Just passing it on...

Job Opening for Sr. ColdFusion Developer in CA/ San Fernando Valley Position:

• Senior ColdFusion Developer
• Contract to hire.
• Seeking an advanced-level developer who lives to push ColdFusion and Object-Oriented Web development to the edge.

Job Description

• Sr. Web Developer / Architect to drive the direction of the company's technology solutions, define and implement best practices and build lean, powerful and extensible functionality.
• Work closely with Business/Systems Analysts, Database Administrators, and Stakeholders to architect, design, and implement robust and user friendly insurance business applications.

More info at his blog post: Job Opening for Sr. ColdFusion Developer in CA/ San Fernando Valley

Yesterday I posted an example of highlight/fadeout effects done with jQuery. It wasn't necessarily that exciting, but it's not something I've done before so it was fun to build. Fellow evangelist (and my boss, so yeah, his comments get special attention) Kevin Hoyt commented that what I had achieved would be possible with CSS and transitions.

Yesterday I blogged a simple example of how to turn an RSS feed into a tag cloud. Today reader JP commented that it would be cool if I could mimic an effect he saw in a Flash based tag cloud. Basically, as you mouse over each word, they light up. Here's what I came up with.

Earlier today Mike Henke asked if there was a way to generate a tag cloud from an RSS feed. While he was able to find a solution quick enough (Wordle), I thought it would be kind of fun to try this myself. I knew that Pete Freitag had already blogged on tag clouds and ColdFusion, so all I had to do was generate my word data and pass it to his code. Here's what I came up with.

As a gentle reminder, don't forget the excellent resource that is the Adobe Cookbook, including over 200 ColdFusion Cookbook entries. Looks like it has been a while since content was added, so take this as a gentle push to yall to consider adding something.

RIACon 2012 will be held August 6th and 7th in beautiful Rockville, MD at The Legacy Hotel and Conference Centre. The official call for speakers will begin next week, but for more information, check out the web site: http://www.riacon.com. I missed last year but hope to speak at this years conference!

I came across something interesting in a tablet app today and I thought it was a great example of bad design. I hate to go critical, especially for a service I love, and especially since I'm no expert in tablet design myself, but I thought it would be a good illustration and a good discussion here.

Thanks for this goes to Paul Irish. For a while now I've been trying to find a way to search for a value across multiple files that are loaded in a browser request. But every time I used the Search field in Chrome Dev tools, it would only search the current file. I'm talking about the highlighted search field below:

Yes - I know - my MSPaint skills suck. ;) As I said, that only searches the current file. If there are a bunch of JavaScript files in one request, you're screwed unless you feel like manually switching from one to another.

But it turns out there's another search form you can open with ctrl-shift-f (cmd-opt-f on OSX):

Not only will it search across all files (not just JavaScript), it supports case sensitivity and regex based searches as well.

Anyway - thanks again to Paul for sharing the tip and I hope it helps others.

Validating forms with JavaScript has been possible since the very beginning of time... or at least the introduction of LiveScript (the original name before the marketing drones got ahold of it). While it's not particular new or as exciting as Canvas based games, JavaScript form validation is one of the best uses of the language (imo) and something that can dramatically improve your user's experience. I recently had a reader ask how to do JavaScript form validation so I thought it might be nice to write up a simple tutorial. This is not meant to cover every possible way, of course, and will be a very manual approach (no frameworks or plugins!) to the problem. As always, I welcome folks comments and suggestions below.

I've done a few projects now that make use of PhoneGap's database support. Like most things in PhoneGap, it just plain works. But I've encountered a few things I thought could be done a bit easier, so I've built a simple utility class for my future projects. I thought I'd share it with folks and see if it would be useful for others.