QuackFuzed.com is the personal ColdFusion coding blog of Matt Quackenbush. It exists primarily as a place for the author to learn, and hopefully to assist others in learning and/or avoiding some of the same pitfalls and mistakes. (Quack certainly makes enough mistakes daily to make up for the entire ColdFusion community.)
I hate Aptana. The damn thing just takes over your Eclipse install and does everything that you tell it not to do. The only thing I ever used it for was CSS code coloring and insight, but today I had enough and uninstalled it. As a result, I am now looking for a CSS plugin again. Any recommendations?
Okay, I admit it. I'm a WinDoze guy. I even have the property patch. Well, kinda. When it comes to me being the server administrator, it has to be WinDoze. Sorry boys and girls, but I don't come from a network background, or even a programming background, so I like point-and-click. I'm comfy in that realm. Start talking shells and all of those other "big words" that pertain to *nix, and I'm lost. That said, I am looking to justify the expense for my first MacBook Pro and/or iMac - but we'll save that for another time and post.
Last night I suddenly realized that I *really* needed to either (a) upgrade my development machine to WinDoze Server, (b) purchase some sort of add-on software, or (c) load Apache. Since Apache is free, I opted for (c). Here is a (somewhat) quickie overview of why I needed to make a move, a couple of links that I followed to get it done, and a couple of "gotcha" notes.
While there are literally hundreds of songs that you'll hear me say "this is one of my favorites!" about, and thousands more that I can be heard saying "I love this song!" about, there are only 10 that are good enough to make it on this list.
In case you hadn't heard yet, jQuery is a seriously bad-ass, lightweight library that I'm in love with. Here's what the official jQuery site has to say about it:
"jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript."
However, you can always leave it to a guy like me to find a way to screw things up.
I don't know if I've ever mentioned it before, but I really love jQuery. It's such a lightweight, yet very powerful tool. There are so many really cool things that you can do with jQuery, and I'm really no authority on the matter, but here is one really basic task that I use it for.
Man, 2008 is here already, can you believe it? It seems like just yesterday it was 1999. Or 1989. Or...
I trust that everyone out there has an incredibly fruitful year this year. Here's to the ColdFusion community at large; raise those champaign glasses high!
(Oh, and for the new year, I decided to roll out a new layout. Hopefully you like it. I think it looks hellabetter than the old one.)
What is reEscape()?
Often times, when you pass a string through ColdFusion's built-in regular expression (regEx) functions [reFind()/reFindNoCase()/reReplace()/reReplaceNoCase()], the string needs to have regEx special characters escaped. reEscape() is a tidy little method that I wrote to do just that.
So, let's see reEscape() in action, and point out its good and its bad.
I am a web standards junkie. I get really agitated if my code doesn't validate to XHTML 1.0 Strict standards. Why? Adhering to the standards, well, there can be nothing but positive things that comes out of making the additional effort. For instance, I know that if it does validate, the chances of it looking good in a variety of modern browsers - even ones that I don't test in - are very much in my favor. While there are really only three browsers that I really place any real efforts in checking (FF, IE6, IE7), I like knowing that I'm not excommunicating someone from my sites just because they use some little-known browser.
Besides, once you train yourself to adhere to the standards, it's really a painless process and takes no more time than just pushing out crap code. And you'll thank yourself later.
I created my own form markup that I've used for a long time now. It works very well, but I've always wondered if there wasn't a better way to make it happen. Today, I found that better way. Hang with me to the end, it should be worth your while.
So I decided that I would play around with a new layout for QuackFuzed.com, and well, hopefully you're looking at it right now. Is it done? Not hardly, but I'm trying to work on it a little each night as I find time. (Find time... that's kind of like "spare time"... No, I've never seen any either.)
Anyways, pardon the mess, but hopefully even its currently-messy state the blog looks better than it did before. :-)
