How I Got Started With Coldfusion
Steve Bryant has declared August 1st “How I Got Started in Coldfusion Day“, which I thought was an awesome idea, so here is my short little story! year Back in ’06 I was working as a PHP developer in a (very) small online marketing company. We ran things like link exchanges, multi level marketing websites, etc. At the time I was actually trying to move away from PHP and get into the new hotness which was Ruby on Rails.
That May my employer, who was an awesome guy, died suddenly from a heart attack. In one morning I lost a friend and also found myself unemployed. I took a few weeks to process things and then sent my resume to every web and software development business in the area. As luck would have it, the current developer at Snap Design was leaving in a month to work as a missionary in Africa. I had read through the company’s website, and already knew they exclusively worked with Macromedia Cold Fusion. I’d never touched Coldfusion, I’d heard it was a “dead” language. I also knew I didn’t want to end up working in a call centre.
I spent my evenings reading and trying the code in the Coldfusion (MX 7 at the time) documentation and the CFWACK books. I practiced by translating code I had written in PHP to CF. While disappointed at the lack of proper scripting support (remedied in Coldfusion 9), I was impressed at how easy it was to learn, and how little code I had to write to accomplish the same things I would do in PHP. I also found a very active and passionate developer community, not something you think you would find with a “dead” language!
To cut a long story short, I managed to secure the job, and 5 years on I still love what I do. Proof that good things can come out of an unfortunate situation!
jQuery Word Limit Plugin
This is a pretty simple jQuery plugin that will limit the number of words a website user can enter into a form textfield or input. It should work with any version of jQuery, though it’s only been tested with 1.3 and 1.4. An example is included in the package. Continue Reading →
Recommended Android Apps
I’ve had my HTC Legend for about three weeks now, and thought I would share some of the more useful / interesting apps I’ve found. Please feel free to share your own in the comments!
Experimenting with JRuby in Coldfusion
This is just a quick post, will post a longer one later when I’ve had more time to play.
Before this will work, you’ll need to download and install JRuby, and copy jruby.jar from the installation directory to your Coldfusion classpath. For me those directories were c:\program files (x86)\jruby-1.4.0\lib and c:\Coldfusion9\lib respectively.
Once that’s done, on to the fun! Continue Reading →
Fix for Slow Windows 7 Install
Installed Windows 7 on my desktop this morning, and ran into a little issue. The installation was taking FOREVER, the install sat at “Setup is Starting…” for at least 10 minutes. A couple of quick tweaks later and I had it fixed. Posting here in case anyone else runs into similar issues.
- Make sure your SATA drives are plugged into the first available ports. SATA_0 on your motherboard should be your boot drive.
- If you have an old-ass 3.5″ floppy drive, like I do, try disabling it in the BIOS (or completely unplug it from the system).
Following those two steps fixed the issue for me!
Friday Challenge Solution – Randomize a Picture
Ray Camden’s Friday Challenge for this week was to take a photo and jumble it into 100 random blocks. Like those puzzles from when you were a kid. My solution written in pure CFScript can be found here. Matthew Abbott expanded on my code and made the blocks draggable using jQuery here.
CFHTTP in Pure CFScript
Figured this out while I was working on my Coldfusion Twitter API component. I haven’t been able to find any examples elsewhere, so I thought I would post it here for others. Continue Reading →