Structuring Web Apps Into Multiple Tiers
Very often I read that you need to structure your web applications into multiple tiers to separate the concerns. The advice is to move the business and data logic out of the web project into two different projects so you end up with the classic 3 tier model - presentation, business and data. This advice is good.

Date:2007-12-17

Using Robust Exception Information On A Shared Host
I was recently contacted by a possible client who was looking for a code review. As part of my standard "playing around" I noticed that his site was throwing errors with the full path information revealed. As folks know, I always recommend you turn off Show Robust Exception Information on a production machine.

Date:2007-12-05

PEER 1 presents Growing Pains - watch now
Todd brings home a surprise for Janet. "This is going to grow into something beautiful," exclaims Todd. He's right. Well, sort of. See what happens next and enter our contest for a chance to win 12 months of FREE managed hosting at PEER 1! See terms and conditions. Limit one entry per person. Watch Now

Date:2007-11-13

Application.cfc Methods & Example Uses
A reader commented yesterday that my Application.cfc reference doesn't really say how to use the various methods. Since my reference is intended to be a simple code skeleton, I thought I'd quickly explain each of the methods and possible uses for them.

Date:2007-11-12

DirectoryWatcher & ColdFusion Image Manipulation
Now that ColdFusion 8 gives us a crap load of image functions as well as event gateways in all editions, I thought I'd write up a super quick demo on how you can use both in your application.

Date:2007-10-31

Using Spry:hover, Spry:even, & Spry:odd All Together
One of the nicer features of Spry is the simple way you can apply even, odd, and hover classes to a dataset.

Date:2007-10-24

Yahoo Strategy Includes Attracting More Developers
Yahoo's old founder and new boss, Jerry Yang, outlined where the company is heading now in a blog post yesterday. The three key items he sees after talking things through with people in the company are: "Become the starting point for the most consumers."

Date:2007-10-17

How To Streamline Your Content
Ektron CMS400.NET lets you do everything you need to do on the Web and everything you want to do... all with just one application.

Date:2007-10-09

AJAX - Too Much Choice
Last week I spoke with Todd Hay, VP of Marketing at ActiveGrid. "Too often, we fight ourselves in the AJAX community. For customers, there is too much confusion between AJAX libraries such as Dojo, JQuery, Prototype or the tens and hundreds more.

Date:2007-09-26

Structure Versus Query
Over the weekend and Monday, there was an interesting thread on CF-Talk. You can read the complete thread here. The basic problem involved getting a particular piece of data to show up in the final feed xml, in this case, the GUID attribute for an RSS 2.0 feed.

Date:2007-09-19

Three Lines Of Code To Boost Your Search Engine Traffic
In the world of Web building, an opportunity to develop/code something quickly is a rare occasion. Mostly, you need to spend hours on research, planning and implementation (unless you code with CSS ;) ).

Date:2007-08-29

ColdFusion 8's Ajax Debug Works Well With Spry
Wow - this was a surprise. I was trying to debug a Spry issue this morning and not having any luck at all. I was using Spry's debug panel which you enable like so: Spry.Data.Region.debug = false; And I was sending debug messages like so...

Date:2007-08-16

What Facebook ToS Change Means For Developers
Facebook pulled the wildly popular music sharing Audio one week after it changed its terms of service. While this is a good for Facebook, it does put limits on what developers can put up as an application.

Date:2007-08-01

.NET - Beware Of The FileInfo.OpenText() Method
I'm a big fan of the System.IO.FileInfo object in .NET because it wraps the System.IO.File object nicely in a strongly typed way. It makes it easier to work with files.

Date:2007-07-20

Return Format For ColdFusion Components In ColdFusion 8
One of the lesser publicized updates in ColdFusion 8 is the introduction of the returnFormat attribute for the cffunction tag. What does this do? ColdFusion Components, when executed remotely, will return data wrapped in WDDX format.

Date: 2007-07-11

Track The Life Cycle of Your Website Visitors
Ektron CMS400.net lets you do more than just what you need to do on the web, it also lets you do everything you want to do on the web...

Date: 2007-07-10

AJAX UI Windows In Coldfusion 8
I've been blogging about new ColdFusion UI controls in ColdFusion 8 and today I'm discussing CFWINDOW. First - CFWINDOW does not - as you might guess - create a popup window. Which is probably a good thing.

Date: 2007-06-27

Getting The Value Of AJAX-ified Controls
I ran into a problem last night trying to use JavaScript to read the value of a rich text field. I had assumed I could use the normal syntax I'd use for a form field: document.forms[0].body.value or document.getElementById('body').

Date: 2007-06-20

Adobe's ColdFusion 8 Beta
The wait is over and the latest version of ColdFusion has just been released in beta. Code named 'Scorpio' (the eighth sign of the Zodiac) during the development stages, the new release is officially named ColdFusion 8 and has just recently been...

Date: 2007-06-06

Section 508 & WAI Triple A Accessibility
I've been fiddling with accessibility standards and validation today. It's something I've been doing for several years now on many different types of web applications. So it was time for my blog to go through validation and it almost did.

Date: 2007-05-30

Wordpress 2.2 Is In The House
If, like me, you haven't yet upgraded your WordPress blog to version 2.1, don't bother. You can pass "go", collect $200 and go straight to version 2.2. The new version fixes more than 200 bugs and includes lots of new user features.

Date: 2007-05-16

Div vs Span
These two tags are often used inter-changeably by developers for different reasons, so what are the differences between them? How should they be used to markup web pages?

Date: 2007-05-02

Cleaning Up Verity Results (Coldfusion)
Christian Ready pinged me a few days ago about an interesting problem he was having at one of his web sites. His search (Verity-based on CFMX7) was returning HTML.

Date: 2007-04-18

Fully Functional Trial Offer for Growing Websites
Ektron CMS400.net lets you do more than just what you need to do on the web, it also lets you do everything you want to do on the web...

Date: 2007-04-16

SES: I, Robots.txt
Danny Sullivan keyed the Robots.txt Summit session during SES New York, where representatives from major search engines discussed the future of the humble file used to manage crawler behavior.

Date: 2007-04-12

Love Ajax? Hate The Exploits
Bringing certain content-updating behaviors to web pages without reloading them has been a key piece of the 'Web 2.0' online application meme; it now appears the criminals could have a way to break them open too.

Date: 2007-04-04

Adobe CS3 Details
Adobe Creative Suite CS3 was announced and the release date ihas been set for April 20th (It did say July 1st earlier though), the software package is going to be coming in 6 different versions and contain a wide array of software.

Date: 2007-03-28

Access Your PC Remotely With WebEx!
Convenient and secure remote computing capabilities, from any PC or mobile device. Conveniently access files, programs and email whether you're at work, at home, on the road, or on vacation.

Date: 2007-03-27

Spry 1.5 - New "Session Expired" Support
I blogged about the Spry 1.5 preview a few days ago and finally made time to whip up a quick demo of one of the new features - Session Handling. First and foremost - let me explain exactly what is meant by this.

Date: 2007-03-21

Can Coding Affect Your Search Ranking
There are many strategies one can employ in order to improve a site's search ranking. Everything from title tags to link buying has been suggested at one time or another when it comes to this elusive beast we like to call search engine optimization.

Date: 2007-03-07

$65m, Bad Use Of Javascript
Javascript is one of my favourite web technologies. When I stop to think how the Internet would be without Javascript I can't help but think how much less productive and enjoyable my days would be.

Date: 2007-02-28

Speed Up Page Load Times W/ Mod_deflate
In a report from November, 2006 Akamai and JupiterResearch concluded that 4 seconds is the threshold an online shopper is willing to wait for pages of the sites to load.

Date: 2007-02-15

Optimizing Your Websites For Search Engines
Ektron CMS400.net lets you do more than just what you need to do on the web, it also lets you do everything you want to do on the web...

Date: 2007-02-12

LAMP Development - Backbone Of The World Wide Web
The World Wide Web has always been an entity that needed a little bit of help in order to run effectively. As long as there has been the Internet, there have been tools to help keep it running well.

Date: 2007-01-31

Frames And Model-Glue
Dan asked the following question about frames and Model-Glue: Basically, my question is about using frames within my application. I basically want to use a frame for my avigation that never gets reloaded and another frame below it for the page displays.

Date: 2007-01-18

Fully Integrated Web Site Analytics
Ektron CMS400.net lets you do more than just what you need to do on the web, it also lets you do everything you want to do on the web... all with one application

Date: 2007-01-15

On Aesthetics and Usability in Design
In all facets of design, we’ve seen many variations on the notion of accessibility. While one medium evolves from the roots of another, certain ideals persist and others vanish. Sometimes, tradition impedes advancement… at others, ambition clouds solutions easily delivered through tried methods.

Date: 2007-01-10