Definitely dreaming

I have no shame. And neither does my past ...

Fly those rockets, baby, and dream on!

p.s. Nice robes.

AJAX simply visualized

I found this a particularly simple yet helpful visual in summarizing the AJAX process from W3 School's tutorial on AJAX, and thought I'd post it here:

FYI, the tutorial itself is worth a view. Try it.

SyntaxHighlighter to the rescue

As much of my use of this blog will involve code, it was imperative that I find some way to leverage a way to display code in an easily readable format. And that is where SyntaxHighlighter came to the rescue.

A few links worth noting:

• The tutorial I used to add SyntaxHighlighter to my Blogger-based blog:
  http://www.cyberack.com/2007/07/adding-syntax-highlighter-to-blogger.html
• For proper display in the Google Chrome browser; the issues involved extraneous blank lines and wonky line numbering: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11804789/extra-lines-using-syntaxhighlighter-for-chrome-only
• And because I love CFML (maybe more than Adobe): http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/manual/brushes/coldfusion.html

So ... my implementation (e.g. the code placed immediately before the closing head tag) looks like this:

jQuery code for adding icons to links

Initial use of Blogger ... will see what I think of this tool. First take is there seems to be a lot of junk HTML added to this post, just the kind of thing that compels me to write my own blogging tool. But I'm trying to hold off as (1) it'd be good to be familiar with the mass tools used by others, and (2) the dreaded time factor rarely works in my favor as it is now.

One use I have for this tool is to archive code snippets that I think may help me with future development projects. Noted below is such a piece of code, some jQuery that adds what I'll term "link icons" to a webpage:

$('a').each(function() {
 // external links
 if (this.hostname && this.hostname !== location.hostname)
 {
  $(this).attr({ target:"_blank" });
  $(this).after('');
 }
 // Check for /restricted/ links
 if ((/\/restricted\//i).test($(this).attr('href')) && !(/\/restricted\//i).test(window.location.pathname))
 {
  $(this).after('');
 }
 // Add icons for other document type by extension
 if ((/.pdf$/i).test($(this).attr('href')))
 {
  $(this).attr({ target: "_blank" });
  $(this).after('');
 }
 if ((/.doc[x|m]?$/i).test($(this).attr('href')))
 {
  $(this).after('');
 }
 if ((/.xls[x|m]?$/i).test($(this).attr('href')))
 {
  $(this).after('');
 }
 if ((/.pp[s|t][x|m]?$/i).test($(this).attr('href')))
 {
  $(this).after('');
 }
});

Yahoo.