If you've ever checked out Ext you've probably seen the feed viewer sample application. A while back I decided to see how quickly I could recreate that viewer using ColdFusion 8 Ajax. I ended up using some Spry bits for listeners - but overall much of the code is pretty simple. I'm not going to bother posting the code unless someone really wants to see it - I just wanted to get this out there as a cool demo of the power/simplicity of ColdFusion 8 Ajax.

I just updated a few of my projects on RIAForge. Just minor updates really, but they've been long overdue. CFCExplorer has added support for generating proxy components. The support is pretty basic and not very extensible but it creates components in the style I'm comfortable using so I like it. Check the screenshots. The second update is to my cfImageCropper custom tag. The only update is a stupid bug that I had in there from day one which hardcoded the image height/width in the tag.

The ColdFusion 8 Special Edition of Fusion Authority Quarterly Update is now shipping. I mention this not only because my mug is on the cover but because I've been meaning to post some commentary on the publication here on my blog. I finally picked up a subscription last year at CFUnited. I received a handfull of back issues as part of the subscription and immediately started reading through them when I got home from the conference.

I've been hard at work on adding background image support to my PPTUtils project. My demo page shows the results of that work. The new bits are up at RIAForge. This version uses a bleeding edge release of Apache POI which includes a bug fix that the folks who work on HSLF (HSLF is the POI API for PowerPoint - for those who are curious HSLF stands for 'Horrible Slide Layout Format') were kind enough to fix for me.

I apologize for the extremely lame title of this post. It's worth reading, trust me. 250 bonus points to the commenter who comes up with the best alternate title. Last night I was tightening up another release of my PPTUtils component when I hit a roadblock with one of the demos in the package. The component returns an array containing an element that represents each slide in a PowerPoint presentation.

So I'm toying around with some of it when I hit the following error: Variable GETWRITABLEIMAGEFORMATS is undefined. Feeling pretty confident that I had remembered the function properly I hit the documentation where I found the reason for the exception. Apparently when the CF Engineers created this function they misspelled Writable by putting an extra 'e' in to make it 'Writeable'. I'm not the best speller myself so I'm not knocking anyone - just something to watch out for...

Dan Wilson blogged this morning about the official launch of the ColdFusion Zone on dzone. To quote Dan: It is my vision that coldFusion.dzone.com will be a resource for the ColdFusion community by providing a place to share information. We encourage quality submissions by members of the community. While not every article can be posted, we encourage those of you who want to share your experiences and lessons with the rest of the community.

In June of this year I will have been working at the same company for 12 years. Working for the same company that long these days is almost unheard of but I consider myself fortunate to be 31 years old and almost half way to being pension eligible (...

Over a month ago I launched the Model-Glue Cookbook with full intentions of immediately adding some super delicious content. Well, things happened (just minor things like Christmas, New Years, Work, 2 sick kids on 2 seperate occasions) and I just didn't get to adding anything. For that I apologize. Thankfully Brian Ghidinelli has submitted a few entries over the past few days so there is actually some good content on the site finally!

Back around Christmas, Ray Camden ran a fun Friday Challenge involving the 12 days of Christmas. He followed up with an idea later in the day of using his Yahoo API to create an image representation of the song. I thought the idea was super cool, and had been meaning to create something similar using this technique.