It appears that the character entity ' is not a valid HTML entity. It was just XML, and thus XHTML.

If you are using a browser that doesn't support XHTML then you probably shouldn't use it, as it will appear as a normal text string. I found this whilst testing something in IE 8, as that is not XHTML compliant.

So just use the ' character, or if you really feel that you have to escape it use:

'

Just be careful with that one, as it will cause coldFusion to flip out. Then you may need to escape your escape characters, and then where will you be?

My latest Google maps lookup template was not working in Firefox 3.n. It was working fine in IE 8 (and 8) so I thought maybe IE was compensating for some shaky JavaScript code, and 'working out' what I was trying to do and fixing it for me.

After spending half an hour painstaking going through my Google JavaScript and removing everything out of my FuseBox framework, just in case anything was mysteriously interfering, I was at a dead end.

A quick flick around online and it seems that there is a setting in FireFox that blocks this sort of functionality.

1. Type 'about:config' (without quotes) in the browser's address bar.
2. Type 'image' (without quotes) in the 'Filter' field.
3. Verify that 'dom.disable_image_src_set' is set to FALSE.
4. Verify that 'permissions.default.image' is set to 0 (the default setting).

For some reason in my FireFox installation the 'permissions.default.image' was set to 1, which blocks the function return from Google.

Google has a tech note on it here:

http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=18529&topic=10789

It is really frustrating when 'controls' are set outside of the development environment. Now to put all my code back!

One piece of recently functionality to a site I'm writing is the ability to look up places on a Google powered map.

There are a variety of ways to insert a Google map into your site, but the first real hurdle is the lookup code.

Google does not use an address to position its map, it uses the Latitude and Longitude co-ordinates to place the map area around the desired location.

Google has pretty extensive documentation around this here:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/index.html

Rather than translate the locations on the fly on a per-hit basis I thought I would perform the lookup when the record is submitted to the database, that way I can cut down the number of google hits, and just reference the local data. Google also prefers this method, as it is less process intensive on their end of things.

First you need an API key:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

This application already has methods for setting the data in a table, so I am simply going to call another packaged method to calculate the latitude and longitude, and store them in the table with the other data.

As you can see from above, I am simply creating a text string URL, and using cfhttp to GET the result from http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?

The screenshot below show the returned responses, and the http status code.

The result is parsed into a struct and returned to the parent function to be stored. Far less overhead than doing this for every map call.

Please note that this is far more heavily commented for Blog purposes. Now to actually call the service using the lat and long variables stored, but thats another article.