If you are using my BlogCFC JS Twitter Pod or you visit my blog, you may have noticed that the Twitter time-stamp started reading "About 365 days ago" when the year rolled over. I finally sat down and looked into this today. Turns out, it's all my fault. I had to do some string manipulation on the date that Twitter sends to get it to work in IE and FF. Apparently I hard-coded '2007' in there to get it working. Maybe, I thought the world would end last year... Well, it didn't. So that code has been updated with #year(now())#.

The Twitter Pod download is still available here. And I'd still love to hear if anyone uses it on their blog.

In march I created a BlogCFC pod to show Twitter messages using the JS Twitter badge script. Recently, Twitter changed the location of the script.

So, my script
http://www.twitter.com/t/status/user_timeline/3026521?callback=twitterCallback&count=10
changed to
http://www.twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/3026521.json?callback=twitterCallback&count=10

Also, Twitter's server seems to have load issues at times. This can pause pages to render slowly while they wait for the script file. So, if you move the script include to the bottom of tags/layout.cfm, then it won't interfere with the page rendering.

The download is still available here. And I'd still love to hear if anyone uses it on their blog.

I saw this story about Google Gears on Ryan's blog earlier. It is such cool news that I wanted to make sure it got spread. Having a consistent cross-browser, cross-platform way to implement an "occasionally connected" work-flow for web-applications seems like huge news to me. Plus, Google + Adobe + Mozilla = Happy if you ask me.

I've already installed Gears and tried it with Google Reader under both WinXP and PCLinuxOS 2007.

Please go and check out the JavaScript syntax for executing SQL against a local SQLite database.

" What Google Gears means for Rich Internet Applications and Apollo by ZDNet's Ryan Stewart -- Some big news today that Google is announcing an open source project called "Google Gears" which is an open source collaboration between Google, Adobe, Mozilla, and Opera that enables offline web applications in the browser. It seems very similar to the announcement that Mozilla made about the offline features in Firefox 3 and will be [...]"

For some reason I clicked the print button on my blog the other day. It opened up a PDF in the tab I was in. Well, I just didn't like that (sorry Ray).

I recently built a print feature for an AJAX heavy project at work. Since this project uses Spry, the detail you see doesn't exist until javascript renders it in the browser. So, I came up with a solution of opening another window and then pushing the rendered contents into it. The new window even has a print.css. So, although it's the same mark-up, it looks different.

If you want to see the code I wrote for work you can check it out here. Just drill all the way into a vehicle and click the print button on the right.

Anyway, I used the same idea to change the print functionality on my blog. I've posted the resulting code and instructions for download here.

If anyone uses it I would love to hear about it.

This is a little late...

But, Adobe snuck out a preview of Spry 1.5 on March 15th.

You can go get it here.

If you haven't heard, Spry is an AJAX and DHTML JavaScript library.

I've been using it on a project at work. It's pretty slick. It reminds me of Flex the way you bind DataSets to "controls" and use curly brackets to reference variables.

The 1.5 preview seems to have fixed a couple of small issues that I had with it. It also promoted JSON DataSets to first-class citizenship. And I think that rocks!

So, if you haven't already, go check it out.