Blog

Social Media - A Mura CMS Plugin

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 12:28:04 -0500

My latest plugin, Social Media for Mura CMS, is available on the Mura App Store. If you want the ability to quickly add some of the most popular social media widgets to a site then you need this plugin!

Dallas TechFest 2010 Review

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:10:40 -0500

Dallas TechFest, a one day technology conference, has come and gone for 2010, but what an awesome day it was. I honestly think that this years conference was much better than the previous year.

Agile Scrum - I didn't Realize it was this Easy

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:06:58 -0500

As I've been streamlining my development processes I've picked up new tools. One of those tools was a plugin for JIRA, GreenHopper. GreenHopper brings some Agile concepts to JIRA, but what is Agile?

Mura CMS Training - Dallas / Fort Worth, TX

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:07:42 -0500

I'm planning to lead some Mura CMS training in the Dallas / Fort Worth area of Texas. If this is something that might interest you I invite you fill out a survey so I can get an idea of the topics that should be covered.

I'll be Speaking at Dallas TechFest

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:11:22 -0500

If you are unable to attend CFUnited and you are in or are able to travel to the Dallas, TX area you should really check out Dallas TechFest. I'll be speaking there again this year on Getting Started with Mura CMS Development.

ColdFusion 9 ORM - Blog Demo Source

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:11:50 -0500

Last month at the Dallas / Fort Worth CFUG we were tasked with creating a blog using ColdFUsion 9's ORM functionality. Here is the source code for my implementation.

Last.fm Mura Plugin

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:08:32 -0500

I just released a plugin that Collin Judd and I developed during a session of Mura training at work. Now you can add last.fm features to your Mura sites!

New Mura Plugin - Recent Comments

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:09:03 -0500

Display recent comments in your Mura CMS through an easy to use display object.

Mura Analytics Plugin Beta Update

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:12:40 -0500

An updated beta is available for download. This beta release brings Microsoft SQL Server support into the plugin.

Form Validation Gotcha

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:09:09 -0500

I ran into a gotcha with the way I've been doing form validation. HTML 5 compliant browsers handle input metadata a little differently and threw me off.

Warfish Turn Notifier 1.8 Released

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:53:10 -0500

Version 1.8 of the Warfish Notifier has been released!

Do You Play Warfish?

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:51:50 -0500

I wrote a tiny AIR app to notify you when you have a turn to take in one or more Warfish games. It's free so feel free to try it out!

Looking for Testers for My Mura Analytics Plugin

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:49:18 -0500

I'm wrapping up development on my Analytics Plugin for Mura CMS and before I do a formal release I'd like to have people testing it on various setups.

Rewriting URLs with Railo (Resin) for Mura CMS

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:42:28 -0500

Rewriting URLs to remove index.cfm in Railo (Resin) couldn't be easier. However, when doing this for Mura there are a few extra steps that will need to be taken to ensure an error free experience for your users.

Quantcast Analytics Mura CMS Plugin

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:56:41 -0500

I've been playing around with the Quantcast Analytics platform recently and after some initial testing I decided to add it to my sites. Rather than hard coding it into my templates I opted to wrap it up in a Mura plugin.

Adding Forms in Mura CMS with Simple Validation

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:04:11 -0500

Earlier today I recorded a brief demo of how to add forms in Mura CMS for Robert Rawlins who is starting to look into what the platform offers. One of the things I neglected to put in that demo was how to perform simple form validation. I've re-recorded my demo with the validation bit included. There's no audio since I'm at work, but just by watching you should catch on pretty easily. You'll probably want to go full screen with the video, it's hard to read when it's scaled down.

Setup Railo Express for Multiple Development Sites

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:42:25 -0500

Today I realized that I've been very inefficient when setting up development sites under Railo. In the past, when I needed to setup a new site I would unzip a fresh Railo Express and launch it. This behavior seemed right since it was so similar to how I do my development with Adobe's CF multiserver install. The reason I do this is to have a completely separate CF Admin for each site. It dawned on me this morning that Railo can do this in a single "install". I'll show you how, with minimal effort, you can setup a single Railo Express install you can host multiple sites with unique administrators.

Using CFParam Inside a CFFunction

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:14:13 -0500

I've been seeing more and more code using the cfparam tag inside cffunction methods. Is this a best practice? Am I missing something? It just doesn't feel right to me.

ColdFusion Throwdown

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:07:37 -0500

After weeks of secrecy I'm finally launching ColdFusion Throwdown, a site dedicated to competitive CF development. Did I mention that prizes are involved?

LatestTweets - A Mura Plugin

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:10:41 -0500

Though this is not my first Mura plugin, it IS the first Mura plugin I have released.

LatestTweets evolved from a simple bit of javascript I had thrown together for the Slantsoft site some time ago, to a modular Mura component, to it's latest redition, a full blown Mura plugin. You can see the plugin in action anywhere on this site that shows my twitter stream.

Adobe Work Flow Wallpaper

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:28:46 -0500

It's been a while since I released my CF8 + Flex + AIR wallpaper and I thought it was about time I released a new one. This one shows the tools used throughout the work flow and life cycle of an online application using Adobe products.

Quotie: A Simple Stock Quote Gadget for Google Wave

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 15:40:50 -0500

I spent some time this week looking at the Google Wave Gadget API. After building the simple example from the api docs I decided to go ahead and build something powered by ColdFusion that implemented jQuery and was able to maintain state in the blip the gadget was added to. After a failed attempt at creating a polling gadget I opted to create a stock quote lookup gadget.

Want a Google Wave Invite?

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:55:18 -0500

I have 20 Google Wave invitations to give out. If you want one leave me a comment here (make sure to use your real email address when posting your comment) and tell me what you will do with your wave. I'll select the top 20 best responses and give them my invites.

If you don't know what Google Wave is then I highly reccommend you watch the video on Google's site. I'm really excited about the possibilities that Wave could mean for internet communications.

Replace Linked MP3 Files with an Audio Player Using jQuery

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:43:13 -0500

A client of mine posts links to recorded audio files in a blog like structure. Linking to the files doesn't really create a great user experience and I decided to swap out the links with an embedded flash player to allow for instant playback while still providing a way for users to download the files.

Sanitizing Lists of Email Addresses

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:42:51 -0500

I ran across an exception today where an email address was not being validated on submit or server side. Obviously this is something that needs to be done, but what about when you have a list of email addresses? The app I'm working on is old and lacks validation in most of the key areas. To combat this I created a method in a util object that will loop over a list of email addresses and validate each one by removing anything that does not match an email address structure.

Powered by Railo & Mura

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:34:21 -0500

Creating and deploying new sites couldn't be easier thanks to Railo and Mura.

About a month ago I was setting up a new site for my church. Knowing that cost was a factor I opted to let 2host.com provide the VPS at a very low cost and build it all on Railo and Mura. Once the server was ready the entire setup process only took about an hour to get MySQL, Railo and Mura all setup. Because of the speed of deployment and how easy it is to setup things like galleries and blogs within Mura I made the decision to move my blog and a couple other sites to a consolidated interface with Mura and Railo running under the hood.