I'm not a designer. I can make may way around Photoshop, but the majority of my time in Photoshop is spent chopping up layers to convert them into images to use in my HTML & CSS. Occasionally I need to create new graphic assets or tweak the colors in an existing image. We have a large collection of icons at work, but occasionally I need to adjust the color of an icon to better match the graphical assets where the icons will be used.

[UPDATED: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 8:41:22 AM] I just noticed that Google appears to have added some new features to the results page. The new features are buttons for "Promote", "Remove" and "Comment". The "Promote" feature appears to be a way to give your "thumbs up" to content—which I'm sure will affect the rating of a page and thus affecting SEO.

I was working on some code today where I was getting back a query object from a CFC and needed to get the execution time. You can get this information from the <cfquery /> tag by using the result attribute, but since I was getting my query object back from a CFC, I needed to try and determine the execution time from only the query object.

I came across a couple of sites this morning that show off examples of existing UI design patterns that I believe will be useful to all developers. While there's always room to improve, many of the design problems we run into while developing applications can be solved with existing design patterns. The links below are good resources for showing existing patterns, why they're useful and examples of when to use them.

Barney Boisvert released FlexChart 2.0 yesterday. This is a Flex-based charting tool that can be used to easily adding graphs to your ColdFusion projects. While ColdFusion does have a number of Charting tools integrated into the product, it seems every time I go to use them I run into limitation after limitation that prevents me from using them. So, if you're looking for alternative charting for ColdFusion, the you should check out the FlexChart demos.

If you want to quickly find all tags that have an attribute containing a specific value, you can use the following regular expression: (?is)]*(ATTRIBUTE)="[^"]*(VALUE)[^"]*"[^>]*> You can use this from either the Global Search (CTRL+H) or from the Find/Replace (CTRL+F) dialogs (just remember to check the "regular expressions" option.

If you want to quickly find all matching open and close tags, you can use the following regular expression: (?is)]*>(.*?) You can use this from either the Global Search (CTRL+H) or from the Find/Replace (CTRL+F) dialogs (just remember to check the "regular expressions" option.) The "(?is)" makes the regular expression ignore case and search over multiple lines. Just replace the string "TAGNAME" with the tag you want to search.

Today I was working on a project where I needed to add some visual "page breaks" to the screen—very similar to the page breaks Microsoft Word shows in "Normal" view. The goal is for visual indicator to show on the screen, but actually trigger page breaks when printing.

When I re-launched my blog last year I mentioned that I made several changes to the XML-RPC code in order to make blogging from Windows Live Writer simpler. I didn't release the XML-RPC mods at the time, because I wanted to make sure they were nice and stable. Now that I've been using the mods for almost a year, I think their stable enough to share. The changes I made most involved trying to simplify blog posting.

I ran into a really weird bug this morning. I was having an issue with a jQuery plug-in I wrote, where for some reason IE7 was not triggering the onmouseover event properly. After spending a bunch of time trying to track down the problem, I finally realized that it wasn't triggering the event until it got inside the padding of the element—which is the wrong behavior.