September 2007

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Reflection on CF8's Image Tooling

I was really hoping for (though not really expecting) a nice simple solution to centering text on an image to show up as a result of the Wednesday Contest. Sadly, that wasn't the case. As you might guess, the contest was based on a real world use case that I had: gracefully [...]

Wednesday Contest Solution (pt. 2)

And here's the extra credit solution:
<cfif NOT isDefined("attributes")>
<cfset attributes = structNew() />
<cfset structAppend(attributes, form, false) />
<cfset structAppend(attributes, url, false) />
</cfif>
<cfparam name="attributes.width" default="100″ />
<cfparam name="attributes.height" default="100″ />
<cfparam name="attributes.backgroundColor" default="f7f7f7″ />
<cfparam name="attributes.borderColor" default="cccccc" />
<cfparam name="attributes.textColor" default="990000″ />
<cfparam name="attributes.text" default="Hello!" />
<cfparam name="attributes.textSize" default="16″ />
<cfparam name="attributes.textStyle" default="bolditalic" />
<cfparam name="attributes.textFont" default="courier new" />

<cfset fontArgs [...]

CFTHREAD is Sweet!

Just had my first occasion to use CFTHREAD in an app, and it's nice.  As part of rendering an image gallery, I wanted to ensure that the thumbnails (which are generated server-side) exist so that they the user doesn't have to wait for them to be auto-generated as they're requested.  Unfortunately, generating the thumbnails is [...]

Wednesday Contest Solution (pt. 1)

Since I had a whopping zero takers for my contest, I'm thinking it won't be a repeat event. Here's my solution for the first portion of the challenge:
<cfif NOT isDefined("attributes")>
<cfset attributes = structNew() />
<cfset structAppend(attributes, form, false) />
<cfset structAppend(attributes, url, false) />
</cfif>
<cfparam name="attributes.width" default="100″ />
<cfparam name="attributes.height" default="100″ />
<cfparam [...]

Contest Update

For those of you who missed it, I posted a little contest this morning and have gotten a whopping zero submissions!  There is still time to submit a solution, but be quick, as my solution (just the base, not extra credit) will be published tomorrow morning.  I'll be posting a full solution (with the extra [...]

Wednesday Contest

Wednesday Contest

Today's contest uses the new image manipulation routines in ColdFusion 8. The objective is to take the custom tag/template skeleton below and add to it so that it'll generate the following image:

The tag/template can be invoked as a custom tag, or directly on the URL with URL and/or form parameters to set it's values. [...]

Scott Adams on Iran

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) posted a very nice piece on Iran (specifically President Ahmadinejad) on his blog.  Definitely worth a read.

My FB3 Lite

I was talking to Sandy Clark back at CFUNITED about how I still use a stripped-down FB3 for a lot of projects. She said I should publicize it, so here goes. At it's heart, it's a toolset for designing something that resembles a single-circuit FB3 application, but with some of the niceties (like [...]

More on Prototype Templates

So it turns out I'm a a bit silly (duh).  My previous post on Templates was all well and good, but it didn't consider IE6.  IE6 loudly complains if you have substitution strings in 'id' attributes, so if you need to do that (usually the case), you have to use the TEXTAREA hack I listed.  [...]

Inline Prototype Templates

If you've ever used Prototype's Templates, you'll know how powerful they are. If you haven't tried them, you should. One thing that makes them even more powerful is creating them from in-your-page HTML, rather than as JS Strings. This lets your designer build templates in raw HTML, and then you can transparently [...]