A call to those 300 some odd of you that have downloaded qbrowser: I am wanting to put out an updated version soon with a few small improvments but nothing spectacular. And I have received absolutely no suggestions for it, even though it has been downloaded so many times. Either I did an excellent job, or just nobody has taken the time to let me know what they think. (Im hoping for the former!) So if you have been using it and thinking, man, I wish it would do this, nows your chance. Use the comments below or shoot me an email if you have any suggestions. Or bug reports. Edit: Oh yeah, if you want to try out qBrowser so you know what im talking about, you can find it here: www.ryanguill.com/docs/

Great "art" piece on how to tell the difference between web 1.0 and web 2.0. Well worth a click.

A great example of ajax and what it is capable of, check out protopage. Quick and easy registration (although registration isn't even required!) and very customizable. I may just have a google/ig competitor...

24 ways is a great little page that just wrapped up its 24 different ways to impress your friends with your javascript and other web-related skills. There are some great things there, and although they are mostly geared towards php development, they are easily translated to our CF world. It is definately worth checking out.

Here is a great list of all the different companies and startups that google has acquired. Some of these have definately gone under the radar, at least the mainstream radar. Check them out. P.S. Cant wait to see what tehy do with android and dodgeball.

This is quite web2.0... Not quite to the caliber of flickr (they really serve two different purposes to be fair) but a very cool mostly ajax application that will quickly let you upload and share your photos. bubbleshare lets you upload multiple photos (very cool) and does it very fast, lets you quickly arrange your photos in albums, click to insert text and other cool features. im pretty sure they are using flash 8 for some things in the app although I can't seem to detect it... Check it out.

Not sure where I saw this, I think it must have been MXNA but just wanted to bump it up in case some of you may have missed it. In CF (comes standard) there is a bat file that you can use to create your cfcharts with a GUI editor. LOTS of new cfchart types are in there and it helps you get things just right. I havent checked it out in practice yet, but looking through its very very cool. You can get to it at {cfusionmx}/charting/webcharts.bat. More info here: http://www.orbwave.com/cfjboss/2005/12/customizing-your-cfchart-results.html

I just happened to look at my Stats Page for this blog and realized that three days (the 12th) ago this blog turned 1 year old. This isn't entirely acurate because I used to have an old blogger blog called the Roman Empire, but only after I switched to using the blogcfc did I really start posting about coldfusion and work related things. So far in the year I have posted 77 coldfusion related entries, 128 linkage related intries and 31 entries realted to my projects. Expect these figures to grow exponentially over the course of this next year though. So heres to looking back and looking forward!

Okay, so the title is somewhat fecitious, but bear with me here. All over the place in the design world (which admitedly I try to stay out of as much as possible; all those artsy people give me the creeps ;) you hear things about fonts. You have everyone talking about points, pixels and ems, you have people using sifr and entire articles written about nothing but typography. But I have to ask, why is it so hard to get good fonts on your website? Now I am sure someone is going to comment on this and tell me why its not technically or legally possible, but here is my ideas anyway. When you develop a website, you have images you put on the website right? What would you say the average website image runs? Now I know that is a matter of opinion, but would you say that 200K is too large of an image to put on a website? 300K? Especially if the user was on broadband? I wouldn't say so. I have something like 900 fonts on my system at the moment. The average font runs less than 300K in size. So, why cant the w3c and the browsers get to gether and give us the font tag back. Only this time, allow us to upload a font to our servers the way we upload images. then let the new and improved font tag tell the browsers that the site wants to use wingdings. The browser can then feel free to say, "but I dont have wingdings!" And then, let the browser download it so it can display the page correctly. Just in exactly the same way an image works. Now, I know there are copywright problems with fonts. So why not make it where the browser will not keep the font for more than a certain amount of time. Just cache it like it does a stylesheet, or any other images, and make it where the user can't get it out of the browser and use it elsewhere. Give the browsers the option to not download a font and if they dont have it, it just doesn't work and uses a default font, same as it does now. So please guys, tell me where this idea is flawed. It almost has to be, otherwise it would have surely been done already.

So we have our first Ask an Emperor question from our reading audience. Lets see how it goes...

I need a simple to use component for query browsing in cf. (you know, the whole next 10, prev 10 thing). Any ideas?

You have heard before I am sure that there is more than one way to skin a cat, and the saying, as disgusting as it may be, rings true here as well. What you are talking about I believe is called query pagination, where you show a certain amount of results on each page. It really isn't difficult no matter how you do it, and its fairly simple to give your users some preferences to set as well. continue reading...

Okay, so the look isn't all that much different, sorry ;) But in following suit with the cf jedi and now the coldfusion muse, I have added a pod to the right there so you can ask the CF Roman Emperor! I have had several people lately ask me to blog more, so that seems like a good way to get fresh content aside from my other postings. So if you have a question you think I might be able to answer, let it fly. Include your name if you want it used, and your email address if you would rather me discuss it with you off list. And I am now finally upgraded to the new blogcfc 4.0. So lets see how this trackback thing works. (if you guys see anything wierd with my layout or colors, let me know)

When you are passing someone on the street and you ask for the time, what do they tell you? Do they say oh, it is 6:47 PM, or do they say quarter till seven? Well thats called fuzzy time and some kde users may recognize it. Well recently I wanted to put something like that in one of my apps, so here is a pretty basic version of a udf called fuzzyTimeFormat(). You can pass in a timestamp or not, if not it will use the current timestamp. continue reading...

This extension has breathed new life into del.icio.us for me. I always liked the site, but man, it was so hard for me to go to the site to add my links. But now, with the del.icio.us firefox extension I can quickly and easily tag whatever page I am looking at. It takes no time, and hardly any effort. I would like to have a link that would tag the entry with all of the recomended tags, but there is always room for improvement. For those of you lurking out there that don't know what del.icio.us is, think of it as a public (although I think it can be private) bookmarking application, that is social, so other people can see your bookmarks. It allows you to tag different sites with keywords, and allows you to see over time what sort of things you are obviously more interested in, as well as other sites you may be interested in by using your tags. check it out, its free, its easy (and the just got bought by yahoo, which is good or bad whichever way you want to look at it...)

I dont usually get into things like this, but I just have to say something in this case. First, go check this site out: http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org/ Basically, they think they are going to file a class action lawsuit against wikipedia because wikipedia apparently contains innacurate information as well as information that defamed them. They state that the trustees of the wikimedia foundation as well as the volunteers do not consider themselves responsible or accountable for the content on wikipedia.org. First a few nitpicky things. The image they use on thier website is a copyrighted image. They have google ads on their website (that really ticks me off). They have some serious grammer mistakes on the page as well. Plus, there are no names mentioned or available that I can find, no examples given except for the one example of the guy who posted some bad information about the jfk assasination. I really wouldn't be surprised if other encycopedias are behind this, or even if microsoft or any other competitors were. Now im no lawyer, so I have no idea if they even have a chance, but I would think they dont. Its free speech. Sure, there is some information that is false on wikipedia. There always will be. Either intentionally or accidentily. But any forum on the web, or email group or comment box on a blog has the potential to contain information that is false and possibly even slander or libel. I mean, how do tabloid newspapers and such get away with it. Should the founders of wikipedia be held liable for it? aboslutely not. Should wikipedia keep information on the people posting information so if they step out of line they can do something about it and hold them liable? I dont think so. Should the offending information be removed? of course. But anyone at any time can do that. Thats the beauty of wikipedia. Regardless if this sites claims are accurate or not, its a shady operation to say the least. The consequences if this thing were to go through and they would win would be disasterous to the web, i know that much. I will definately be watching this as it goes. What do you guys think on the subject? Please let me know in the comments, but please, dont post anything that is going to slander someone else. I surely will not be held responsible!

I had a request today to be able to ping a server or website using coldfusion and extract the importaint information. So I whipped up a small function that allows you to do just that. This function returns a struct full of information, you can decide what you need out of it. It *could* return a little more information, but that is left as an exercise to the reader. Also, I have done the same thing for tracert, and the windows systeminfo command (if you dont know what that is, go to a command line and type systeminfo), but I haven't packaged them up into functions yet. Stay tuned for those. This code has been tested on cfmx 7.0.0, and win2k3 server. Im not sure if this would work on linux or osx or any other system because im not sure how their ping commands work. I have a feeling this wouldn't work on those systems. So without further ado, here is ping(): If you do not pass in the target_name (which can be an ip address or website or computer name) it will use 127.0.0.1. It also has the optional 'options' argument. To see it in action, stick the function on a page and run:

I just put out a new version of qBrowser. New in this release: You can now save your results as csv, tab delimited or xml format. You have the option to open your results in a popup window, which allows you to have multiple resultsets open at the same time for comparisons. A new sql reference page has links to sql reference websites for several dbms. If you have any you want me to add, let me know. Along with many other settings, you can now set a setting in the application.cfm file that will automatically select a certain datasource on load. Also, the application.cfm page as well as the index.cfm page (that does all of the work) are pretty well commented now. Check the application.cfm file to see all of the different settings you have. There are now links above the sql textarea box that will allow you to expand and contract the box based on your needs. It should save your setting when you reload the page. There is a new feature that tells you the current version you are running, and if the server you are running the application on has access to the internet, it will periodically check to see if there is an update for the application available. Added a variable to report execution times for cf 6.1 users. It is slightly inflated because it also includes processing time for the cfinclude, but it is better than nothing... And a few other bug fixes. I recomend anyone already running qbrowser update to this newest version. You can download the app from http://www.ryanguill.com/docs/ As always, let me know if you have any suggestions, bug reports or feature requests.

Alright guys, the time has come. qBrowser now has cfmx 6.1 support, the ability to not pull in all of your datasources, but you specify exactly which ones it has access to, a few new sql restriction possibilities, htmleditformat() has been added to the results view, a couple of bug fixes, and the big one: you can now save the results of your query as a csv file and download it! The bug fixes alone are worthy of an upgrade, so download it here: http://www.ryanguill.com/docs/ If you haven't heard about qBrowser yet, check this post and Ben Forta's Post on it. Thanks, and as always, let me know if you have any problems, suggestions or comments.

I have a beta of a new version of qBrowser that should allow cfmx 6.1 developers to play too. Problem is, I dont have a local development copy of 6.1 to test on. So if you wouldn't mind testing the beta out for me, email me at ryanguill@gmail.com and ill get you a copy of the beta to try out. I am fairly sure that everything works, but I want someone else to verify that before I release it to the wild. Thanks in advance!