Dan Mackey On ColdFusion Development

CFOrgChart : Download Available

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 05:52:00 GMT

Just a quick post as I havent posted in ages due to the considerable committments from Teamwork Project Manager My CFOrgChart demo has gained a huge amount of interest from people and I have unexpectedly been flooded with requests for the code so here it is ;-) DOWNLOAD ZIP FILE I'll be updating this soon to: Use Prototype.js for the AJAX Use functions instead of Custom Tags for the recurrsion Add more functionality .....[READ MORE »]

3G iPhone Push Technology may be the answer to apps running in background

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:19:00 GMT

I upgraded to an iPhone 3G recently and love it. I am doing this one legally and have not Jailbroken it so I dont have all the cool 3rd party apps from Installer App. The main app I miss is an IM service app. I used to use Fring but now can't so I was delighted when I found Palringo. Very nice app but due to the restrictions on iphone apps, it cant run in the background. This morning, a new chat app called MobileChat from Twenty08 was released which promises support built in for Appl.....[READ MORE »]

FeedDemon is now free. I'm happy and dismayed at the same time

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 09:50:00 GMT

I was checking my RSS feeds (using a paid version of FeedDemon) and noticed on Nick Bradbury's blog that FeedDemon (and all newsGators non-enterprise RSS products) are being released free. While I appreciate why they are doing it, something inside me felt disappointed. Why? Cause I paid for quality software and feel like our exclusive little club is letting in free members ha ha Its hard to explain, maybe I am just paranoid. Along with HomeSite (originally from Nick also), FeedDemon is one.....[READ MORE »]

Silverlight Vs Flex - Good article from a developers point of view

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 04:08:00 GMT

I found a very interesting article today on a subject that is of particular interest to me at the moment. I am in the need of a good gantt chart component (for integration with www.teamworkpm.net) and after searching high and low, have come to the conclusion that it may be worth building one myself. The nature of the component means that AJAX is out (I want it to be extremely functional and fast) My problem is that I am not very good at flash. I tried Flex Builder 3 but I have a whole load of e.....[READ MORE »]

Allow people to IM you from your blog - no software required!

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 12:36:00 GMT

As I have posted before, Live Support is something that interests me greatly and I have been constantly on the look out for a good solution. A new addition to the Windows Live Messenger family of products is the Windows Live Messenger Control for blogs and websites. It allows anybody to contact you directly from your blog and you receive the message in your standard Windows Live Messenger client. You can dictate if only registered WLM users or annonymous visitors can contact you and there.....[READ MORE »]

Impressive Adobe AIR Application - Google Analytics Suite

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 05:41:00 GMT

Once again I have been impressed by AIR - Adobe Integrated Runtime. I can see massive advantages of an app environment like this even if I have some requirements that are not available. Anyway, we use Google Analytics for client projects and our own websites and I always found the interface a little bit confusing. The left hand menu was structured Marketing, Developer etc and I had no idea where anything was. The AIR Application Google Analytics Suite solves this problem by.....[READ MORE »]

ColdFusion Powered Teamwork Project Manager Released

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 09:42:00 GMT

We got there! After a gruelling few days hard work and an extremely long day yesterday, Topper and myself finally hit our launch milestone and Teamwork Project Manager went live Already the feedback has been excellent and a roadmap of features will be defined and uploaded today sometime. People really really like the UI and the Teamwork PM approach to Project Management Some of the features I cant wait for myself, such as: Project Notebooks - Like a mini version comparing word process.....[READ MORE »]

Very impressive and affordable live support application

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:56:00 GMT

We all have pet applications. The apps that interest us so much as programmers, users and benefiters that we want to write our own. Its that ingrained thinking of a programming mind that you want to write your own version. My pet application is a live support type application written in ColdFusion and a .NET C# Desktop Operator Console with popup notifications. I have had various incarnations of such a beast over the years and actually had one running that I developed for CFTagStore.com. I have.....[READ MORE »]

Pandoras Box Running In Ireland Again!

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 11:14:00 GMT

Its been a while looking at Pandoras Box seeing as access to Ireland (and Europe) was cut off. I have got a shed load of emails from people but there was nothing I could do. This really bugged me and I have had to listen to FineTune which while good was never my favourite and the repeats made me want to shoot myself in the head. The player is cool though : Using Adobe AIR. Kudos to the programmer who actually contacted me recently! Now European Pandora fans can get access to the service.....[READ MORE »]

Securing Your RSS Feeds Using Basic HTTP Authentication and ColdFusion

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 05:35:00 GMT

We are working on a project at the moment that requires secure RSS feeds. We need it to be secure in both browsers and Feed readers such as FeedDemon so decided that Basic HTTP Authentication was the best way forward. The snippet of code below demonstrates how to force the user agent (browser/feed reader) to prompt for a username and password which in turn ties into our existing users table without messing around with IIS permissions and users etc <cfset REQUEST.userAuthenticated = false>.....[READ MORE »]

Navicat 8 for MySQL Released

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 04:46:00 GMT

We have just upgraded our copies of the fantastic Navicat 8 in the office from version 7 and first impressions have left me disappointed. The upgrade process was fast and easy and I had it installed and activated within minutes. The most important thing to me and the bit I was looking forward to was the code-completion when writing queries. Sometimes you have so many field names you cant remember the exact name of all of them so the code-completion would be a God send. Its there alright but not.....[READ MORE »]

Setting IIS Maximum Connections To More Than 10

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 10:00:00 GMT

Every project I am working on, I test against 5 different browsers: Safari, Mozilla, IE7, Opera and IE6 on the same machine. Since Safari has entered the browser lineup, I have been receiving an annoying "HTTP 403.9 - Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected" message. To solve this issue, do the following: Download the Administrative Plugin MetaEdit from Microsoft : http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B301386 Install Application (Comes with ol.....[READ MORE »]

Apple Safari 3 PC Version Beta 3

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 12:31:00 GMT

I am so happy today! Last night I found out Safari 3 was released for Public Beta for both Mac and PC. Download Link : http://www.apple.com/safari/download/ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en) AppleWebKit/522.11.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Safari/522.11.3 Finally, after years of waiting, I am able to test my work and products on Safari and by all accounts what you see on PC is what you'll see on a Mac. The browser is XP and Vista compatible and uses the familiar Apple c.....[READ MORE »]

Initial thoughts on Apollo

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Tue, 08 May 2007 12:19:00 GMT

Just back from Edinbourgh and a load of emails and blog comments to catch up on tonight but something that sprung up out of necessity was Adobe Apollo, specifically FineTune Desktop Player. Since Pandora no longer allows access to listeners outside of the US, I was tipped off to another similar service called FineTunes. Its quite different to say the least and I am still getting used to it. I kinda preferred Pandora with the rating and interface but I thought I'd give it a whirl! The.....[READ MORE »]

Pandora Shuts Its Doors To Non-US listeners

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Thu, 03 May 2007 04:45:00 GMT

I was guessing the day would come when I would no longer be able to enjoy www.pandora.com I dont know how this is going to affect development of Pandoras Box but hopefully the service will resume for listeners outside of the US in a couple of months. I dont know what I am going to do for finding new music while programming now :-( More information can be found here : http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/02/pandora-to-shut-out-non-us-users-thursday-evening/ As of 16.45pm GMT I can access the.....[READ MORE »]

Teamwork CMS nearly ready to be launched as a free product

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Over the last 7 years we have been developing and improving our in-house ColdFusion based content management system christened Teamwork CMS. Every website, every application and every tool we develop starts out with a basic Teamwork installation. We have just finished a hugely successful job of implementing plug-ins to the architecture meaning that a website or application can have a specific module (e.g: an imaghe gallery) plugged in and live with in 5 minutes with ZERO programming. Even.....[READ MORE »]

37 Signals Getting Real - A fantastic read

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 09:28:00 GMT

Picked up the book Getting Real from the great and fast Lulu.com this week and devoured it this weekend. What a fantastic read....I only wish it was longer! Everything in the book is worth taking on board, even if you only agree with a fraction of it. Main Points I Learned: Get your stuff out there! A full product with half the features is better than half a product! Forget meetings and planning and worrying about features, go with your instinct, start the programmin.....[READ MORE »]

Handy MySQL - ORDER BY FIELD

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 05:49:00 GMT

Had a slight problem today and found a neat solution. My problem was I wanted to sort properties by status and date added but needed the status to show in a priority fashion. For example, I wanted the order of the property status to be For Sale, For Rent, Sale Agreed and also to sort by date added. I couldnt use ORDER BY propertyStatus, propertyDateAdded because then For Rent would come before For Sale. The solution was to use ORDER BY FIELD Syntax: ORDER BY FIELD(propertyStatus,'For S.....[READ MORE »]

ColdFusion Application Servers

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 11:14:00 GMT

In the early days of our company any dynamic parts of our work were performed using home built C++ CGI executables. We used ISAPI filters and Peter blew me away one day when he wrote a flat-file database in C++. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on where you look at it from) our CGI days came to an end when a CD arrived from some trade show. We had got our hands on some kind of new fangled energy source squashed onto a shiny compact disc called Cold Fusion. At the time I had barely hea.....[READ MORE »]

Annoying IE7 bug with window.opener.document.location

Dan Mackey (dan@cfdan.com) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 02:10:00 GMT

I hate these types of bugs. I have just wasted an hour of my day trying to figure this out. It works in Mozilla as expected and I havent tried IE6 but IE7 threw a strange error. I was trying to check if a certain string was in the url of the window that opened a pop-up. The code I was using that failed was: I tried everything I could think of to try and test and re-check my code etc. I stripped it all back and thought maybe it was to do with string types so did the following: Bingo...it.....[READ MORE »]