- Blogging

Die Spammers Die! (Painfully Please)

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:47:00 -0700

My blog has been absolutely hammered with comment spam lately. If any of you were subscribed to any of those comments and were forwarded the offensive spam, I am very sorry. Fortunately, one of the bots wasn't submitting something correctly. So, instead of getting a few thousand spam comments I got a few thousand error emails. :-( Anyway, I just took the time to add CFFormProtect to my comment form. It was super easy. There was really no excuse for me not to do this sooner. So, again, I apologize. Just to show you how easy it is, here is the implementation code from the docs.


Put

somewhere between your form tags.

Of course there are lots of things you can do to customize it's behavior. But, that is the basics. So please go checkout CFFormProtect for all your 'spam form submission' needs. Because, seriously, Captcha is the suck.

BlogCFC JS Twitter Pod (Bug Fixed)

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 09:30:00 -0700

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.

BlogCFC Derby Support

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 09:14:00 -0700

So, I managed to volunteer myself to code (if possible) Derby support into BlogCFC. I'm brand spankin' new to Derby. I managed to tweak the table create scripts enough to get them to run. That is as far as I have gotten. I hope to start looking into the scope of the project tonight. Who knows, maybe it'll be less work than I imagine. :-) However, if it should turn out to be difficult or I run into an issue that I am having trouble with, it would be nice to have someone who knows Derby at my disposal. So, if you have some experience with Derby and would like to help if I get stuck, then add a comment here. I'll keep you all up-to-date as I get into the meat of the project...

BlogCFC JS Twitter Pod (Updated)

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 23:20:00 -0700

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.

Hello Aggregators!

Thu, 24 May 2007 22:29:00 -0700

Within the last week or so, I got emails from both MXNA and Full As A Goog, both accepting my blog for aggregation. So, this is a quick "Hello" to any new readers. Thank you for stopping by! Come back soon!

BlogCFC Print Using DOM Injection

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 21:57:00 -0700

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.

BlogCFC JS Twitter Pod

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 22:06:00 -0700

I was looking at the Twitter Badges that you can add to your site. I noticed that there was a JS implementation. I thought that would be cool because I could style it to match the rest of the site. So, I created a new empty BlogCFC pod and pasted in the code that Twitter offered. Well, I have to say I was very un-impressed. It basically is only set up to display the current message and the time it was added. Except there's even a typo. So, it wasn't even showing the date. After a little investigation, I got it to show the date, which turns out to be the raw date, not the "about x [min|hours|days]" that I was expecting. Well, I took that as a challenge and began to build out similar functionality to the Flash Twitter badge in my JS Twitter badge. [More]

Hello World (Wide Web)!

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 12:50:00 -0700

It's my first blog post and I couldn't resist. And being that it is (my first blog post), I'll introduce myself. My name is Chris Phillips. I'm a Web Application Developer. I work with ColdFusion, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and SQL every day. I really enjoy my work. A Little Personal History: I tried a few other jobs before I fell into Web Development. Most of them were just a poor fit for my particular personality quirks. Lining up all the parts of a widget at 45% angles on the table before I assembled them really upset my bosses at a previous job. They frequently pointed out that I was slower than the other employees at manufacturing widgets. To which I always responded, "Yes, but my widgets are crafted expertly and lovingly to the exact specifications". Well, they weren't buying that. So, I started taking Web Design classes. Eventually I found ColdFusion. Now, I think that my attention to detail make me a really good fit for this profession. Well, that's enough for now. I'll be posting some actual technical content soon.