November 2006 Web Log Entries
Skin Spider : The Problem Approach To Referential Redirection
Posted: November 30, 2006 at 9:14 AM by Ben Nadel
To learn all about Skin Spider, click here . To view the most updated application, click here . To view the current code base, click here . I do NOT support this approach . I am only posting it as an update because it works in a misleading fashion and should be changed. I only realized this after I had done it. I want to talk about my reaso... read more »
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XML Config Files And The Heuristic Exception
Posted: November 30, 2006 at 8:02 AM by Ben Nadel
There seems to always be a conversation going on somewhere about the use of XML config files versus Programmatic config files in ColdFusion. I personally believe that Programmatic is the way to go, but that is not the point of this post. I wanted to talk about heuristics for a moment. A heuristic (in a general sense) is a rule that is used to incr... read more »
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Overriding Built-In ColdFusion Methods With Custom ColdFusion Component Methods
Posted: November 29, 2006 at 1:54 PM by Ben Nadel
ColdFusion has a TON of amazing functions built right into. The problem (in a weird way) with some of these functions is that they have great names. This is a good thing most of the time, but sometimes, a function name is so good that you want to use it for another purpose. Image a situation where you have a custom data type . You might want to s... read more »
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ColdFusion Regular Expressions Match New Line Using "."
Posted: November 28, 2006 at 5:35 PM by Ben Nadel
Minor note here, but over on CF-Talk , Rick Root just pointed out a flaw in my understanding of ColdFusion regular expressions. I was under the impression that the period "." would NOT match the new line character or the carriage return character in a target string. I think this is traditionally how regular expressions work (or maybe not). It tur... read more »
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SELECT TOP And ColdFusion Query Of Queries
Posted: November 28, 2006 at 5:00 PM by Ben Nadel
NOTE: Please disregard the following post. It is solved using a CFQuery Attribute, MAXROWS, that I didn't know about. (Thanks Joe!)... you think you know a language and them BLAM! You don't. Using the SELECT TOP directive of a SQL statement is a nice way to limit the number of records that are returned from the database. Unfortunately (as far... read more »
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Peter Bell Is Killing My Productivity (In The Short Term)
Posted: November 28, 2006 at 9:15 AM by Ben Nadel
Every time I settle down to start actually doing work again, Peter Bell has to write some really cool article that takes me half an hour to wrap my head around (I read slow and I don't exactly run a stud-farm in my head). This is killing my productivity, but hopefully only in the short term. As I can leech knowledge from him, it should be good f... read more »
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I Have Resorted To Checking Comment Content (For Spam)
Posted: November 28, 2006 at 9:08 AM by Ben Nadel
It seems I have taken one step forward, two steps back when it comes to blocking blog comment spamming. Stuff just keeps getting through. Granted, I have not implements some of the ideas that I wanted to rip from Dinowitz, but it bugs me none the less. I have finally resorted to actually checking the content of the comment. Right now, I am not all... read more »
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Streaming Text Using ColdFusion's CFContent Tag And The Variable Attribute
Posted: November 27, 2006 at 9:23 AM by Ben Nadel
If you haven't used ColdFusion's CFContent tag to stream data to the browser, either as an inline object, or as an attachment, you should at least test it out. It's a really great feature of ColdFusion and really gives you some good control (with CFHeader) over how the data gets used by the end user. Anyway, some one over on CF-Talk (a while back)... read more »
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Are All Passionate People Selfish?
Posted: November 27, 2006 at 8:38 AM by Ben Nadel
I am extremely passionate about my work with ColdFusion. I don't just leave it at the office and then live the rest of my life, detached from work. I am constantly going over problems in my head. During lulls in conversation, my mind often switches over to the task of problem solving; how can I better perform a task, what should I look into next, ... read more »
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ColdFusion Iterating Business Objects (IBOs) From The Ground-Up
Posted: November 25, 2006 at 6:08 PM by Ben Nadel
Peter Bell recently wrote an article for the ColdFusion Developer's Journal (CFDJ) on using Iterating Business Objects in ColdFusion . I have heard about these IBOs for a long time, so now that there was some source code to look at, I really dove right in. In order to learn more about a chunk of code, I often times try to build it from the grou... read more »
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Thanksgiving Is The Enemy Of Project HUGE
Posted: November 24, 2006 at 9:41 PM by Ben Nadel
Ugggg. Why is food so good tasting? Why are there so many left over desserts in the refrigerator? Thanksgiving is the enemy of Project HUGE. I have eaten so much over the past two days. Now I have to work extra hard in the gym to get back to where I was - I'm not even gonna think of where I want to be. In fact, between going down to see my new nie... read more »
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Regular Expression Finds vs. String Finds
Posted: November 22, 2006 at 8:15 AM by Ben Nadel
I suggested to Michael Dinowitz last night that the short-circuit evaluation of multiple OR statements (within a CFIF) would execute faster than the short-circuit evaluation of a regular expression with multiple "or" pipes ("|"). For example, I argue that: <cfif ( (strValue.IndexOf( "Sarah" ) GTE 0) OR (strValue.IndexOf( "Libby" ) GTE 0)... read more »
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Skin Spider : The Page Equivalent Url
Posted: November 21, 2006 at 2:50 PM by Ben Nadel
To learn all about Skin Spider, click here . To view the most updated application, click here . To view the current code base, click here . I am a firm believer that most pages in an application should have a URL equivalent. Meaning, you can put some URL in the browser and get most any page in the system. I say "most" any page, as I draw the... read more »
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Skin Spider : Another Bell And Whistle
Posted: November 20, 2006 at 4:16 PM by Ben Nadel
To learn all about Skin Spider, click here . To view the most updated application, click here . To view the current code base, click here . Just a minor update here. I have updated the videorating.cfm ColdFusion custom tag to have a toggle for whether or not the video clip is a favorite of the user. It works pretty much the same way as the... read more »
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Damn Spam Bots! Too Smart!
Posted: November 20, 2006 at 8:18 AM by Ben Nadel
Over the weekend I had 4 spam comments posted to the site. Granted 3 of them were from the same bot, but still, this irks me. Last week I implemented a new de-spamming protocol and it seems that it is not tough enough. I am going to leave it in place for a bit longer to see how it goes. I apologize for any spam emails that people get (via comment ... read more »
