I went to Wal-Mart the other day to pickup a card for my wife (mother's day coming up). When I entered the building I noticed they added a new Dunkin Donuts. That makes 3 Dunkin Donuts within two blocks (on the same road). You can count a 4th if you go down an extra 1/4 of a mile down the road. I know this is common in many cities (I've seen 4 Starbucks on four corners), but I live in a semi-rural area.

So how many do we actually need? This just goes to show that we as a society (including myself) cannot go about our daily lives without relieving our daily caffeine addictions. Man I love coffee. Just thinking about it (even this late in the evening) makes me want a cup. Time for some decaf :).

Apparently I was a little lucky today. I won a ticket to CFUNITED. Read more about it on their website.

I purchased a ticket a while back, so hopefully I'll get reimbursed for that :). I am still looking for someone to room with me and split the cost (Don’t worry; I booked a room with two beds). The hotel is already booked, so if someone wants to split the cost with me drop me a line.

On a recent site I worked on (www.middlesexhospital.org) one of the requirements was to take the body from dynamic content pages and make an unordered list of anchored links pointing to the <h*> heading tags on the page.

Most copywriters today write correctly using headings (and nested headings).
(Click on the example image to the left).

<h1 id="Heading-1a">Heading 1a</h1>
<p>Some paragraph text.</p>
<h2 id="Heading-2a">Heading 2a</h2>
<p>Some paragraph text.</p>
<h2 id="Heading-2b">Heading 2b</h2>
<p>Some paragraph text.</p>
<h3 id="Heading-3a">Heading 3a</h3>
<p>Some paragraph text.</p>

Referencing the id attributes for the <h*> heading tags you can now provide anchored bookmark links pointing to them in an unordered list (apply styles as needed).
(Click on the example image to the right)

<ul title="Page navigation tree">

<li><a href="#Heading-1a">Heading 1a

  <ul>

    <li><a href="#Heading-2a">Heading 2a</a></li>

    <li><a href="#Heading-2b">Heading 2b</a>

      <ul>

        <li><a href="#Heading-3a">Heading 3a</a></li>

      </ul>

    </li>

  </ul>

</li>
</ul>

So given the body, how do we create the unordered list dynamically? Also, I don't want to make my users have to know how to set id attributes in <h*> heading tags (especially if they are using a WYSIWYG editor such as FCKEditor or htmlArea to edit their content).

Read more in this tutorial.

Firefox 1.0.3 was released. This release was to address some security issues that have come up recently. If you haven't already gotten it go to www.mozilla.org and download one in your language and OS type.

When I saw the site yagoohoogle.com last week I got a good chuckle (note: His router goes down at times). Then last night a friend forwarded me a link to gizoogle.com and I couldn't help but bust out laughing. I wonder how much time people actually spend on writing these things.

By the way, if you're a PSP fan like myself you might get a kick out of this photo.

I don't know about you but since Firefox came out in beta I haven't been able to be without my preferential list of extensions and add-ons. Well, now you don't have to be. Introducing Portable Firefox.

Okay. That sounded like some cheesy salesman approach (sorry about that :)). This thing is pretty cool. So far I've only tried one or two of my extensions, but they seem to work fine.

Now you can put your own copy of Firefox on a USB key and run it from anywhere.

"It will also work from a CDRW drive (in packet mode), ZIP drives, external hard drives, some MP3 players, flash RAM cards and more"

I've been trying to decide for the last few months whether or not to go to this year's CFUNITED conference and I finally gave in to my temptations.

I don't mind driving down there (should only be half a day's drive) however this can get pricy, fast (gas, hotel, admission, etc). So I'm planning to ask around the Hartford area (probably at the next Hartford CFUG meeting) to see if anyone is interested in carpooling and/or sharing a suite or something.

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Lately I've been doing my best to use coldFusion's Evalaute() function less and less (due to all of it's performance issues). I have only found one case so far where I haven't gotten away from using it (and I'm pretty sure that there is a way around taht as well).

A friend recently noted that I was setting dynamic variable names using the Evaluate() function. He noted that I should be using the setVariables() function instead (because its faster). Sounded good to me at the time.

Today I discovered that as of CFMX this function is "no longer required in well-formed ColdFusion pages" (I'd almost venture to say Deprecated, but the CFMX docs didn't say that). You can read more about it on the Macromedia Live Docs.

So what do you replace it with? Believe it or not you can just set the new variable name using quotes.

Not only is this much faster, but it is much easier to read when we start getting into more complex algorythms on the right-hand side of the set statement.

It’s official now. The new website for Middlesex Hospital has been a big success. Requests have been pouring in for more features and enhancements (enough to keep me busy for some time). Other clients of mine have seen this release and are aware of some of its great features and have already shown some interest in a Farcry-based website (don't worry, my current projects come first :) ).

There are so many people I'd like to thank. In particular I'd like to thank Spike Milligan. Although this project has been in the works for over seven months, we flew Spike in to help out during the last two weeks. After what seemed like endless hours and sleepless nights we were able to get the product production-ready.

Spike and I were working at my home during the weekends (my wife's cooking is better than hospital food any day :)).

Thanks again Spike for your hard work and dedication. We wouldn't have been able to get those remaining CF code portions done in time without you.

Now that I've been able to catch up on a little sleep I've been able to take a step back and breathe a little (seriously, I was working 18+ hour days the last 6-8 weeks. I ran my body down so much that I'm sicker than you can imagine. I'll heal though :)).

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