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After an arduous amount of time spent brainstorming, strategizing, (drinking), and doodling with our friends at Abovo Marketing Group, we have finally re-branded our baby. The open source version of our rockin’ site management system, i3SiteTools is…
Today marks my year anniversary at Digital Positions. How I survived David, Beth, and Ben’s ‘yellow’1 approach, not to mention Eric’s phone voice, I’ll never know. But here I am, still going strong.
Has it really been a year? It feels as if I just walked through the door yesterday. But looking back I can’t believe how much has happened in the past year and how much I have grown as a developer. I have gone from being a strictly ColdFusion programmer to a much more well-rounded developer. Of course ColdFusion is still a huge part of my skill set and I have ramped up my knowledge by delving deep into i3SiteTools, DP’s own site management system, utilizing the power of CFCs, and getting my ColdFusion MX 7 Developer certification.
However, at Digital Positions I have had the chance to get involved in much more than the ColdFusion world alone. I have had the opportunity to be a part of the RIA movement by helping develop an AJAX based online application and assisting in developing a soon to launch Flex shopping cart application. I have also had the delight of becoming the lead here for all things CSS. Prior to my time here at DP, my experience with CSS was simply stylizing font and now I am creating cross-browser compliant table-less layouts left and right, and loving it.
Looking back, the past year has been a good one. And looking forward I am excited about things to come. In addition to more RIA apps coming our way, we are busy preparing for i3SiteTools going open source. There is a lot going on here at DP and I am grateful to be a part of it. Yes, it’s even worth putting up with Eric’s phone voice.
1. All DP employees have their own Herrmann Brain Dominance profile. Being a detail oriented ‘green’ planner, I’m not always on the same wavelength as those ‘yellow’ holistic conceptualizers.
The latest Windows update which rolled out on April 11th affects every web site that uses any type of Active X control. Microsoft modified Internet Explorer so that now in order for a user to interact with embedded objects (like Flash) she must first click on the object to activate it.
Have you ever wondered what the <!DOCTYPE> tag is used for? Have you even given it any thought or just simply used whatever version of the tag is included in your usual html template? Although in the past this tag has been something which could be easily overlooked with little to no adverse side affects, with W3C standards compliance on the rise, the DOCTYPE tag is no longer something to be ignored.
We have a client who recently moved from CF5 to CF7. We did all the normal things you would do during a migration like this.
So I was a little miffed when their automated email script wasn’t working properly. I checked the code and at first thought it was an issue with the SQL query but after about 40 minutes of poking around that turned out not to be the case. So I commented out the cfmail tags, threw in some cflog tags and started to look at the code as it executed (I’ve become a huge fan of the cflog tag).
After the first run through I immediately saw the issue. Because of the large number of subscribers requesting the emails, we write a portion of the email to a text file and store it on the server so we can retrieve it later on in the code. These text files are typically deleted and recreated at the start of the scheduled task. My log messages were telling me that we were skipping the first two files, one of which happened to be the body of the emails I was investigating.
Further digging into the code I found where the CF5 developer had diligently coded his query loop to start at row 3. I had an idea why this was, but it wasn’t till I talked to a developer in my shop with actual experience in CF5 that my suspicion was confirmed. In CF 5 if you looped over a directory list, you had to start at row 3, because row 1 was ‘.’ And row 2 was ‘..’, BUT in CF 6 & 7 this was changed so the ‘.’ and ‘..’ are ignored. This is something I didn’t realize during the migration and it’s not something the code analyzer would not catch since the code is legitimate.
So, a word to the wise, if you’re upgrading from CF5 do a quick search on your code for “ startrow=’3’ ” and see if maybe those attributes need to be removed.
We have spent a lot of time in the past few months experimenting with the Flex 2.0 Alpha, Macromedia's (now Adobe) latest offering in the Rich Internet Application development arena. From what we have seen so far, it's an amazing tool for delivering the kind of powerful applications we build. We have built a wonderful RIA alternative for searching Amazon.com, complete with slider filtering on price and publication date and a toggle between image view and data view of the search results. Look for a link to demo the application in a future post from our new developer Darin Kohles.We are hard at work giving some overdue love and attention to our very own CMS, fixing little bugs and rethinking the flow of some of the tools. i3SiteTools is the engine that has driven the Content Management side of our business and we are excited about taking it to the next level in 2006! We are planning a new RIA dashboard that will give our users even easier access to the content on their site and puts all of the information they need at their fingertips including some traffic stats, a message queue and more.
Additionally, we are building out a new media-driven help document library. Using Adobe's Captivate, we are creating a series of narrated mini-movies to walk users through using all of the tools in i3SiteTools. This library accompanied by a robust new glossary of all things "webish" are part of our commitment to make owning and maintaining websites the best possible experience for all users.
Yes, it is true, the cobbler's children often go shoeless. We are finally making the time to rework our own web site and have thrown the gauntlet down to launch by the end of January (2006 that is ;-)!
We have nearly killed each other in the planning phase --- everybody gets a little bit passionate about our beloved DP site and the grand vision of what it can be. But that's good, because nothing good ever came from apathy, and you can quote me on that! I figure the last one standing when the dust settles gets to actually build it! Apathy's lookin' better all the time.
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