Trent’s Blog

I have to admit, I love programming with cfeclipse and aptana. Together they cover about every area of web programming with coldfusion. But as of late I have been a little let down. I’m not quite sure if its a plugin issue, eclipse issue, or what. Eclipse loves to throw me errors anytime I refresh.

I tried upgrading everything to the new version of eclipse and Aptana clearly states they do not yet support it and I just get cfeclipse errors when trying to open a cfm file. On linux eclipse is dreadfully slow. I bounce a lot from platform to platform, and eclipse is great for that since it runs on most anything, but as of late its been a pain. I hate to break out Dreamweaver again…

I’ve created a little information site in case anyone is looking into the Bucksville Oaks community. Hopefully it will help someone out who is looking for some property in a beautiful location! Here is the Bucksville Oaks site

The new Opera is here with developer tools more cleanly integrated and a new look. Now Developer tools comes up within the window much like firebug! The standard tools that come with Opera are impressing me more and more each release. (I know I know its a Windows screenshot..)

I’ve always been rather fond of Opera Web Browser, but due to being dependent on firefox and firebug I’ve not been able to make a full switch. Times are changing. With the new Opera 9.5 Developer Tools (Dragonfly are supplied as well, and boy are they nice. With many of the same features I rely on in firebug(like mouse over elements, view CSS and see which styles are overwritten) I may be able to make the switch. I definitely recommend giving it a try!

With the new arrival of Open Blue Dragon, we may now have some new server environment combinations. Over at Shad Belcher’s blog he has now declared(christened as far as I’m aware) MAPO (Mac, Apache, Postgres, Open Blue Dragon). As big of a ColdFusion fan as I am I can’t wait to see the success of OBD. So what will it be called on Ubuntu.. UAPO? I guess in that case it would go back to linux, LAPO.

I just thought I’d share that one of my common design tools is ColorPix which does nothing more than give the hex and rgb colors for whatever your mouse is currently hovering over.  There are other similar tools out there, but about a year ago I got attached to it on my Windows machine at work, and felt lost at home on Ubuntu without it.  Well just so happens it works like a champ with Wine!  The download is the .exe file so all you need to do is wine that sucker up!

While constantly doing websites I find myself always needing to work from the root web address. The problem is there is only one localhost. Well we can always create subdomains off of localhost in Ubuntu and Apache very easily(I’m sure other linux distro’s are very similar to do as well) I will walk you through it but there is also another tutorial on ubuntuforums.org.

First we need to add our domain to our hosts in Ubuntu. Todo so go to System -> Administration -> Network. Then click on the Hosts tab. Click the localhost entry and Properties. On a new line add your new aliases(subdomains).

Now on to Apache. We need to open up our httpd.conf file and add an entry for the new virtual host( sudo gedit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf )

Finally we should restart Apache and visit our new domain. Make sure the directory exists where you point your subdomain as well. To restart apache: sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

I always hated writing big queries in php by concatenating strings. Its very ugly and can get hard to follow with quotes and double quotes. Heredoc to the rescue. If you’re unfamiliar with heredoc, its basically a syntax with php (and some other perl based languages) to type blocks of text without having to escape characters. This can also be useful when writting our big multi join/union/where/group/having/order by query. Here’s how:

$sql=<<<EOD
select *
from pages
where pagename='$pn'
EOD;

You have to be very cautious though with spacing. Heredoc does not like spaces on the lines with the opening and closing identifiers (EOD in this case), however everything in between can be spaced to suit your fancy. Give it a shot!

I finally put together my own little gig for web development, TownNetWorks.com.  I will be available for small to medium size websites.  If you or anyone you know is interested please contact me via the contact for on that site.  I would take on larger sites, but this isn’t my 8-5 job, more like my 7-12+ job.  I look forward to hearing from you!

We’ve been waiting on this for quite some time.  Skype for linux is now available with video! Check it out!