Web Dev Blog

The law library runs four blogs on our site, including the Due Process Blog, Feedback Blog, Student Worker Blog and the Web Dev Blog where you're reading this post. They all run using a ColdFusion-based blogging platform called BlogCFC. Since much of our site is written in ColdFusion, this platform works well for us, and we've been using it since early 2007.  Recently, BlogCFC has been updated a few times, including new features for us to administer things.  Just last week, they added a mobile plugin for the system called jQTouch. What does this mean for non-technical folks?  Well, all four sites now look good on iPhones and other mobile platforms. Take a look at the current list of entries in our Due Process blog as well as one recent entry with a nice picture.  We'll look at adjusting styles and colors, but for now, it's great to know that all of our blogs include some mobile-friendly goodness.  Just because we can (or rather: just because the BlogCFC team cares enough to try).

This entry was posted on November 1, 2010 at 1:17 PM and has received 18238 views. Print this entry.

One of the powers of the ColdFusion 8 tag CFPRESENTATION is that you can create presentations from dynamic database queries. A type of query introduced in Cold Fusion 8 is the CFFEED tag. This takes a feed (rss or atom) and turns it into a query that you can loop over as needed. Pairing the two together, following is a simple proof of concept that shows a series of slides using an RSS feed as the source.

The source for this example is a feed of Recently Redesigned Websites from the site eduStyle: Inspiration for Campus Web Designers. This was chosen as the source, as the feed output is very uniform, presenting two screenshot images and minimal but predictable text in the source of the feed.

First off, following is the pertinent code showing only the necessary CFFEED and CFPRESENTATION elements:

With this, it generates 15 swf slides, each representing a single entry from the feed source. If I want to do this in a week or a month, all I have to do is re-run the ColdFusion file and it will get results live from that point in time.

The best way to view this is to view the demonstration in a new browser window.

Alternately, you can also view an inline version of this presentation here.

This entry was posted on November 10, 2008 at 5:05 PM and has received 29878 views. Print this entry.

One of the tags introduced in ColdFusion 8 is CFPRESENTATION, which allows you to create a Flash-based presentation that is very slick and can take full advantage of many ColdFusion tools. Also, once created, it's easy to tweak the content and render it anew.

For a recent talk I had to give, I used CFPRESENTATION mostly to learn more about it. Following are five tips from others trying this out, together with some thoughts about those considering it. In a separate post, I'll put up a simple proof of concept to show how it works.

Five Useful CFPRESENTATION Tips

1. Adding Attachments to a CFPresentation: As a mostly undocumented feature, you can add attachments to a presentation very easily. Attachments can be web links or file references
2. CFPresentation: Presenter image tips: design suggestions for including presenter photos and a logo in your presentation
3. Cool-feature-in-CFPRESENTATION: CF Guru Ray Camden shows a technique for storing presentations for offline use. I found that it works to set the directory path in the intro and then copy these from the server.
4. Tweaking CF 8 Presentations: Ben Forta points out tips on where to tweak some internal settings for a presentation done with CFPRESENTATION
5. Creating Slide Presentations: Adobe documentation and examples for creating a presentation with this tag

In my opinion, it's best not to think of this as a PowerPoint alternative. Instead, it's a slick way to create online (or offline) presentations where you want to include live content or render slides in a customizable manner. Output for presentations is stored as a series of SWF files. For this reason, don't expect to include hypertext links on your slides, as they won't work.

The rendered content is not as easy to control as standard web markup. When CFPRESENTATION converts images of webpages, it resizes everything to fit in a single screen. For this reason, slides with minimal text show larger type. Also, image presentation is a bit quirky. For example, I was unable to insert a JPEG in an HTML table with a width of 50% to balance text and graphics.

All in all, CFPRESENTATION is pretty useful, and it sure looks nice for the amount of code required (which is very minimal).

This entry was posted on November 10, 2008 at 4:57 PM and has received 30652 views. Print this entry.

ColdFusion evangelist (deity?) Ben Forta recently announced that Adobe is making ColdFusion available for free for educational users. This is exciting news for many universities, though it's not clear if all server versions of ColdFusion are free as it turns out, no server versions are free. This is a program focused on free software for training and personal use in higher education.

If I were at CFUnited, I might know more. On the one hand, this announcement could be an indicator that ColdFusion is losing market share as a development language. Afterall, PHP is free, so many people migrate towards that instead. That said, many aspects of ColdFusion are easier to learn and implement than they are in PHP. It will be a few weeks before the ColdFusion plan is available from Adobe, so we are probably upgrading to ColdFusion 8 in the traditional manner: we'll pay for it. We hope to do this soon.

In reading about this announcement, I also discovered that Adobe already has a program to give away Flex Builder 3 Professional for educational users. I just signed up to get a license. Once we have the time, we'll explore possible Flex applications for our law library.

This entry was posted on June 20, 2008 at 5:07 PM and has received 32127 views. Print this entry.