The Honey House Buzz - browsers

"Button" tag vs. input type='button'

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:40:00 -0600

Although the tag has been around W3C for a while, Dreamweaver still creates buttons as "form buttons".

The form input button creates generic browser buttons, and can be customized using css. However, an easier way to manage the styling of buttons on your site is to use the "button" tag.

This allows a developer to create and use push buttons outside of FORMS in a manner that is better suited for site styling and flexibility.

Help for Businesses on a Budget! AikenBuzz.com Now Oline

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:37:00 -0600

In order to meet the every growing needs of individual professionals and home-owned businesses in the Aiken area, HHWD has released a new site geared just for small entrepreneurs or the business just getting started online. For a single price of $200, we will provide you with a one page ad on AikenBuzz.com that features

Your Business' search terms
Your photos and content
Your busines hours and contact information
Search Engine optimization customized for your and your business

AND... renewals are only $50 annually! This is perfect for single professionals such as hairstylists, real estate agents, home-based businesses, doctors, and more! Visit AikenBuzz.com and Call Us Today at 803-648-8556 to get your ad!

Quick & Dirty Tricks -- Using CFDUMP inside CFC -- Viewing All Methods, Pt. 2

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:24:00 -0600

In the second part of CFDump Q&D tricks, you can view the entire methods and settings for a CFC, just like you would see in the 'Live Data View' from inside Dreamweaver. Placing in a CFC outside a function, but inside the tags starts the setup and produces a runtime dump that looks like this: Clicking on the linked 'component' in that dump will open up the Live data View (note, you'll need administrator privileges to view the methods). And, in keeping with Adobe's color coding, CFC Dumps are red :).

Quick & Dirty -- Using CFDUMP To View CFC Functions

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:06:00 -0600

CFDUMP is a quick way to see the contents of variables, structures, arrays, even queries. But it can also be used to quickly see at runtime the parameters and setup of a called CFC Function. If a is placed inside a CFC Function, then at runtime, the dump generated shows the user quick information regarding the function itself. Side Note: Adobe color codes cfdumps (if not overridden by CSS settings). variable and structure dumps are blue, arrays green, queries purple-ish, CFC Methods are red,and CFC functions are brown. Nice tough to pick out types of dumps.

Browser Statistics & Monitor Sizes

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:46:00 -0600

HHWD had their annual meeting last week. One issue is the continued development of sites that were cross-browser compatible with IE6, IE7, FireFox, Safari, and Opera. We don't maintains compatibility with Mozilla as most of our Mozilla/Netscape users migrated to FF. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp W3Schools.com maintains a statistical chart of browsers and monitor sizes and is quite useful to determine just what percentage of the population is actually USING a browser. As of April 2008, these are as follows: IE7 24.9% IE6 28.9% IE5 1.0% FF 39.1% Moz 1.0% Safari 2.2% Opera 1.4% Since most of the clients in our geographic region still use IE6, we tend to code to IE6 and tweak sites to fit FF/IE7. When IE6 drops to less than 25% of users, we plan to update our methodology to code to FF and tweak to IE6. We will also be dropping Opera as a browser compatibility standard due to its low percentage. It is statistically insignificant. It is refreshing to see FF steadily gain market share against IE and HHWD has been encouraging clients to consider it as a browser of choice.

Rating Your Site

Tue, 06 May 2008 14:03:00 -0600

Having Finished several recent projects ranging from relationship to politics to retail sales, I found the broad spectrum of categories warranted a review of my standard project meta tags. HHWD has always used the 'rating' meta tag 'Safe for Kids' in keeping with our policy of family friendly sites. But.. after a number of years, just WHAT is the way the Internet rates websites? One resource is the Family Online Safety Institute. It provides resources for families, parents, and web designers for rating websites and content. It brings to attention a variety of risk factors for websites, sex, violence, dangerous behaviors and such. The site has the ability to rate your web project and provides links/images/ratings for it. As a developer, I found it quite interesting to read through the site and rank a few projects. As a mom, even of teens, I was pleased to see an organization as much a 'wet-blanket' as I am :)

CF8 Installation throws "JNDI listen port in jndi.properties blocked by TCP/IP filtering" Error

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:17:00 -0600

I have two CF installations running on separate servers, CFMX7 on my 'production' development server and CF8 running on a secondary server I set up at the end of beta testing last summer. I was ready to make my primary server now CF8 as most of my new projects are developed in it. Installing CF8 on the secondary server went flawlessly (except for forgetting uninstall Scorpio first). Prior installations of Coldfusion on my dev server also always occurred flawlessly. So, why then, when I attempted to install CF8 did I get a "JNDI listen port in jndi.properties blocked by TCP/IP filtering " error? What is the dickens was that? Java-ish in nature, I knew I was about to enter the netherworld of java... (Sidenote, I would LOVE to take a few weeks off to learn the internals of CF, Java, RIA, FLEX, etc... but my project load is SO great, and coldfusion is SO good, I simply haven't had time. These are on my list of 100 things to do before I die) I uninstalled CF8 figuring that was the issue and reinstalled 7... NOPE now CF7 throws the same error... grrr. Checked the TCPIP of newly installed NIC card... oops, IP doesn't match IIS, so corrected.... but error remains (suspect this is root of problem) I had just installed a new lan card, but for the love of mustard couldn't see why that would cause my Coldfusion to fail. But that indeed was the culprit. Looking at Russ Michaels blog, who had a running client with the same issue in 2006, I ran netstat -an to see what was listening (Thanks Russ... I would have never thought of that). Indeed there was not port 2930 listening on my netstat listing as is set up in \runtime\servers\coldfusion\SERVER-INF\jrun.xml. so I looked at the server config and sure enough, my new card's IP was 192.xxx.xxx.4 instead of the 192.xxx.xxx.3 used in the IIS server setup. I corrected the card's IP address and could not get the system to look and listening (voila-- reboot). Upon reboot, another netstat command shows that the tcpip port 2930 is now listening and the server will configure as it should. I could have updated the jrun.xml to another port that was listening, but this was more elegant, and I now have it set to what it was before.

Quick & Dirty Tricks -- Dynamic CSS

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 09:08:00 -0600

Ever have site that needs CSS to be similar yet different based on user input? Take HHWD's main site. We use different colors for different type of categories for our site. Instead of creating multiple DW templates, we can use ColdFusion to set the id or class tag dynamically to determine the format, color, etc for our site. We can even use CF to determine the site settings based on browser. To do this, set your tag to be a CF variable



   blah blah code goes here

where category is a variable previously set. In your CSS file, you can different IDs, classes, and so on that would be called. You can even use different CSS files based on variables. Quick And Dirty, but effective!

Creating a Dynamic Slide Show Using P7 & Coldfusion

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 02:00:00 -0600

Ever like the Project Seven Slide Show magic but want to use the functionality of Coldfusion to fill in the thumbnails and images? Well, ok... lets do it. Open your page to place slide show in and create the basic slide show, filling in a default directory and selecting an image. This creates directories and code populates the default SSM code on your page. Once this is created, you can go back in and edit it to fill images in from a query. Interestingly, you only need to update the

area with the query output to have the updates reflected both in the thumbnails and the larger images. With respect to P7's code, I won't be cutting/pasting the entire SMM code here, but will only show snippets of strategic locations for place your outputed query. Once the SMM code is built, find the p7ssm_thumb_section div. Looping through your query/array/list with

tag will update your thumbnails.

To update the starting image from the 'default' one you used when you set up SMM, go down a tad further in the code, and edit the p7ssm_fsimg div.

See an example of this here: Click on a Dog to see SMM
This is a site in development due to be rolled out to production soon. As such, the FireFox formatting is still wonky as the client site is validated against IE6 first, and is still being adjusted for more modern browsers.

Beware Maintaining Balances continued....

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:59:00 -0600

A few weeks ago I discussed the issue between Coldfusion's ability to separate sessions among different types of browsers and sessions. Well, with further testing, the same scenario can also occur with CLIENT variables. The issue being that a user on a single computer, using two different types of browsers, IE and FF, or FF, and Opera... will be given two different session IDs. Maintaining and relying client balance in session IDs will not sync the balance between the two sessions. If the balance is stored in a client variable as well, the same scenario can occur. While it may not be an issue of the browser per se, I have run into situations where the client ID between two different types of browsers did not match. Any any activity on one did not get reflected to the other. So Beware.....

Beware maintaining Customer Balance Information in Coldfusion's Traditional Sessions

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:54:00 -0600

If you are working with logged in users, Coldfusion has an excellent method of maintaining client information in session variables. Typically, However, beware of session independence between different types of browsers when using traditional ColdFusion session variables (CFID & CFSESSION). When a session variable is updated in one browser, it is not automatically in other browsers. While not a big deal if the variable doesn't change much, such as the user's email or name, or even ID number. On the other hand, if the variable contains information that would be business critical or updated frequently, such as account balances, or time logged, using CF 'vanilla' session variables (where the session ID are determined by CF administrator) may not be the proper place to store the information to be relied upon. If a user uses two computers both logged in at the same time, or two different user log in with the same account information simultaneously, we already realize that frequently updated information may lag and not reflect actual values due to activity in the different sessions updating the session variables without regard to the other session. This same phenomena occurs [More]

AOL Nightmares?

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:03:00 -0600

October 2007: More and more I am receving phone calls... Seems most of these users are using AOL to email their attachments, photos, etc and the are not coming through. Nope, they are not in my junk filter. It appears as if AOL, in addition a history to blocking emails TO AOL users is also blocking outgoing emails, especially those with attachments. Duh, we've all known that for some time. But what can we DO about it? Quit using AOL. Period. Nada. End of Discussion. This is an issue that is so prevalent, that HHWD is considering no longer accepting the use of AOL emais from clients or use on projects. So, to the AOL lovers out there, Here is my question to consider: "At what point is your business WORTH using a service that 1) Monitors your activity for their purposes (Read their EULA, then check out CastleCops info on it) 2) Determines which of your emails THEY allow to come to you (and which of your emails GO OUT to others) 3) Uses AOL.com instead of your own business's name in every single communication you send out ?????

Getting CFMX Custom CFC to Run on goDaddy

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 08:04:00 -0600

I have a client who wanted to keep their current goDaddy hosting for a site redesign project. The site was updated in CFMX7 and used CFC cfobjects throughout. After the site was completed, we realized that goDaddy's shared hosting disables the function of any customized CFObjects. However, goDaddy does not seem to restrict CFINVOKE. A quick search of all 'cfobject' or 'Createobject' tags throughout the site was done. All the createobjects and cfobjects were removed, and all related cfc functions calls were updated to CFINVOKE commands. And voila-- it works. You can see the site here: ERLLC