Creative Juices Bo. Co.

HTML5 Tip: Using localStorage to Retain Form Data when Sessions Expire

Most of the websites I design have a pretty nifty Content Management System which allows my clients to edit a majority of their website content. One of the biggest problems I've been trying to address over the past few years has been the short session limit on some of the shared hosting plans we use. It seems like the ISP's only allow a maximum of 30 minutes when using session management. 90% of the time, this is fine, but if my client is in the middle of an edit and then takes a phone call or leaves the computer, it's possible the session will expire and then they will lose the form data they had entered.

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.

My Attempt At The Ultimate Image/File Manager.

Finally, after two weeks of non-stop work, I have finally released version 3.1 of CJ File Browser, my image/file manager that can be used as a tinyMCE plug-in or be used in stand-alone mode. To anyone that downloaded the previous couple of versions, let me apologize to you.

Since the very first release of my ColdFusion File Manager, I have always tried to make it simple and easy for people to figure out how to use it. When I converted the code to make it a tinyMCE plug-in, it added a layer of complexity that I never really had time to deal with. The result of that led me down the path of releasing a bunch of sub-par projects to the public.

A few weeks ago, I decided I was going to re-write some of the code and try to clean things up a little bit. I quickly released version 3.0, found some little bugs and released version 3.0.1. Well, I got to be honest with you. That one was pure crap. And for that, I apologize.

Incorrectly Blaming TinyMCE for My InvalidTag Problems

My entire morning was wasted on a perplexing little problem I was having trying to get TinyMCE to embed YouTube videos for one of my clients. I must have tried a gazillion different little hacks, mods and anything I could think of, but each time I hit the submit button, it seems as if the <object> and <embed> tags were being converted to <InvalidTag>. No matter what settings I used in the TinyMCE init script, it still was converting these tags. Guess what? It wasn't TinyMCE at all. It was ColdFusion all along! Go figure.