cfsilence - cfsnippets

CFSnippets.org SnipEx Server Back Up

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 21:14:00 -0400

The public SnipEx server at cfsnippets.org is now back online. As suspected it was a stupid error on my part that brought it down and I apologize. Thanks to the user (sorry I forgot your name) who brought this to my attention.

CFSnippets.org SnipEx Server Down

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:12:00 -0400

I wanted to put out a quick message to users of the public SnipEx server at cfsnippets.org to let you know that the server is temporarily down. Unfortunately I don't have access to the server from where I'm at today so I'll have to dig into the issue tonight. I'm sure it's related to some silly changes I made the other night. Many apologies...

Snip-A-Thon Winners

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 09:07:00 -0400

I'm pleased to announce the following winners of Snip-A-Thon 2007:

cozmotrouble
lmajano
dvega
ryanTJ

Per the rules each winner will be contacted individually from 1st to 4th place and will choose one of the prizes. The contest was an amazing success, with well over 500 snippets now residing in our SnipEx repository!! A huge huge thank you again goes out to the sponsors!! Also thanks to Ben Forta who provided two copies of the CF8 WACK!

Snip-A-Thon Ends Tomorrow

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:18:00 -0400

Just a quick reminder that Snip-A-Thon 2007 ends tomorrow night at midnight. If you've been holding on to tons of snippets now is the time to get them in there! You can view the current standings here.

ColdBox Users - Check This Out

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 10:40:00 -0400

I almost forgot to blog this. Last week Luis Majano sent me a massive library of snippets that he's created for users of his ColdBox framework so that I could import them into CFSnippets.org. Check out that library here.

CFSnippets.org - Good News And Bad News

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:01:00 -0400

If you've visited CFSnippets.org or refreshed your SnipEx servers in CFEclipse over the weekend you may have noticed a bit of a difference in the size of the snippet library. The good (great, fantastic, amazing) news is that thanks to user cozmotrouble the library grew from 87 snippets to 544 overnight. The bad news is to all the amazing folks who have participated in the Snip-A-Thon because it looks like first place is pretty much a lock for him right about now. Don't let that discourage you though, there are still some awesome prizes up for grabs!! In case you were wondering, yes, I did do a mass import for him. I'd be glad to do that for anyone else (provided we're not going to add tons of duplicates) so if you have a ton of snippets locally and would care to share please drop me a line. One other thing. I was doing some thinking yesterday (a rare occurrence) and was wondering if anyone would care to obtain a copy of the codebase for CFSnippets.org so they can set up an instance on an intranet. Would anyone be interested? If so let me know.

Real Life Ajax Scroll Paging

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 07:36:00 -0400

You're all probably tired of hearing me blab about this, but the real reason why I decided to revisit my Ajax scroll pagination demo yesterday was because I needed to use this technique on CFSnippets.org. Here is a real life application. Scroll down the list of snippets and once you get to the 10th snippet the next batch will load. This is also the first real world application of cfajaxproxy that I've used. It might not stay like that (I may switch to using Spry.Utils.loadURL) but it's certainly a kick ass tag and was very simple to use. The loading/paging process is a bit slow right now because of my newness to ColdSpring/Model-Glue. My next step is to work on speeding that up. Oh - and the reason I needed to add pagination to the snippet view page will also be coming soon...

Snip-A-Thon 2007 - And The First Winner Is...

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 08:10:00 -0400

This morning I held the first random drawing in Snip-A-Thon 2007 for a copy of the ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit (courtesy of Ben Forta) and the winner is Johann Sonnenberg. Congrats to Johann!! I'll draw for the next WACK winner early to mid November, so if you haven't got an entry in yet hurry up and do so! Current Standings

UserName	Points
dvega	21
ryanTJ	21
mr_nil	13
boyzoid	9
jpsonnenberg	7
ggilbert	7
penny506	7
fuzzyorange	7
rbils	6
cfdvlpr	1
pmarcotte	1

In case you forgot, here is another look at the prizes up for grabs and another thank you to the sponsors!! Prizes

A 5 user license for Savvy Content Manager
A copy of Fusion Reactor
A copy of FusionDebug 2.0 Standard
A one year subscription to Fusion Authority Quarterly Update
Two participants will be chosen at random (one each month) and will receive a copy of the ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit.

This contest could not have happened without the support of the following sponsors: Savvy Content Manager - ColdFusion CMS
Fusion Reactor
Fusion Authority Quarterly Update

So How Do You Use SnipEx Servers?

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 13:17:00 -0400

I've been asked that question several times lately due to the immense popularity of CFSnippets.org and have been meaning to put together a good tutorial showing just how to do it. Then I remembered that it's already been done for me! Check out this tutorial up at the CFEclipse Wiki.

Snip-A-Thon 2007 Current Standings

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:15:00 -0400

Snip-A-Thon 2007 is rolling right along and I'm thrilled to say the contest seems to be pretty successful so far. Through one week we've had 5 active participants who've submitted over 15 new snippets to the site. It's quite an awesome feeling to open your snippet explorer in CFEclipse and see tons of helpful snippets just waiting to make my coding easier!! Here are the current standings:

UserName	Points
dvega	10
boyzoid	9
mr_nil	9
fuzzyorange	7
ryanTJ	7

In case you forgot, here is another look at the prizes up for grabs and another thank you to the sponsors!! Prizes

A 5 user license for Savvy Content Manager
A copy of Fusion Reactor
A copy of FusionDebug 2.0 Standard
A one year subscription to Fusion Authority Quarterly Update
Two participants will be chosen at random (one each month) and will receive a copy of the ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit.

This contest could not have happened without the support of the following sponsors: Savvy Content Manager - ColdFusion CMS
Fusion Reactor
Fusion Authority Quarterly Update

Email Fixed And A Note To Model Glue GMail Users

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 08:07:00 -0400

Last night I fixed my issues with emails being sent from CFSnippets.org. About a week ago, in the haste of my hosting fiasco (which I still need to do a proper blog post about) I quickly realized that I would also need to move my email as I moved my blog. I decided on Gmail for your domain (or Google Apps - or whatever it's called). So I made the switch and made sure my CF administrator pointed to the new SMTP server (as described here). The one problem with doing this was that CFSnippets.org used the Email Actionpack that ships with Model-Glue which does not use the default server mail settings. No problem, I figured I'd just point it at the new server and all would be great. Well, not really. If you look at the Gmail settings page I link to above you'll notice that you must specify 'TLS' and/or 'SSL' when using Gmail's SMTP server - which I had done when configuring CF, but I wasn't sure how I'd handle this at the individual cfmail level. I had a quick chat with my buddy Brian Rinaldi who pointed out that cfmail has a few new attributes as of CF 8 - two of which were exactly what I needed. (For the record, the new attributes are useSSL, useTLS and priority). So after a few mod's to the Email Actionpack, a quick loop over my Undelivr folder to change all the existing queued mails, a copy/paste from Undelivr to Spool and my email is back in business. Thanks for your patience. If you've signed up for CFSnippets.org you should now have your verification email. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience!

Email Issues - CFSnippets.org Users Please Read

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 07:49:00 -0400

Thanks to a quick email from Chris Jordan I realized that any emails being sent from CFSnippets.org in the last few days have not gone out (specifically the registration verfication emails). I do not have access to the server right now, but I'll get this squared away this evening and send those emails out as soon as it's fixed. I see that there are a few unverified (legit) users in the queue so please bear with me. If you've tried to use my contact page to tell me about this, well, those emails wouldn't have gone out either :) so please accept my apologies for this issue.

Announcing Snip-A-Thon 2007 - Win Big Prizes!

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 09:20:00 -0400

I'm thrilled to announce Snip-A-Thon 2007. The purpose of this contest is to encourage snippet submission by our users, increase our registered user base and promote the overall concept and usage of CFSnippets.org. Here is the low down: Contest Rules

Contest runs from October 3rd, 2007 until November 30th, 2007 at 11:59PM EST.
You must be a registered user of CFSnippets.org to participate.
You will receive one 'ticket' for every snippet that you submit to CFSnippets.org within the contest time frame.
You will receive one 'ticket' for every verified blog post that you post which promotes the contest and links directly to this page.
You will receive five 'tickets' for displaying the banner ad shown at the top of this page on your blog/site during the contest (must also link to this page and be verified).
At the end of the contest period the top 'ticket' holders will be declared the winners.
The 4 winners, beginning with the highest number of tickets, will select a prize from the list of prizes below.
Two additional participants will be chosen at random (one each month) and will receive a copy of the ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit.
WACK courtesy of Ben Forta
Important! Blog posts and banner ads must be manually submitted and must be verified by me to receive credit! Please use the manual entry form here by clicking on 'Enter' at the top of the page.

You may point your banner ad on your site here:

Prizes

A 5 user license for Savvy Content Manager
A copy of Fusion Reactor
A copy of FusionDebug 2.0 Standard
A one year subscription to Fusion Authority Quarterly Update
Two participants will be chosen at random (one each month) and will receive a copy of the ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit.

This contest could not have happened without the support of the following sponsors: Savvy Content Manager - ColdFusion CMS
Fusion Reactor
Fusion Authority Quarterly Update
Also a huge thank you to the following folks: Ben Forta for donating two copies of the CF8 WACK to give away.
Ben Nadel for creating the super-cool banner ad!
Ryan Everhart for also creating a banner for me, even though I used Ben's (sorry EV!).
So that's it! Remember, the more you participate the better your chances of winning! See the contest page for full details.

CFSnippets.org - Powered By Model-Glue and CF 8

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:05:00 -0400

I wanted to dedicate a specific post to the technology/framework that powers my new site CFSnippets.org. In case you haven't noticed just yet (and if you haven't noticed, shame on you, go create an account!), CFSnippets.org is powered by Model-Glue. This was my first full experience with the magic that is MG and I must say I'm hooked. It just all seemed to make sense - and it just 'worked'. I found myself thinking very little about 'what goes where' once I got comfortable with the framework and thinking more about the user experience and the overall flow and look and feel of the site. It's hard to fully explain just how cool it is to finally understand and be able to develop a full application within a framework. My learning curve was a bit steeper seeing as how I decided to also take the time to fully soak up OO design patterns and put them into practice with this site. The end result is something that I'm really proud of - and for once the site is not something that I dread going back into to make a minor change or add a bit of functionality. I know exactly where to go to change/fix something and that's a feeling that I like a whole lot! I'm not completely sold on what my next full blown MG project will be - but I know there will be another one. I still metally waiver on those 'smaller' projects and whether or not the end result will be 'worth' using MG. I know that sounds silly - and again - I can't really explain why I feel that way since it's so darned easy to work with. So about that user experience that I spoke of earlier. Bits and pieces of the site make use of ColdFusion 8's Ajax features. For example, when you're logged in and viewing libraries you may notice a 'Subscribe' option underneath each library that you can use to subscribe and create your own custom feed. I thought it would be nice to allow you to do this without a page reload so when the link is clicked, an Ajax request is submitted to update your subscription and the link fades out and is replaced by the 'Unsub' link. Subtle, but still pretty cool if you ask me. I also am using <cfwindow> on the site to display the code view of each snippet that you see as you browse a given library. Another small touch that seems to work out nicely. The initial reaction to the launch has seemed very positive and I'm hoping that the momentum keeps up. I really feel that this can become a valuable asset to the ColdFusion community. If you have any ideas for the site please feel free to let me know.

cfsnippets.org Launches - New ColdFusion Community Site

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 08:03:00 -0400

I'm proud to announce the launch of my latest project, cfsnippets.org. The site is the first public SnipEx repository open to all snippet types for CFEclipse. If you're not familiar with Snippets in Eclipse, they're basically simple chunks of code - typically repetitive type tasks - that you can quickly and easily insert into your code by point/click or keyboard shortcut combinations. Jared Rypka-Hauer has already started a library on the site - check it out to get a feeling for how the site works. If you have snippets to add just register, verify your account and start adding snippets to the existing library or create your own. To use the SnipEx repository, click on 'SnipEx Server(s)' and copy the URL shown on that page and paste it into CFEclipse. For more on how to set that up see this post from Mark Drew. As the site grows you may find there are a handfull of libraries that you use more then others. No problem, you'll be given the option to subscribe to individual libraries and customize your feed. A second URL will be presented to you (of course only when you're logged in) that contains only the libararies that you've subscribed to. Currently you must manually delete your SnipEx cache in Eclipse to see new snippets as they're updated. Be sure to check the FAQ for a link that explains how to do this. Note: Thanks to Jim Priest for reminding me that Raymond Camden also has a public SnipEx server. The main difference being that Ray's server strictly serves up the UDF's hosted at CFLib while this server is open to any snippet.