I always wanted to take pictures of Life Underground by Tom Otterness. It's an installation sculpture series created in 2002 for the 14th Street and 8th Avenue station. I finally had a camera with me and just missed the train, so I had a few minutes to capture some of Otterness' playful characters.
The Wiley Mobile Apps page was updated with a number of new iPhone applications this week.
October 2010 (10.7" x 7.2") - Since my parents went by themselves to Puerto Rico, the number of shots were limited. Naturally, I wanted a photo of both of them for the cover and there weren't many to choose from. On top of that, whenever a stranger uses their camera, it never comes out good. So I made the most of the one I picked. It's a little grainy, but had the right colors. The red from my Mom's shirt was reflected across the rest of the cover as the accent. The back cover is a nice landscape shot of El Morrow. The blank sky allowed for the 2 thumbnails and chapter menu.
This is just a note that I changed all items previously labeled as "Frommer's" to Wiley. I started a new position at Wiley's Web Publishing Technology group, so I'll be working on several of the company's websites, including Frommers.com. Here are a couple of updates so far:
Wiley.com Logos
The logo pages on Wiley.com were skinned with an interface designed a few years ago, but their content areas were left in a much older, 800x600 design. I rebuilt the pages as practice in the CMS we have in place. So now all the page are the full width of the content area.
- Logos for Print
- Divisional Logos
Frommers.biz Press Release
These come in every couple of months or so, but it was kind of nice to get one on the week I started the new job because it was still Frommer's in some way. To read about our partnership with AARP, click here.
August Rheumatologist
The Rheumatologist is a monthly online magazine that we post on the website for download and yet another Wiley owned site that I never knew about. Click here for August's issue.
Coming Soon
I can't post any direct links to some of the larger projects yet, but I'll be working on Pfeiffer, Current Protocols, Comprehensive Physiology and Encyclopedia of Life Sciences.
Earlier in the month, Kim & Bock Yeo's house and garden was featured in The New York Time. Since it was a biographical piece, we decided to add it to the website's about section as well. The New York Time actually gave us permission to reprint it as long as it linked back to the original Online edition. I was surprised at this because the New York Daily News did not allow me to reprint an article written about RCT Performance a few years ago.
Click here to read "A Semi-Secret Garden in Queens"
Earlier this week, we went up with our monthly contest. It's New York City in May, sponsored by Wicked. So that's why I took all of those pictures last month. I used a generic shot of the NYC skyline for the homepage. That was an older photo I took earlier in April from the Hoboken waterfront. The 3 images on the contest page were shot for the Wicked promo. The play is located in the back of Paramount Plaza, so there weren't that many interesting exterior shots. I tried to get as much green into each photo as possible for the ones of the signage. The surrounding trees helped blend the logos in with the midtown surroundings.
The Signature
This is where all of the pieces come together... the libraries & keystore from Part 1 and the XML from Part 2. Here's the script that applies all of the algorithms and transforms:
Although I've tried CFEclipse and ColdFusion Builder BETA, I always ended up reverting back to the old, outdated copy of ColdFusion Studio for 2 reasons. Neither of these advanced programs had a good batch search/replace and neither had keyboard shortcuts for commonly used HTML tags. Both of these issue were addressed last night:
RegEx Replace
Ben Nadel, one of pioneers in the language was also a CF Studio/Homesite user for the same reason. So fortunately, he wrote the RegEx Replace extension that does a better search/replace than CF Studio. There's a preview & commit since any batch processing can be dangerous. It also visually highlights the changes made so there are no surprised at the end. The only con is that it doesn't process multiple files or directories. But just having this extension available was a major factor for me in purchasing ColdFusion Builder. There's always potential for a future release to cover multiple files.
Keyboard Shortcuts
I can't live without keyboard shortcuts. I'm used to developing with the mouse and keyboard at the same time, so shortcuts are essential to productivity. Since ColdFusion Builder evolved from Eclipse and not the CF Studio/Homesite family, it lost the common shortcuts for HTML code. It's already second nature for me to hit CTRL+B for STRONG, CTRL+I for EM, CTRL+SHIFT+A for links, etcs. So I felt CF Builder was inefficient when all of these went missing. There are shortcuts for common CF tags, which balances things out. At the meeting, Adam Lehman also mentioned that an XML-based config file could be hacked for custom shortcuts. So I think I can add these back in... more updates when my copy arrives.
Presented by Adam Lehman
ColdFusion Product Manager
Adobe
March 23, 2010
NYU Medical Center
550 1st Avenue
New York, NY
Introduction
Adobe found that an IDE was more in demand than any other CF feature. It's something that always came up whenever they surveyed users. We didn't really have an official one since ColdFusion Studio since CFEclipse was from the community. Adobe saw IDEs as a way to attract new developers. It makes CF a legitimate, accepted language. A productive language needed a productive environment. Adobe is fully dedicated to this product as it has a rapid development roadmap:
I gathered some links for donating to the earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. Each item below was personally link-checked to make sure there was an option for the specific crisis:
Also check out NY1's relief list. They made it a point to review organizations to insure that donations would really make it to their intended destinations.The XML
I'm going to start with the base XML (before adding in the ColdFusion processing) to give an idea of what I'm going to generate. Here it is below with the items you need to replace marked off as ColdFusion variable calls:
Just before the holidays, one of the projects that I was devoted to was a new slideshow format for Frommers.com. We wanted something that highlighted the photo. It also had to be fast and easy to navigate. I went with a neutral color scheme so the only colored item on the page would be the photos. Here are some of the one's we've published so far:
This a pretty useful tool in trying to weed out malware from a website. It checks against a database of blacklisted sites created by Google. All of the good browsers (Firefox, SeaMonkey, Safari & Chrome) check against this database whenever you visit a site.
