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Blogs » Archive for April 9th, 2004

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Bookmarklets

by Simon Willison

My latest SitePoint article is up: Better Living Through Bookmarklets. I’m a huge fan of bookmarklets and the article details some of my favourites and demonstrates some tricks for writing your own.

In the short time since I wrote the article I’ve come across a couple of new bookmarklets that deserve a mention. Mouseover DOM inspector allows you to inspect the structure of a page, showing a window with the element type and attributes for whatever is currently under your mouse pointer. Topographic page layout reveals the “depth” of elements on a page by changing their background colour - a useful alternative to tools that add borders to elements as borders can slightly alter a layout while background colour changes leave the shape of a page intact.

Friday, April 9th, 2004 | Posted in JavaScript & CSS | 6 Comments »

PEAR Weekly Summary

by Harry Fuecks

FYI, Zend are now hosting a PEAR Weekly Summary column, much like the PHP Weekly Summary. More handy packages on their way, as well, such as Text_Diff for comparing text files and many more.

Particulary noteworthy is Alan Knowles proposal (now accepted) describing the process by which new packages become part of PEAR. If you’re considering contributing you need to be aware of this. Overall think it’s a good sign that the PEAR group is willing exert some control over what joins the repository, the result being, hopefully, quality over quantity. There was an interesting article here discussing CPAN and the problems faced with managing (giant) Open Source code libraries.

Friday, April 9th, 2004 | Posted in PHP | 1 Comment »

Very Cool Things for ColdFusion

by davidjmedlock

…posted by davidjmedlock:

Okay, I wanted to post something about companies, organizations, and people doing cool things with ColdFusion. Here are just a few:

cfdev.com
I’ve downloaded some of the free tags and apps that the guys at CFDev have created and plan on checking them out thoroughly. But, even the software that they have for sale is noteworthy. Think of the things you can do with it:

- EmailVerifier: Check an email address using syntax, DNS MX lookup, top level domain validation, and mail server validation. I’d like to see someone enter a fake address with that kind of validation…
- Translate: Uses babelfish translation engine to translate from one language into another.
- CFX_Soap: A SOAP client built in Java for ColdFusion.

There’s much more cool stuff on cfdev.com.

Another one that is very cool is a project called FusionScript. The site used to be at www.fusionscript.com, though it looks like its been snatched up by a domain squatter recently. There’s a SourceForge project here. FusionScript began development in 2001 or early 2002. I was actually working at DigiScript with Nate Nielsen, the developer for FusionScript. (I even started helping with converting …

Friday, April 9th, 2004 | Posted in ColdFusion | 3 Comments »