Creative Juice Bo. Co. Presents

Using GZIP Compression with ColdFusion

As some of you might of heard, Google recently announced they are factoring in site speed as a criteria in their web search ranking. I have about 30 websites being monitored by Google's Web Analytics and over the past month or so I have noticed a significant drop in all their traffic. Now, I'm not 100% sure if this has to do with the new ranking rule or the fact that most US schools are out for summer, but either way this has me a little perplexed and I'm starting to wonder if this has anything to do with my code.

Reading up on a bunch of speed enhancement tips, the one thing I kept coming across is to use HTTP Header Compression. Basically, if the web browser supports it, you can GZIP your Scripts and CSS files and serve them instead of the uncompressed text files. Typically you can save over half the normal file size by doing this. Since I use ColdFusion for most of my sites, I had to find a way to integrate GZIP with ColdFusion. Here's what I came up with.

Internet Explorer 8 Is Having Problems Caching Returned JSON Results

As you all know, I released CJ File Browser 3.1 the other day and I thought I had tested the heck out of it. Well, a user discovered that it wasn't working properly in IE8. The script relies heavily on jQueries getJSON function to communicate with the handler engine (The code the does all the grunt work for the browser). The problem was occurring when the user uploaded or deleted the file. He had to close the browser window and the re-open it to see the results.

Immediately, I knew it was a caching issue. My first guess was the HTML file that handles the browser layout needed to have the no-caching META tags placed in the header. I added those, but the problem still persisted. Then it dawned on me, I had a similar problem with Safari and a problem it was having with caching iFrame content. This was solved by adding a simple URL parameter with it's value set to the current time. Safari would then see that something was different and would no longer cache the page.

Using jQuery's ready() method and callback functions to get your animations to queue smoothly

One of my long time followers and most likely my biggest fan, ran into a little jQuery problem the other day and e-mailed me to see if I could help out. Here's what he had to say:

I am trying to get jQuery to do a fade, a slideDown, and a fade. I need to delay each by a few seconds, or ideally have them trigger after the previous effect completes. I can't seem to figure it out. Your an awesome guy, think you can help out?

The secret to getting me to look at something is to call me "Awesome"!