Friday, May 27, 2005

GMail Skinning

The best result of working with open source and industry standards is often how open and useable your product becomes. Google products are often reused for unexpected uses, different from the orginial purpose (i.e. using a Gmail account as a backup harddrive). Now comes skinning for GMail. Sweet!

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Google Tools

Google has added a personal portal area to it's offerings. While Yahoo!, MSN and others have long had this functionality, in typical Google fashion, it is clean and well done.

In realted news a new site, Chicago crime database, is up. It offers free access to all of the cities reports crimes with Google Maps built-in. Very slick setup! This has already proven to be a great tool for me, as I am shopping for a house/condo.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

da Fox

I do not use Firefox because it is safer than Internet Explorer. I use Firefox because of the freak-in cool extensions!

My must have list has grown to include the following:
And of course:
When it comes down to it, I would still use IE for many tasks, if it was safer, oh, and of course, COOLER! ;)

Monday, May 16, 2005

More Star Wars Goodness...

BBC has a Star Wars quiz, allowing you to test your readiness for Episode ]I[.

I only got 1 wrong, making me a Jedi Master... woohoo!

Also the BBC has a great story about the Star Wars marathon.

And finally, check out Ebert's review! NICE!!!

Sunday, May 15, 2005

Store Wars

The release of Star Wars is upon us. And with it comes a great new parody Store Wars. Follow the adventures of Ham Solo, Chewbroccoli (my favorite), C3Peanuts, Tofu D2, Obi Wan Cannoli, Cuke Skywalker, Lord Tader, and Princess Lettuce as they fight to save organic foods and the ways of the Farm.

There are so many things to love about this, it's a FLA, it's about organic foods, and it's a Creative Common release. Go see, learn, enjoy!

Why I Love CF...

Those who know me, and what I do have no doubt heard me go on and on, and on, about the things that I love about ColdFusion. Well I just found another thing to totally love.
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/main.css" title="Main Style Sheet" media="screen">

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="cssprint.css" title="Print Style Sheet" media="print">

Most web coders know the differences between the two lines above. The second is supposed to make it possible for the browser to have different print styles. This doesn't really work, because all browsers suck as a printable platform. CF 7 introduced a new tag, <CFDocument> allowing direct output to PDF or FlashPaper. What I didn't know, and I'm not sure is in the docs is that when it renders, it will pull the print style sheet. What does this mean? It means that you don't have to have a separate index page for your printable reports. For example, the project that I am working on right now has a calendar with events; because of this new feature, I have added a "print" link to every page that opens a new window with the current page inside a <CFDocument> formatted for FlashPaper or PDF.

Thus allowing a completely controllable print version and thanks to CF7 and use of multi stylesheets I only have to change one file to tweak the print output.