I don't know how many times I've tried to explain this phenomena to people in my company, or others who work with/for programmers, but the truths espoused here are so very self-evident to us programmers, but maybe not so much with everyone else. Anyhow, great article and here is a link to it: "Programming is like a dream"

Here's my favorite excerpt:

So, yesterday my company launched it's 6th or 7th incarnation of our website. Here's a link to the first one :) Starting back in 1999 we had this crazy idea to start tracking vehicles on the internet, and now here we are 10 years later and still kickin!

Things have come a long way, the product has matured into a VERY stable platform complete with a tracking API, a newly released AIR Application (interface designed by me), Flex application and a Coldfusion driven reporting system (done by your's truly.)

So go check it out, and if you or someone you know could use vehicle tracking for their company, give 'em my name, and our website http://www.navtrakgps.com

From Adobe's website:

View the Browser Lab Website

(FYI: i was able to login with my Adobe credentials that I use for forums, Alpha stuff, etc)

Some gripes... there is no choice for Chrome, which I realize is new-ish, but come on guys :) Also, no choice for Mobile Browsers? I guess these things will be coming soon enough!

you can hide these blog postings if you'd like... i understand... they are not for you... and would bore me if i were you... facebook has a great feature whereby you can link your blog to your facebook page and draw interested web searchers that way.

conversely, to all of my geek friends, you might want to try adding your blog's rss feed to facebook's "notes" system and see if help's generate traffic!

i know that i have enjoyed a 280% increase on my Google Adsense payouts this month, and i'm looking to get that return to increase even more. why not. we have good knowledge, that new people in the industry want - more and more each day!

good luck, im sure you will be able to figure it out. but if you cannot... here is some information that i found here at SiteProNews "5 ways to Import and Promote your blog on Facebook"

yah, great post, from a site that i found while reading some tweets this morning. thanks ray camden for the point in the direction, this is a cool little explanation of 5 different things you can do with jQuery that used to be cumbersome, if not down right impossible with plain old css.

anyhow, check this post out... cool info.

So I had a problem I had to tackle, and this is one that I've tackled before using various methods, but this one I wanted to tackle a bit differently.

Imagine a text area inside a graphic that would be at the head of a page... kinda like this one (look on the right side, the text inside the white rectangle)

View banner Image here

And then imagine that you want that to appear on this page, but it has to be in the center of the page, it needs to be dynamic (the text on the right side) and you dont feel like making a <DIV> sit on top of the image, with text, and links... how many different ways can this be done, probably 2 or 3. however this time I wanted to harness the power of ColdFusion 8 to do this, this time. Since I know ColdFusion can write text in an image, and I already had the image, why not make the space blank, generate the text and the links from a database call and write those values to variables, then take those variables and write them to the image, and then display the image?

To accomplish this I did the following (First I had created the base Image with no text on the right hand side, just white space. I saved it as a transparent PNG and ColdFusion preserved the transparency!!)

• Read the image into memory imageNew()
• Create strings for each of the text row's
• Create an attribute structure to give size, shape and weight for the font
• Set the drawing color for the color of the text
• Use the imageDrawText() function to write each of the strings to the image at the most correct spot (note that the x/y coords are for the bottom left portion of the text
• Then I simply use the tag to write the image to disk, and the tag to display my newly created dynamic text inside the graphic, exactly where I want.
• I used an image map on the page where you can see it live

[More]

Well, I think so. and I'll tell ya why.
But first, did you know that there were choices in the Coldfusion 8 Server Monitoring portion of the administrator to setup alerts?

Did you know that there were alerts that you could setup to let you know that your server was going into an "Unresponsive" state... and that while it was going to alert you, it would also start the task of killing hung threads all the while preventing new requests from bogging the server down once it gets back on it's feet?

Did you know that you could also watch the memory that is being used by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and if it gets to be too large you can have it do all of the above, plus spurn some garbage collection to boot?!

But that's not it, it gets better :)

You can also, detect that your server is "running slow" ie, too many requests taking too long, and do the all of the above, OOooh and I forgot you can email yourself too, heck you could even setup an sms gateway and send sms messages out to alert you, your team, even maybe the president on his blackberry :)

Anyway, i'd get into more of this here, but Charlie Arehart did a great job of explaining not only this but the entire "ColdFusion 8 server monitoring" series on Adobe.com's Developer Connection in the ColdFusion Developer Center.

Definitely check it out, I hadn't heard of this until tonight and that was a result of needing just the things this amazing feature offers! And with the aforementioned, I believe it would be possible to have a server that never goes down... right?

and im stoked.

finally cf getting some love from the mothership, in a VERY public way. yes, we get plenty of love when they give us great features, but now we will have an IDE made for us Coldfusion Developers.

cool stuff.

im stoked on thermo, i mean Flash Catalyst, and im stoked on a lot of other things here that i am seeing in adobe's stack as well as their plans for the future.

man, it sure looks bright for us!

one major note that i took away from the keynote was this...

C# code making flex applications!

yes... that means, all of your old C# developers can contribute on a team that will include flex developers, thermo designers/developers and wow, everyone can work towards one common goal, a flex or air project, driven by coldfusion, designed in photoshop, whipped up in Flash Catalyst and deployed FAST!

wow.

lots more to mention, but i gotta go to my Adobe Air Bootcamp 3.5 hour hands on lab!!!

nice.

so, im doing a new site for a friend and had to implement a new web 2.0 style (woo hoo yeah woo) lightbox effect. well, after toying around with mooFX, scriptaculous and jquery (by itself), i got really really frustrated. the code seemed to be bloated (as ive read now), the visuals were kinda klunky, and it just was more than i needed... thankfully, the dude who wrote this, thinned things out, and it works like a charm...

so, here we have THICKBOX - a great tool built on jQuery that needs, jquery's latest build, the thickbox.css file, and the thickbox.js file to include. literally, its as simple as this... for the javascript files

and like this... for the .css file

and then for the ajax part of it, and to actually make it work, use this

and in the tag you want to use to activate the lightbox, simply use this:

where the .html file i have could be any file you want to pull into the div that becomes your lightbox! its that easy!!!

im a designer/developer hybrid, not quite a javascript expert, and more of a designer than a developer, except when it comes to ColdFusion, whereby, EVERYONE can be a developer :) hahha, ok, anyway, the implementation is soo darn simple, i can only say, that thanks to jake at rainn for showing me about thickbox, and dan vega who last night told me about jQuery, not only am i implementing thickbox, but im populating the thickbox window with another external html file, using AJAX!

hah! so, me, a lowly designer is using all these cool things, and it couldnt have been any easier to implement.

head on over to the thickbox implementation page, and check it out...

ps. here is my little piece that im doing click on "Update Your Profile" on the left side, just a bit down the page...

(the site isnt done yet, its going to be a cool site overall, and the cause is awesome, so, if when im done the site, you feel like donating to RAINN, go here, and do so. thanks!)