Shaun Mccran

My digital playground

01
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U
G
2011

How I got started in ColdFusion

I thought Steve Bryant's idea of encouraging the ColdFusion community to write a blog article about how each of us got started with ColdFusion was genius. Here is a link back to Steve's blog. I'd recommend reading it and seeing just how many of us have chipped in with something.

http://www.bryantwebconsulting.com/blog/index.cfm/2011/7/20/August-1-2011-is-How-I-Started-ColdFusion-Day.

The story of how I got started in ColdFusion is below....

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08
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U
N
2011

Handling Error templates in FW/1

I've been using Framework one for a few smaller scale projects, and during a wrap up session I noticed that I didn't have a global catch-all error page, or any kind of error notification subsystem, like an admin email prompt.

This blog article describes how FW/1 looks for and uses an error handling template.

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04
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N
2011

HostMediaUK site migration complete

I'd been unhappy with my current hosting provider for a while, the performance just wasn't there, and the more I pushed the boundaries of development the more blocks I encountered. Also they were running old versions of ColdFusion and an old JVM which was having an effect on some Java development.

About three months ago I bought a test account with HostmediaUK. I thought I'd venture into Linux based ColdFusion 9 hosting and see how it worked out. I dropped a few test sites onto the platform and discovered a few migration issues around Linux, obvious things to me now, but case sensitive database table names and a totally different file directory system caused me major headaches.

That being said the server performance is great. sites respond well to requests, is easy to manage through the software layer installed on the servers, and when I requested access to the DNS settings it was freely given (albeit with the usual 'here be dragons' warning!).

The customer service is great too, they keep winning awards and I can see why. I've just finished migrating the rest of my site to their platform, it is rare that I recommend a service but I'd point anyone in the direction of HostmediaUK.

19
M
A
Y
2011

JQuery datatable with added FancyBox and auto refresh

Recently I've had a few questions about how to use the datatables plugin to display data, and also integrate a pop up or lightbox function. The pop up would have an edit form in it, and when the user completes the edit the light box goes away and the datatable refreshes.

This is relatively straightforward to do, but there are several key concepts to getting everything working correctly, so I've broken it down into a few chunks.

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