
Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! TODCon Was a Gas If you're a regular subscriber to this newsletter, you know we've been plugging TODCon for months. Every year brings in new people, new learning sessions, and new hangovers. This year's event was no different except that more people attended than ever, which made for a wildly diverse crowd eager to share and gain knowledge. Many authors from Community MX were present, as were many Community MX subscribers. Tom Green and David Stiller, otherwise known as the Flash Twins (and not because they work with Flash... Long story) were also present. Tom reports on Day One of TODCon, while David throws in his two cents on Day Two of TODCon. Watch for a report on Day Three from CMX author Jim Babbage. Meanwhile, our own extension man extraordinaire, Paul Davis, gives us his general musings on TODCon on the CMX blog. If you missed it this year, don't miss it next year. New Adobe Product To Help You Create Digital Bookshelves For years, Adobe's Acrobat Reader has been the program you use if you want to distribute an eBook, but Adobe has just released Adobe Digital Editions, and it offers some great advantages over delivering and viewing documents through Acrobat Reader. First off, with Reader you simply... read. Digital Editions not only allows you to create libraries out of the digital publications and eBooks you've got on your hard drive. It can also create a new experience for the reader by allowing Flash, XML and PDF content to reside in each document seamlessly. For more information on Digital Editions, check out the product page at Adobe.com, or check out this article from ITWire.com. Check out our Fun and Freebies section for one person's take on why Acrobat Reader is just no fun anymore. Apollo Catches Some AIR It's going to be tough getting used to calling Adobe Apollo by another name, but Adobe apparently wanted to make sure that we understood that the program is still going strong and making positive strides. Now named Adobe AIR, the program will allow developers to take applications written in Flash, HTML or AJAX and deploy them on a user's workstation without having to view them on the web. InfoWorld.com has more information on the newly released AIR beta, or you can learn more about it Adobe.com. Still unsure about what AIR can do? Check out some of the amazing apps that have been built using Apollo/AIR. There's also a great interview with Jesse James Garrett, the man who coined the term AJAX, on the Wired.com blog, where Jesse throws in his thoughts about AIR. Adobe - To Infinity And Beyoooooonnnd!! With the release of CS3, Adobe has made some amazing strides that will benefit all of us in the web development field. With intelligent revamping of existing products and the release of new products on a seemingly weekly basis, you'd think that the folks at Adobe might just look back on all they survey and think "OK, that should about do it." But no, Adobe not only continues to innovate within their product line, but they're also constantly striving to seek out ways to stay ahead of the competition. Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe Systems, recently sat down for an interview with CNet.com, and talked about current goings-on, and more importantly, how Adobe sees its own future unfolding. Zombie Pirates. Coming To a Server Near You. With every software release comes a new wave of pirates wanting to get the software for free. From the casual user to the guy who just wants ever single program ever made, people will do whatever it takes to get their programs for free. Cracks for most software are made available immediately after the software's release. Sometimes before it's released. But if you're one of those folks who thinks it's harmless to use a crack just to see "whether or not you want to buy the software", keep this article from SoftPedia.com in mind. The folks who make cracks are not always the most honest folks (we almost typed that without laughing), and could possibly screw up your computer before you even know it's happening.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Thank You Heidi Bautista for supporting us .net developers. I haven't downloaded Expression Web yet, but I will. Working between Visual Web Developer Express 2005 and Dreamweaver is tedious. I appreciate all that you do for the .net developers. Again thank you!" - Samuel S., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Heidi Bautista's article, Expression Web. Whether you're just starting out or need advanced support, Community MX will give you answers and ideas to work through your tough issues. Don't miss out. Learn more about CMX or sign up for a free trial today!
Great Quotes: "Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer, for chaos and madness await thee at its end." - Henry Spencer We Are NOT For Sale. Uh, How Much Are You Offering? Google seemingly releases about a kazillion new products a week, but a lot of those products start out as a germ of an idea outside of the company. For instance, Google's new PowerPoint viewer, available within Gmail, was not created by Google. It was born from the minds of Wayne Crosby and Robby Walker who built the app and named it Zenter (as in "Presenter", nyuck nyuck). Crosby and Walker's product got snatched up by Google for an undisclosed - but probably tidy - sum, and the rest is history. How did Zenter catch the eye of Google? They made a fantastic product and got it noticed. Luck was on their side, considering Google was building a similar application at the time. If you want to follow in their steps and get bought out by Google, do this: First, read this article at Business2.com, and then build a killer app. Simple, eh? Who Is This Lance, And Why Does Everyone Want To Free Him? Those of you that have started your own business know it's not as glamorous as you thought it would be. There's a lot of work that goes into keeping your business afloat that you hadn't considered, right? But it's easier now than it used to be. Before the internet, you'd have to rely on books or classes to help you succeed in freelancing. Before books and classes, you had to rely on people banging rocks against cave walls. Freelancers have it made now. You can go to a website like FreelanceSwitch.com and find over 120 great links to project and invoicing software, links to websites dealing specifically with web developers and graphic artists, legal advice and plenty more. If you're working for yourself, check out the link. CMX Author Joseph Balderson Goes Coo-Coo For Flash Player Upgrade. All of the authors at Community MX are enthusiastic to say the least, and Joseph is no exception. When any progress is made in the Flash arena, he's the first one to extend kudos and praise. The latest beta of the Flash Player packs a pretty good punch, what with Multi-threaded video decoding, less tearing in the new full screen mode, multithreading and hardware acceleration with DirectX (PC) & OpenGL (Mac) for bitmap & vector rendering engine and multithreaded, hardware accelerated video running in the Flash Player in High Definition (720P and 1080P) resolutions in Fullscreen Mode. Catch this demo from Adobe before installing the beta and then watch it again after installation and see if you get the same chills Joseph did. The Day The Music Died... For About A Day. This coming Tuesday, you may want to get your mp3 player ready if you want to listen to your favorite tunes. You won't be able to listen to Live365 or a few other internet-based radio stations. Due to some new taxes being imposed by the government, those stations have decided to form a protest by staying silent on Tuesday. The 30% tax hike isn't even the worst of the problem. For each channel that a radio station streams, the government wants a $500 cut. Considering people can create their own channels on places like Pandora, resulting in over 400,000 channels being streamed over Pandora's network last year, that's going to add up to an insane amount of money that these mostly free radio stations are going to have to come up with. We're still shaking our heads over this one. Read more on this at CNN.com. One Of These Days, Norton. One Of These Days... There has been a raging debate for several years over Symantec's Norton Antivirus and Internet Security software. Some swear by it and won't run their computers without it, while others are vehemently opposed to having any trace of any kind of Symantec product on their computer. Is it all that bad? Jimmy Ruska at JimmyR.com thinks so, and explains why in his Blog.
CMX Link to PDF File Extension for Dreamweaver Linking directly to specific places within a HTML file is pretty commonplace with the help of named anchors, but not all content on the web is so amenable.Link To PDF was developed to provide a method for Dreamweaver users to provide hotlink capability inside a PDF document. What this means is that with CMX Link TO PDF, you can now specify how Adobe Acrobat Reader opens the PDF document in a browser session. Methods include targeting specific pages, control of bookmarks & thumbnail tabs, setting zoom and page positioning, and fit view to horizontal or visible available space. Take a look at this Extension by Danilo Celic
Fun and Freebies! 'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy Of course, that should be "'Scuse me while kiss the sky", but rock lyrics get misinterpreted all the time. A great recent example is Yellow Ledbetter by Pearl Jam. My band used to cover that song, and frankly, I made up new lyrics every time we played it because I was sure Eddie Vedder was just making up sounds rather than actual words. But this video on YouTube.com takes a stab at figuring out the lyrics with hysterical results. Well, That Was Just Disillusioning Magicians hate it when secrets are given away. But at Community MX, we're all about sharing knowledge. This blog gives away the secrets to many of your favorite and most confounding tricks. Yeah? Captcha THIS! Man, some of those Captcha forms can be sooooo passive-aggressive.
Building a Drag-and-Drop Jigsaw Puzzle - Part 1 Jigsaw puzzles were a mainstay of my youth on rainy afternoons. The earliest puzzles I remember had merely a dozen pieces, but ah, the sense of accomplishment! Piecing together the artwork was always a rewarding experience. One year, my mother found an ad in a magazine for a company that would convert your personal photo into a puzzle — at the time, the notion struck me as incredible! We ordered one and I treasured it for years. After reading this two-part series, you'll be able to do the same thing on your own computer! Over the course of these tutorials, you will write an ActionScript 2.0 class to build a re-usable jigsaw puzzle engine. Here in Part 1, we will deconstruct our endeavor into a handful of bite-sized methods and write one large method, CMXJigsawPuzzle.buildPuzzle(), to call those as necessary. The complete code is already included with this tutorial, but the full explanation will span into Part 2. This free article by CMX Partner David Stiller can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Rule #3 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Manage Your Client as Well as the Project Derrick Ypenburg Not managing the client while managing their project is a big mistake made by many freelancers. As a freelancer, you are plugging away to get the job done (barely keeping your head above water) and then at the end of it all, your client comes back to you with a whack of changes, concerns, unreasonable demands, or frustrations. I hear this all of the time from colleagues and have had some of these experiences myself. I think some of the lack of client management may, in-part, stem from the reason why people get into freelance in the first place. Most of us freelancers got tired of working for a boss. Although you may be your own boss, your clients are your boss when you take on a project with them. You need to manage them and treat them like you would treat a boss in any other job. The Rules for Busy Freelancers Series: Rule #1 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Don't Be Everything to Everybody Rule #2 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Be Honest with Your Scheduling Rule #3 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Manage Your Client as Well as the Project TODCon 9: Day Three [FREE] Jim Babbage As I mentioned in my TODCon summary, the topic coverage at TODCon was far ranging. Wednesday, the final day, was no different in this regard. There were ten sessions one could attend on the final day. This overview will give you some insight into the topics covered on the final day of TODCon 2007. The New Way to Do Gray in Photoshop CS3 Kim Dudley Photoshop is often used for simple tasks, such as converting a color image to grayscale. Like other tasks this one can be completed in several different ways and every Photoshop user will have their own technique. So finding the method that works "best" for you may come down to trial and error. Knut Kubenz's Image > Mode > Grayscale Is Out Series presents two "better" grayscale conversion options. Now with the introduction of Photoshop CS3 there is a brand new way to complete this task. This tutorial will discuss Photoshop's Black and White Conversion tool and look at some of the results you can achieve with it. TODCon 9: Day Two [FREE] David Stiller The Las Vegas strip is lit up at all times. While this is certainly a true statement, the phrase "lit up" merely hints at the teaming magnetism of the neon dynamos that whirl, blink, and jitterbug off every building, billboard, and casino slot machine. If you remember the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment in Disney's Fantasia — where Mickey unwittingly awakens a swarm of enthusiastic broomsticks — you'll have an inkling of the sort of enchantment that has here awakened the humble light bulb. Think of it as a chorus line of <blink> tags personified. Every last one alluring, all vying for your attention. In light of this (hey, a pun!) it wasn't until day two of TODCon that I found myself able to instinctively locate the conference meeting rooms. Until then, I had been adrift among the brilliance, veering from this placard to that, winding my way — always distracted! — toward the escalators that led to the stairs that led to the breakfast buffet that led to the rooms. SQL Joins: The LEFT JOIN Adrian Senior In this tutorial we will learn how to utilise the SQL LEFT JOIN to gather information from two different tables. The SQL Joins Series: SQL Joins: The INNER JOIN SQL Joins: The LEFT JOIN SQL Joins: The RIGHT JOIN Coming Soon TODCon 9: Day One [FREE] Tom Green Religious revival, surly greetings to the U.S., ugliness at the restaurant and enough information to make your head explode. Yep. TODCon, Day One. Creating a Table-less Horizontal Looper in ColdFusion Tom Muck Dreamweaver has a Repeat Region server behavior that loops through your data and allows you to display it in a vertical or horizontal manner. If you want to display the data in a grid pattern, however, it requires a little more effort. Typically, a Horizontal Looper extension or code is used to create a table and put your individual data sections in a table cell. In this tutorial I'll show how to do that using <div> tags and CSS without tables. This is a version of an article I did for PHP—but for ColdFusion instead. For this tutorial I'll assume you know how to use your database tools to create and manage databases, and how to create connections for ColdFusion. The IE Fieldset Background Color Bleed Bug [FREE] Zoe Gillenwater When it comes to changing text styles in forms, there's little you can't do. As soon as you attempt extending your custom styles into the realm of background colors, borders, and layout, however, things can get difficult. Styling fieldsets and legends are among the more difficult form elements to style because they come laden with a good deal of default browser styling, as well as a few bugs. In this tutorial, we'll focus on one of the most common fieldset and legend styling frustrations: the fieldset background color bleed bug in Internet Explorer, where the background color of the fieldset extends outside the top border of the fieldset. This bug occurs any and every time you try to give a fieldset a background color, and it affects even the latest version of IE, 7. This tutorial will show you how to fix the bug using a couple additional CSS rules and no changes to markup or hacks. This tutorial assumes you're already familiar with the building blocks of forms and how to use them correctly to build accessible forms. If you do not have a good understanding of what fieldsets and legends are and how to use them, please see Tricia Littlefield's video tutorial Accessible Forms with Dreamweaver, which covers not only those elements but all the standard form components. You'll also need to have a good understanding of document flow and positioning for this tutorial. For a great introduction to these concepts, see Flowing and Positioning: Two Page Models -Revised for IE7 by Holly Bergevin and John Gallant. Rule #2 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Be Honest with Your Timelines Derrick Ypenburg In my quest for streamlining my small business, my next rule is honesty! I am an honest business person, but I'm not always honest when it comes to timelines. My clients never see this dishonesty however. That's because I work like mad behind the scenes to keep up when I make un-realistic deadlines. Not being honest with your client/yourself doesn't only cost you time and sanity, it costs you money. It can cost you lots of money$$$ The Rules for Busy Freelancers Series: Rule #1 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Don't Be Everything to Everybody Rule #2 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Be Honest with Your Scheduling Rule #3 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Manage Your Client as Well as the Project Coming Soon XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 8 Rob Williams When it comes to web development there are often a lot of technologies that people are aware of but never really understand or come to use in their daily tasks. XML tends to be one such technology. Most developers have heard of it, and usually have a general idea of what it is, but on the same level most have also almost never used it or understood the purpose of it for their usual projects. In this series we're going to explore how we can use XML in a practical way to help us develop rather interesting and uniquely controlled/flexible web applications by combining it with AJAX. In the eighth part of this series we're going to continue to add functionality to the AJAX photo gallery by developing the server-side components that we'll need. The XML and AJAX Series: XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 1 XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 2 XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 3 XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 4 XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 5 XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 6 XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 7 XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 8 Approximate download size: 910k
PHP Formmail Spam Prevention It used to be that there were clear sides in the junk email battle: the spammers and the spammed. I always considered myself a member of the latter group, and then one day I became a member—inadvertently—of the former. I had become a victim of the email injection attack via a PHP formmail script. In this update to the Dreamweaver Creating and Processing Form series, we'll take a new look at the phpformmail script and demonstrate how to use a key and email value pair to keep your email address out of the html page. Check out the Article by CMX Partner Sheri German
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Harlene Finn, CMX subscriber. Debugging With The Help of Color Coding Using Code Coloring in Dreamweaver is a helpful tool for debugging minor problems. You can set tags, attributes, values, etc. with your own color choices or use Dreamweaver¹s default code coloring schemes. You can do this for HTML, CSS, ASP etc. For example, there have been times when I've left out a closing single or double quote for an attribute or deleted it by mistake but didn't notice it until viewing the design and realizing something was wrong. Since the value for an attribute isn't closed without the quote mark(s), everything that follows is affected. If I've set text to be black and everything below a certain point is black, including tags, I can go back to the place in the code where the colors didn't change and look for the cause of the problem. Would you like your tip published? Submit it to tips@communitymx.com. That's it for this week. Stay tuned for the next CMX newsletter!

CMX Weekly Newsletter

News
Fun and Freebies
Recent CMX Content
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats

Check the News!

TODCon Was a Gas

If you're a regular subscriber to this newsletter, you know we've been plugging TODCon for months. Every year brings in new people, new learning sessions, and new hangovers. This year's event was no different except that more people attended than ever, which made for a wildly diverse crowd eager to share and gain knowledge. Many authors from Community MX were present, as were many Community MX subscribers. Tom Green and David Stiller, otherwise known as the Flash Twins (and not because they work with Flash... Long story) were also present. Tom reports on Day One of TODCon, while David throws in his two cents on Day Two of TODCon. Watch for a report on Day Three from CMX author Jim Babbage. Meanwhile, our own extension man extraordinaire, Paul Davis, gives us his general musings on TODCon on the CMX blog. If you missed it this year, don't miss it next year.

New Adobe Product To Help You Create Digital Bookshelves

For years, Adobe's Acrobat Reader has been the program you use if you want to distribute an eBook, but Adobe has just released Adobe Digital Editions, and it offers some great advantages over delivering and viewing documents through Acrobat Reader. First off, with Reader you simply... read. Digital Editions not only allows you to create libraries out of the digital publications and eBooks you've got on your hard drive. It can also create a new experience for the reader by allowing Flash, XML and PDF content to reside in each document seamlessly. For more information on Digital Editions, check out the product page at Adobe.com, or check out this article from ITWire.com. Check out our Fun and Freebies section for one person's take on why Acrobat Reader is just no fun anymore.

Apollo Catches Some AIR

It's going to be tough getting used to calling Adobe Apollo by another name, but Adobe apparently wanted to make sure that we understood that the program is still going strong and making positive strides. Now named Adobe AIR, the program will allow developers to take applications written in Flash, HTML or AJAX and deploy them on a user's workstation without having to view them on the web. InfoWorld.com has more information on the newly released AIR beta, or you can learn more about it Adobe.com. Still unsure about what AIR can do? Check out some of the amazing apps that have been built using Apollo/AIR. There's also a great interview with Jesse James Garrett, the man who coined the term AJAX, on the Wired.com blog, where Jesse throws in his thoughts about AIR.

Adobe - To Infinity And Beyoooooonnnd!!

With the release of CS3, Adobe has made some amazing strides that will benefit all of us in the web development field. With intelligent revamping of existing products and the release of new products on a seemingly weekly basis, you'd think that the folks at Adobe might just look back on all they survey and think "OK, that should about do it." But no, Adobe not only continues to innovate within their product line, but they're also constantly striving to seek out ways to stay ahead of the competition. Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe Systems, recently sat down for an interview with CNet.com, and talked about current goings-on, and more importantly, how Adobe sees its own future unfolding.

Zombie Pirates. Coming To a Server Near You.

With every software release comes a new wave of pirates wanting to get the software for free. From the casual user to the guy who just wants ever single program ever made, people will do whatever it takes to get their programs for free. Cracks for most software are made available immediately after the software's release. Sometimes before it's released. But if you're one of those folks who thinks it's harmless to use a crack just to see "whether or not you want to buy the software", keep this article from SoftPedia.com in mind. The folks who make cracks are not always the most honest folks (we almost typed that without laughing), and could possibly screw up your computer before you even know it's happening.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Thank You Heidi Bautista for supporting us .net developers. I haven't downloaded Expression Web yet, but I will. Working between Visual Web Developer Express 2005 and Dreamweaver is tedious. I appreciate all that you do for the .net developers. Again thank you!"

- Samuel S., CMX Subscriber, commenting on Heidi Bautista's article, Expression Web.

Whether you're just starting out or need advanced support, Community MX will give you answers and ideas to work through your tough issues. Don't miss out. Learn more about CMX or sign up for a free trial today!

Great Quotes:

"Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer, for chaos and madness await thee at its end." - Henry Spencer

We Are NOT For Sale. Uh, How Much Are You Offering?

Google seemingly releases about a kazillion new products a week, but a lot of those products start out as a germ of an idea outside of the company. For instance, Google's new PowerPoint viewer, available within Gmail, was not created by Google. It was born from the minds of Wayne Crosby and Robby Walker who built the app and named it Zenter (as in "Presenter", nyuck nyuck). Crosby and Walker's product got snatched up by Google for an undisclosed - but probably tidy - sum, and the rest is history. How did Zenter catch the eye of Google? They made a fantastic product and got it noticed. Luck was on their side, considering Google was building a similar application at the time. If you want to follow in their steps and get bought out by Google, do this: First, read this article at Business2.com, and then build a killer app. Simple, eh?

Who Is This Lance, And Why Does Everyone Want To Free Him?

Those of you that have started your own business know it's not as glamorous as you thought it would be. There's a lot of work that goes into keeping your business afloat that you hadn't considered, right? But it's easier now than it used to be. Before the internet, you'd have to rely on books or classes to help you succeed in freelancing. Before books and classes, you had to rely on people banging rocks against cave walls. Freelancers have it made now. You can go to a website like FreelanceSwitch.com and find over 120 great links to project and invoicing software, links to websites dealing specifically with web developers and graphic artists, legal advice and plenty more. If you're working for yourself, check out the link.

CMX Author Joseph Balderson Goes Coo-Coo For Flash Player Upgrade.

All of the authors at Community MX are enthusiastic to say the least, and Joseph is no exception. When any progress is made in the Flash arena, he's the first one to extend kudos and praise. The latest beta of the Flash Player packs a pretty good punch, what with Multi-threaded video decoding, less tearing in the new full screen mode, multithreading and hardware acceleration with DirectX (PC) & OpenGL (Mac) for bitmap & vector rendering engine and multithreaded, hardware accelerated video running in the Flash Player in High Definition (720P and 1080P) resolutions in Fullscreen Mode. Catch this demo from Adobe before installing the beta and then watch it again after installation and see if you get the same chills Joseph did.

The Day The Music Died... For About A Day.

This coming Tuesday, you may want to get your mp3 player ready if you want to listen to your favorite tunes. You won't be able to listen to Live365 or a few other internet-based radio stations. Due to some new taxes being imposed by the government, those stations have decided to form a protest by staying silent on Tuesday. The 30% tax hike isn't even the worst of the problem. For each channel that a radio station streams, the government wants a $500 cut. Considering people can create their own channels on places like Pandora, resulting in over 400,000 channels being streamed over Pandora's network last year, that's going to add up to an insane amount of money that these mostly free radio stations are going to have to come up with. We're still shaking our heads over this one. Read more on this at CNN.com.

One Of These Days, Norton. One Of These Days...

There has been a raging debate for several years over Symantec's Norton Antivirus and Internet Security software. Some swear by it and won't run their computers without it, while others are vehemently opposed to having any trace of any kind of Symantec product on their computer. Is it all that bad? Jimmy Ruska at JimmyR.com thinks so, and explains why in his Blog.

CMX Link to PDF File Extension for Dreamweaver

Linking directly to specific places within a HTML file is pretty commonplace with the help of named anchors, but not all content on the web is so amenable.Link To PDF was developed to provide a method for Dreamweaver users to provide hotlink capability inside a PDF document. What this means is that with CMX Link TO PDF, you can now specify how Adobe Acrobat Reader opens the PDF document in a browser session. Methods include targeting specific pages, control of bookmarks & thumbnail tabs, setting zoom and page positioning, and fit view to horizontal or visible available space.

Take a look at this Extension by Danilo Celic

Fun and Freebies!

'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy

Of course, that should be "'Scuse me while kiss the sky", but rock lyrics get misinterpreted all the time. A great recent example is Yellow Ledbetter by Pearl Jam. My band used to cover that song, and frankly, I made up new lyrics every time we played it because I was sure Eddie Vedder was just making up sounds rather than actual words. But this video on YouTube.com takes a stab at figuring out the lyrics with hysterical results.

Well, That Was Just Disillusioning

Magicians hate it when secrets are given away. But at Community MX, we're all about sharing knowledge. This blog gives away the secrets to many of your favorite and most confounding tricks.

Yeah? Captcha THIS!

Man, some of those Captcha forms can be sooooo passive-aggressive.

Building a Drag-and-Drop Jigsaw Puzzle - Part 1

Jigsaw puzzles were a mainstay of my youth on rainy afternoons. The earliest puzzles I remember had merely a dozen pieces, but ah, the sense of accomplishment! Piecing together the artwork was always a rewarding experience. One year, my mother found an ad in a magazine for a company that would convert your personal photo into a puzzle — at the time, the notion struck me as incredible! We ordered one and I treasured it for years. After reading this two-part series, you'll be able to do the same thing on your own computer! Over the course of these tutorials, you will write an ActionScript 2.0 class to build a re-usable jigsaw puzzle engine. Here in Part 1, we will deconstruct our endeavor into a handful of bite-sized methods and write one large method, CMXJigsawPuzzle.buildPuzzle(), to call those as necessary. The complete code is already included with this tutorial, but the full explanation will span into Part 2.

This free article by CMX Partner David Stiller can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Rule #3 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Manage Your Client as Well as the Project

Derrick Ypenburg

Not managing the client while managing their project is a big mistake made by many freelancers. As a freelancer, you are plugging away to get the job done (barely keeping your head above water) and then at the end of it all, your client comes back to you with a whack of changes, concerns, unreasonable demands, or frustrations. I hear this all of the time from colleagues and have had some of these experiences myself. I think some of the lack of client management may, in-part, stem from the reason why people get into freelance in the first place. Most of us freelancers got tired of working for a boss. Although you may be your own boss, your clients are your boss when you take on a project with them. You need to manage them and treat them like you would treat a boss in any other job.

The Rules for Busy Freelancers Series:
Rule #1 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Don't Be Everything to Everybody
Rule #2 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Be Honest with Your Scheduling
Rule #3 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Manage Your Client as Well as the Project

TODCon 9: Day Three [FREE]

Jim Babbage

As I mentioned in my TODCon summary, the topic coverage at TODCon was far ranging. Wednesday, the final day, was no different in this regard. There were ten sessions one could attend on the final day. This overview will give you some insight into the topics covered on the final day of TODCon 2007.

The New Way to Do Gray in Photoshop CS3

Kim Dudley

Photoshop is often used for simple tasks, such as converting a color image to grayscale. Like other tasks this one can be completed in several different ways and every Photoshop user will have their own technique. So finding the method that works "best" for you may come down to trial and error. Knut Kubenz's Image > Mode > Grayscale Is Out Series presents two "better" grayscale conversion options.

Now with the introduction of Photoshop CS3 there is a brand new way to complete this task. This tutorial will discuss Photoshop's Black and White Conversion tool and look at some of the results you can achieve with it.

TODCon 9: Day Two [FREE]

David Stiller

The Las Vegas strip is lit up at all times. While this is certainly a true statement, the phrase "lit up" merely hints at the teaming magnetism of the neon dynamos that whirl, blink, and jitterbug off every building, billboard, and casino slot machine. If you remember the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment in Disney's Fantasia — where Mickey unwittingly awakens a swarm of enthusiastic broomsticks — you'll have an inkling of the sort of enchantment that has here awakened the humble light bulb. Think of it as a chorus line of <blink> tags personified. Every last one alluring, all vying for your attention.

In light of this (hey, a pun!) it wasn't until day two of TODCon that I found myself able to instinctively locate the conference meeting rooms. Until then, I had been adrift among the brilliance, veering from this placard to that, winding my way — always distracted! — toward the escalators that led to the stairs that led to the breakfast buffet that led to the rooms.

SQL Joins: The LEFT JOIN

Adrian Senior

In this tutorial we will learn how to utilise the SQL LEFT JOIN to gather information from two different tables.

The SQL Joins Series:
SQL Joins: The INNER JOIN
SQL Joins: The LEFT JOIN
SQL Joins: The RIGHT JOIN Coming Soon

TODCon 9: Day One [FREE]

Tom Green

Religious revival, surly greetings to the U.S., ugliness at the restaurant and enough information to make your head explode. Yep. TODCon, Day One.

Creating a Table-less Horizontal Looper in ColdFusion

Tom Muck

Dreamweaver has a Repeat Region server behavior that loops through your data and allows you to display it in a vertical or horizontal manner. If you want to display the data in a grid pattern, however, it requires a little more effort. Typically, a Horizontal Looper extension or code is used to create a table and put your individual data sections in a table cell. In this tutorial I'll show how to do that using <div> tags and CSS without tables.

This is a version of an article I did for PHP—but for ColdFusion instead. For this tutorial I'll assume you know how to use your database tools to create and manage databases, and how to create connections for ColdFusion.

The IE Fieldset Background Color Bleed Bug [FREE]

Zoe Gillenwater

When it comes to changing text styles in forms, there's little you can't do. As soon as you attempt extending your custom styles into the realm of background colors, borders, and layout, however, things can get difficult. Styling fieldsets and legends are among the more difficult form elements to style because they come laden with a good deal of default browser styling, as well as a few bugs.

In this tutorial, we'll focus on one of the most common fieldset and legend styling frustrations: the fieldset background color bleed bug in Internet Explorer, where the background color of the fieldset extends outside the top border of the fieldset. This bug occurs any and every time you try to give a fieldset a background color, and it affects even the latest version of IE, 7. This tutorial will show you how to fix the bug using a couple additional CSS rules and no changes to markup or hacks.

This tutorial assumes you're already familiar with the building blocks of forms and how to use them correctly to build accessible forms. If you do not have a good understanding of what fieldsets and legends are and how to use them, please see Tricia Littlefield's video tutorial Accessible Forms with Dreamweaver, which covers not only those elements but all the standard form components. You'll also need to have a good understanding of document flow and positioning for this tutorial. For a great introduction to these concepts, see Flowing and Positioning: Two Page Models -Revised for IE7 by Holly Bergevin and John Gallant.

Rule #2 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Be Honest with Your Timelines

Derrick Ypenburg

In my quest for streamlining my small business, my next rule is honesty! I am an honest business person, but I'm not always honest when it comes to timelines. My clients never see this dishonesty however. That's because I work like mad behind the scenes to keep up when I make un-realistic deadlines. Not being honest with your client/yourself doesn't only cost you time and sanity, it costs you money. It can cost you lots of money$$$

The Rules for Busy Freelancers Series:
Rule #1 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Don't Be Everything to Everybody
Rule #2 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Be Honest with Your Scheduling
Rule #3 For Busy Freelancers to Follow: Manage Your Client as Well as the Project Coming Soon

XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 8

Rob Williams

When it comes to web development there are often a lot of technologies that people are aware of but never really understand or come to use in their daily tasks. XML tends to be one such technology. Most developers have heard of it, and usually have a general idea of what it is, but on the same level most have also almost never used it or understood the purpose of it for their usual projects.

In this series we're going to explore how we can use XML in a practical way to help us develop rather interesting and uniquely controlled/flexible web applications by combining it with AJAX.

In the eighth part of this series we're going to continue to add functionality to the AJAX photo gallery by developing the server-side components that we'll need.

The XML and AJAX Series:
XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 1
XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 2
XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 3
XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 4
XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 5
XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 6
XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 7
XML and AJAX: A New Paradigm - Part 8

Approximate download size: 910k

PHP Formmail Spam Prevention

It used to be that there were clear sides in the junk email battle: the spammers and the spammed. I always considered myself a member of the latter group, and then one day I became a member—inadvertently—of the former. I had become a victim of the email injection attack via a PHP formmail script. In this update to the Dreamweaver Creating and Processing Form series, we'll take a new look at the phpformmail script and demonstrate how to use a key and email value pair to keep your email address out of the html page.

Check out the Article by CMX Partner Sheri German

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of Harlene Finn, CMX subscriber.

Debugging With The Help of Color Coding

Using Code Coloring in Dreamweaver is a helpful tool for debugging minor problems. You can set tags, attributes, values, etc. with your own color choices or use Dreamweaver¹s default code coloring schemes. You can do this for HTML, CSS, ASP etc.

For example, there have been times when I've left out a closing single or double quote for an attribute or deleted it by mistake but didn't notice it until viewing the design and realizing something was wrong. Since the value for an attribute isn't closed without the quote mark(s), everything that follows is affected. If I've set text to be black and everything below a certain point is black, including tags, I can go back to the place in the code where the colors didn't change and look for the cause of the problem.

Would you like your tip published? Submit it to tips@communitymx.com.

That's it for this week. Stay tuned for the next CMX newsletter!