Longview, Texas Web Design, ColdFusion, PHP and SEO Blog

New Blog Location

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:32:00 -0500

This blog is now used for archive purposes only. The new/current blog can be found here:

http://www.design903.com/index.cfm/texas-web-design-blog/

Launched New Site for HeartsWay Hospice

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:53:00 -0500

Design903 re-designed the HeartsWay Hospice website to give the site a more modern look and feel and improve usability. The HeartsWay Hospice is deployed on the Mura CMS to give HeartsWay full control of publising their content.

HeartsWay Hospice has been in business for 25 years. They are Longview's first hospice and its most trusted.

View site: www.heartswayhospice.org

[More]

Launched New Site for Skincart

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:02:00 -0500

Design903 re-designed the skincart website and moved it over to a new, robust e-commerce shopping cart platform.

Skincart offers custom products like skincare and vitamins. Also soon to come, they will offer a wide variety of products about healthy living and skincare.

View site: www.skincart.com

[More]

Google Fiber for Longview

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:37:00 -0500

Nominate Longview, Texas as a trial location for Google Fiber Network. Visit chooselongviewforgooglefiber.com for more information.

Favorite E-Commerce Package

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:36:00 -0500

What is your favorite e-commerce software package and why? I have several different packages I use depending on the requirements of the project.

FCKEditor Controls Missing in ColdFusion

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:47:00 -0500

I have used FCKEditor for WYSIWYG for many of the custom ColdFusion applications I have built. Recently the FCKEditor stopped rendering and the code was just rendering a normal textarea. [More]

Deleting all files in a directory with ColdFusion

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:37:00 -0500

This not something I have to do very often so I tend to forget how to do it although it is very easy. I have a folder that is holding temp files that get written by a data export. I need to go through and clean out these files on a daily basis.

I needed code to read a directory, loop through all files and delete them. This is a simple task with CFDirectory and CFFile. [More]

Coldfusion 9 - cfspreadsheet tag

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:32:00 -0500

In the past when I needed to create a data export and dump it to a csv/xls file, I would create a file then loop through the query and append each line of data. This was not a hard task and did not take too many lines of code.

However, with ColdFusion 9 this task can be done with one line of code using the cfspreadsheet tag. [More]

Launched New Site for 3D Security

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:31:00 -0500

We just launched a new site for 3D Security in Henderson, Texas. They are East Texas leader in high end security systems: http://www.3dmaxsecurity.com.

We built this new site with SEO as a top priority. They are looking to drive more traffic to their website for potential customers in East Texas. [More]

Select a Tab in CF8 +

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:14:00 -0500

Today I needed to select a tab that was created using the built-in ColdFusion tabs with cflayout. I had never had this request before but found a quick and easy solution. The ColdFusion.Layout.selectTab function made short work of it.
Click Here Replace tablayoutname name with the name of your cflayout and replace tabname with the name for your cflayoutarea.

When the link is clicked, it selects the tab and displays it's contents.

It is a very simple but useful function.

Mura Timeout Issue Fixed

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:15:00 -0500

In the past when I installed a new Mura CMS site, I would get a timeout error trying to load the admin. I recently upgraded my server to CF 9 and a newer version of the JVM. Since upgrading the CF and JVM, I am no longer having the timeout issue. Old Setup:
CF: 8,0,1,195765
JVM: 1.6.0_04
New Setup:
CF: 9,0,0,251028
JVM: 1.6.0_14
Server is Windows 2003. See this thread for more info on the issues:
http://www.getmura.com/forum/messages.cfm?threadid=E29AFC2E-1307-4CE1-8AD3F64777FD8F79

Adding reCaptcha to ColdFusion Site

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:31:00 -0500

Thanks to Rocketbooks for the great tag for integrating reCaptcha into a ColdFusion site.
The tag makes it very easy to integrate with just a few lines of code.

More info on the project:
http://recaptcha.riaforge.org/

More info on the other RocketBooks projects:
http://www.rocketboots.com.au/site/index.cfm/page/osprojects

Sample integration Code:

ColdFusion 9 Migration Issues

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 11:24:00 -0500

Here is more details on the issues encountered when migrating from ColdFusion 8 to ColdFusion 9 on a Windows2003 VPS server:
"The 1st attempt the install failed completely at the end and broke both CF9 and CF8. I uninstalled CF9 and rebooted, CF8 was working again.

2nd attempt the install completed, but the settings migration failed. I had to follow this Adobe KB:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/527/cpsid_52797.html

After that, the migration completed fine."

My hosting company did a great job working out these issues.

Now Powered by ColdFusion 9

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 11:11:00 -0500

My ColdFusion VPS that runs www.Design903.com and multiple other sites is now upgraded to ColdFusion 9.

My hosting company took care of the upgrade so I did not deal with any of the technical issues of the upgrade. They did say they ran into a few small issues but got everything resolved.

The only issue I had was with a site using the ColdBox framework with Transfer 1.1. That version of Transfer is not compatible with ColdFusion 9. I just downloaded the bleeding edge version from their Subversion and replaced the Transfer folder and was back in business.

Other than the small issue with Transfer everything went smoothly on my end. I will report more when I hear what issues the hosting company ran into on the upgrade.

Everything seems to be running well right now and I am anxious to see if that continues.

ColdFusion serializeJson issues

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:17:00 -0500

Today I was using serializeJson to pass a query object back to a form via jQuery.
I ran into two different issues:
1. serializeJson automatically converted a value of "yes" to "true" and "no" to "false". This was causing issues as I need the "yes" or "no" not "true" or "false".
2. serializeJson automatically stripped out a leading zero from a string. Ex: "02" became "2".

The only solution I could find was to add a leading space in these strings. Ex: For Number 1, I changed the string to: " yes" and for number 2 I changed the string to " 02".
I didn't really like this solution because I then had to strip out the spaces on the front end.
However, jQuery made this simple with the jQuery.trim function. Ex:


$('#user_custom_1').val(jQuery.trim(user_custom_1));

Anybody know of any other solution?