One of the challenges that we as web professionals face is that of keeping our skills updated in a constantly changing world. Our expertise can and will quickly become outdated if we don’t work purposely to continue our education, which makes continuing education one of the most important things you can do. But when you’re putting in full days to take care of clients and working hard on developing...

Recently, I have been working with reading of text files and xml files. To do this you can use the Coldfusion cffile function. The function, getCurrentTemplatePath(), will return the full path of the current template. By path we mean the directory and file name. The function, getDirectoryFromPath(), will then get just the directory from the path. Code Example: <span style="color: #800000;">&lt;cfset...

qTip is an unobtrusive jQuery tooltip plugin with a list of nice features. It has: - rounded corner support without use of any PNGs - very flexible tooltip pointers are as they can be positioned in several locations - 5 ready to use stylish themes & you can create your own easily - support for not-overlacking. How close the tooltips are, they will preserve their stacking order - ready to use effects:...

Some times clients will request little features such as a word count on a form field or request the data collected from the user fall within a certain word count range. Although, this is slightly different then the more common practice of performing a character count for field size validation, it is still a easy task with the use of JQuery. Below is a little snipped which performs a word count: $(’#data’).keyup(function()...

I have recently explored the use of transfer with my Coldfusion Applications as the tedious coding of beans, gateways, and service components was too time consuming. This post is more of a documentation of my experience with it and I will be adding to these posts as I continue to explore the and gain experience developing new applications. First the installation was a breeze, actually there isn’t...

Below is a code sample for creating a nice animated hover effect. This effect could be useful for the creation of tool tips or additional information snippets. However, developing the skills for this effect may take sometime and may be as difficult as mastering online poker or chess skills. One use that comes to mind in my work environment would be when requiring footnotes. This is an ideal solution...

Recently I had the need to check for files existence within a directory and trigger an actioned based on a file update date. Now this was not a difficult task but one that not everyone may be familiar with or use on a daily basis, this is why I am documented a brief example of its use. In ColdFusions newest version CF8 this is can be accomplished with the use of the getFileInfo() function, with the...

If you have spent anytime at all trying to add dynamics to your pages then you will know that you tend to follow a pattern selecting an element(s) and then adding functionality to these elements in the way of conditional statements. You make be hiding/showing an element, adding/removing a class, modifying an attribute or performing some additional task. Now using basic javascript or server-side coding...

I stumbled onto a nice File Management example from developer Cory S.N. LaViska, which is quite slick and can be useful in creating a content management interface. LaViska gives us the following overview: jQuery File Tree is a configurable, AJAX file browser plugin for jQuery. You can create a customized, fully-interactive file tree with as little as one line of JavaScript code. Currently, server-side...

This is a follow post to my previous post regarding the use of meta tag data to increase web popularity and the effects within top search engines. I am only 18 days into the case study but things seem to be going well, one indication is the increase in my Alexa rank, from day 1 where tommycraig.com was not even ranked to hitting ranks of approx. 13,000,000 to my new ranking of 5,381,989 and this is...