sure you get a lot of kit with CS3. But am I wrong in thinking Adobe software is expensive?

Subversion Part 1: Version control just keeps getting better

Posted on June 29, 2008
Filed Under Subversion | Leave a Comment

I was recently tasked with the job of speccing a new development server that will soon be ordered and built by me. But in the interim, a mirror of the development server had to be setup on my laptop and act as a proving ground for how the new development server would be setup.

The company I am inheriting the site from don’t have version control implemented - it seems as though I go from organisation to organisation where version control is either non-existent or in the very early stages of implementation. Once you get version control integrated into your workflow, I find it hard to not use it - I find it integral to development whether you are in a team of 10 or a team of 1. The safety and sanity it provides is invaluable.

Since I have had to setup SVN from scratch again, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see how much the platform has matured since I last implemented it. At that time it was stable but still somewhat of a newcomer up against CVS. The clients were pretty mature, but the server installations on Windows were tricky. Not anymore.

Enter VisualSVN. Couldn’t be easier to install and setup - provides a very nice set of defaults, a configuration GUI that makes setting up of users and groups and piece of cake, a built-in webserver for repository exploring and installs as a service to boot - best of all it’s free.

It’s such an easy installation process that it couldn’t be further removed from my experience trying to setup an SVN server 2 years ago. Painful doesn’t describe it. So if you’re looking for an SVN server installer, I can’t recommend VisualSVN more highly.

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