JohnBs personal blog

Sorry it’s been a bit quiet round here for a while. I’m settling into my new job now - it’s great to at last be coding for a full time job! It’s taking a while to get my head round the CMS we use and also the custom application development that has taken place which has ‘plugged’ into the CMS. Plugging applications so closely (ie. at a template level) into the underlying CMS seems an unwise architectural decision since there may come a time when these applications will need to be unplugged and plugged into another application.

Consequently, I’ve been writing a CFC based API calling the CMSs’ customtag API - my plan….to use my CFC API in my applications then further in the future I only have to modify my API to call the new products API and the applications should continue to operate. Well anyway - that’s the plan, whether it works or not is another matter…

Here’s a handy hint i saw today on TV this morning to determine when your steak is cooked to your liking, rare, medium, well done etc.

Firstly, it involves your hand. You bring the tips of your thumb and first finger together and then use your other hand to press the area at the base of your thumb. With your thumb and first finger together the area will be squiggy, now if you press on your steak when it’s in the pan and it’s soft it’ll be rare. As you change from your first finger to your little finger the area hardens up, so you relate how squiggy the area of your hand is to how cooked your steak is you end up with the perfect steak!!!

Previously, I didn’t have any real handle on ColdFusion’s penetration into the UK market, in fact statistically i still don’t. I recently spent time with Goss Interactive looking at their content management product, ControlSite. I’d never heard of the product before moving to my new job thinking i’d seen most of the ColdFusion content management systems on the market. Goss have built up an impressive client list ranging from district councils, health, travel, construction, education - the list goes on…..all running under ColdFusion, it turns out even my local council is running on their product!!!

I’m not sure why i thought that CF wasn’t all that big over here, probably down to the fact that the majority of people you see posting on various lists are from the USA and it’s rare to see fellow UKanians posting - could it be they’re such super developers they don’t need to ask questions?

Anyway - it’s certainly encouraging to discover the take up of CF in the UK is larger than i’d imagined, who knows - with the next release it’s likely to grow even bigger….

It’s finally here, grab yours from here

So fingers crossed the 4.1 cores will be gold very very soon, but just in the nick of time another tweak has been made before they go final.

I ran into a situation the other day where i’ve got a couple of preprocess fuseactions running globally dumping into a CCV (to produce my blog sidebar) so they always appear in my layouts. So far so good - but i then needed to add an item to the sidebar ABOVE the global FAs. Ahh…well you could do it with FuseQ but with the native grammar you needed to go via an additional variable, eg

RightCCV is the name of the CCV in my layout with the global FAs already in it, so i then set the value of RightCCV to be the result of the FA i want prepended and add the orginal content behind it, kinda clunky huh?

Well, now in addition to the append=”true” attribute you can do prepend=”true”, so the above simply becomes;

Hopefully i’m not the only one that will benefit from that little tweak…

I’ve just received an email from my host telling me that they’re going to be carrying out emergency maintenance on the server that hosts my VPS server, between 5PM ET today through to Thursday 5pm ET - downtime is expected to be a minimum of 15 minutes during the time. Apologies if i disappear…

This lesson looks at some of the new grammar that Fusebox 4.1 will introduce along with changes from Fusebox 4.0 and a quick look at Custom Lexicon.

Download Lesson 6 PDF

This lesson will follow shortly, I’ve just got a few more things i want to say before i post it.

EDIT: 24/02/2005 - It’s here!!!

Download Lesson 7 PDF