This past week, Ellernet launched a new website for Patriot Ready Mixed Concrete - my brother Roy's company. Check it out if you have a minute. I have a number of side-projects that I am currently working on and I will post what I can here. Funny - when I was looking for a job a few months ago, i couldn't find any side projects to work on. now that I have a new job I have side work coming out of the wood work. :) Go figure.

Well, in a moment of geek weakness, I added a chat room to Ellernet. I decided to use the Chatopica chat widget. It was exceedingly simple to setup. Took all of ten minutes, and most of that was getting the popup window sized correctly. They provide you with a free piece of JavaScript that you add to the page where you want your chat to appear. That's all there is to it.

You can click the link in the sidebar to enter the Ellernet Chat or click here. Stop in and say hello.

I just launched a new website that I've been working on for a client. It is a food and art site. Check it out and let me know what you think:

The Impressionists Table

Some details about the technical aspects of the site: It is running on ColdFusionMX7 using the ColdBox Development framework. I'm also using a couple of the YAHOO EXT library widgets. Additionally, the site is hooked up to Google Checkout for payment processing.

Since I build web applications for a living, I try to make sure that I check any site I build in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. As such, I've been using both browsers to some extent for a while now. One thing that is really nice about Firefox is the large library of add-ons that you can download and install for free. Also, I really like the ability to "skin" (change it's appearance) Firefox as well. If you haven't yet, you should try it out. You can get Firefox here.

Additionally, here is a list of ten really cool extensions for firefox. I partuclarly like the web developer tools. And, here is the full list of all the extensions available.

I like MSIE7 also, but Firefox is my choice for browsing now.

So I volunteered to be the webmaster for Bailey's school's PTA. Little did I realize just how out-of-date this site was. Anyway, I decided to just redo it and I made the site live this evening. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Maybe you've noticed the cool new way you can view pictures on this site. This is thanks to a great new JavaScript library collectively known as LightBox JS. I am still amazed at how easy it was to setup. Add a few JavaScript includes at the top of the page and a single attribute to all of the anchor tags that load pictures - that's all there was to it.

To find out more, click here. By the way, it is a free download.

I came accross this excellent tool recently and have been playing with it a lot. The Synthis Process Modeler is a great tool for designing website process flow, database design, and a multitude of other processes. It is easy to setup and use and you can't beat the price - free. For a limited time, the folks at Synthis are giving this normally $1500 product away to help build awareness about this and other products they offer. Also, i must commend their customer service - I had a small problem with my installation and emailed them. I had a response and solution within minutes.

http://synthis.com/content/products/model

So, I emailed Ray Camden because while I was on vacation I made a few updates to my blog and rendered it useless. My sister (Patti) and I tried and tried to figure it out, but we could not figure out why it was giving this error. Turns out the that my ColdFusion mapping setting for the /org directory was set wrong. I renamed a directory from a development directory to where the blog resides now. This rendered the mapping useless since my development directory no longer existed. Bonehead move on my part - i just forgot about the CF mapping. Ray told me immediately what the issue was and I was back up and running in minutes. Thanks Ray.

I'd like to thank Ray Camden for his great BlogCFC application. This application is relatively easy to setup . I only had problems when I tried to tweak the stylesheets. Once I got the hang of the CSS, it was very easy to deal with.

BlogCFC is available here:

http://ray.camdenfamily.com/index.cfm
(just click the "Blog" link in the right margin)