
Wednesday, July 19th, 2006
CMX Weekly Newsletter News Fun and Freebies Recent CMX Content Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats Check the News! Adobe Releases Lightroom Beta to Windows Users Lightroom is an application for camera enthusiasts who need a simple way of editing, cataloging and viewing their digital photos. It was released months ago for the Mac platform, but Windows users have been out of luck until now. The beta runs until January of 2007, so if you want to try it out and offer suggestions to Adobe to make it better, now's the time. You can download it at Adobe Labs. For some quick information on this beta, check out News.com. 340 Undecillion Can't Be Wrong Every computer hooked up to the internet has a specific address. Apparently there are only so many IP addresses to go around, and experts say that if we keep going at the rate we're going, we'll run out of addresses by 2009. A new internet address protocol has been developed to save us begging for IP addresses on the street, and it's called IPv6, a 32-bit numbering system. We're currently using a 16-bit system, IPv4, which begs the question, "Whatever happened to IPv5?" But we digress. IPv6 will create at least 340 undecillion more web addresses. 340 undecillion is a lot. Want to see? 340,282,366,920,938,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000. There. That's an undecillion. That's more than the number of people with MySpace accounts. Plenty. Read up on it at TimesOnline.co.uk. Burn Movies From The Internet to DVD... Legally CinemaNow.com, one of the biggest (and legal) movie download sites in the world, has started a new service that will allow you to download a dvd to your computer, burn it to a disc - menus and all - and watch it on a stand-alone dvd player. The movies will have some major encryption, and you can only download any given movie once, which should satisfiy movie companies concerned with security. The selection of videos is pretty poor (think Bubble Boy and The Hindenburg), with only a hundred movie titles or so, but this is only a test phase to see if this method of movie delivery is a worthwhile venture for all involved. Why Use Internet Explorer Anymore? Have you ever been browsing in Firefox and come upon a website that either doesn't work correctly or plainly states that the website is "IE Only"? Who wants to open up another browser just to view a website that should be accessible in any browser? A new extension for Firefox out of Taiwan lets you open up Internet Explorer in a tab. Not only that, but you can very easily switch the page from IE view to FF view with one mouse click. You can even run Windows Update right within Firefox thanks to this nifty extension. Read all about it and download it from MozDev.org. Time For a Dumb Criminals Break Thanks to the internet, there is a whole new kind of crime, and a whole new batch of idiots to perpetrate it. Case in point: A kid decided he wanted to burn down his school principal's house, and let everyone know about it via his MySpace page. Sheesh... Read about this guy and other folks who are one clown short of a circus at NewsFactor.com.
Satisfied Customers Speak Out! "Thanks for such a great tutorial. I've not had time to do many tutorials lately as I have been busy doing my friends travel website... but I saw this one today, completed it and automatically found a use for it within the current website that I am designing. Keep the great tutorials coming, one day they will make me an expert." CMX Subscriber Stuart L., commenting on Zoe Gillenwater's FREE article "Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 1" 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: "Few things in the world are more powerful than a positive push. A smile. A word of optimism and hope. A "you can do it" when things are tough." — Richard M. DeVos Comcast's New Role: Censor A recent story on the internet version of ABC's Nightline television show had a segment that included a story about a Comcast technician who was caught napping on a customer's couch as he stayed on hold with Comcast technical support for about an hour. The customer got the nap on film, adding insult to injury, creating a very unflattering depiction of Comcast in general. Before Nightline hit the internet, Comcast snipped that whole part of Nightline's segment out of the broadcast, effectively censoring Nightline's content. This is a slippery slope, especially with everyone being concerned with net neutrality. TechSearch.com has the story, with links to the edited and unedited segments of the program from Consumerist.com. Trim The Fat A fresh install of Windows XP brings with it a lot of bulk that most folks just don't need. For instance, NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing is one serice that's pretty useless if you don't intend on running Netmeeting. TechTree.com has put together a great article that will guide you through many of the services you probably don't need, and lets you know which are safe to disable. Before disabling anything, you should be absolutely sure you don't need that service, but if you're looking to trim some of the fat off of XP, this is a good place to start. Crazy Or Genius? You Decide. Last week we linked to this News.com article about Kyle MacDonald, who traded a paperclip for something on CraigsList.org, and kept trading up until he actually got a house. This is one crazy idea that turned out to be genius, not unlike The Million Dollar Home Page, which netted Alex Tew a million dollars simply for selling a million pixels for a dollar apiece. The TechNewsHub has several more examples of ideas that no one thought would work, but surprised everyone. MySpace.com: Creating a Whole New Breed of Web Developers There's no doubt that MySpace.com is popular. With so many people using it, there are bound to be some personal pages that are not quite as aesthetically pleasing as Phyllis Diller's nose hairs. Zefrank.com had a contest recently to find some of the ugliest MySpace pages available, and you will not be disappointed. It's difficult to tell which of these are honest-to-goodness personal pages and which were created just for the contest, but at the same time, we're not sure it makes any difference... If It's Good Enough For Your Dog... This falls into the "It would be brilliant if it wasn't so idiotic" category. Thanks to iAttire.net, your iPod, Shuffle or Nano can be as stylish as your music. Put a beret on it, dress it up as a cowboy or a fairy princess, or even Frankenstein. On the bright side, your iPod will never get fat, so you don't need to worry about it outgrowing its garments. On the non-bright side, you could lose all your friends and get kicked off the bus.
The Polaroidizer for Fireworks 8 If you had a chance to read my recent article, Create a Polaroid Photograph in Fireworks, you saw how (relatively) easy it is to do this on your own. You can create two simple rectangles, punch the smaller rectangle through a larger rectangle, apply some simple drop-shadows, and Voila! Fairly easy frames that can be applied over the top of a photograph to give the appearance that the picture was snapped with a Polaroid camera. While the techniques described in the earlier tutorial were fairly easy, wouldn't it be even better if you could automate the process? Since you might not remember all the things that need to be done to achieve the effect how about it you could just run a command and have the frames created for you? You could then scale and place your own images and get the final outcome you see above with a minimum of muss and fuss. Now you can. When you download the support files for this article you'll find three commands for Fireworks 8 that will create the Polaroid frames for you. Just unzip the files and save into the Commands folder in your copy of Fireworks 8 and instant Polaroid frames are just a few clicks away. Check out the Polaroidizer from CMX Partner Kim Cavanaugh
Fun and Freebies Ron Burgundy Tries Out For ESPN If you saw the Will Ferrell movie "Anchorman", then you know how perfectly dense Ron Burgundy is. Here he is (via YouTube.com) trying out as a sportscaster on ESPN in an inspired commercial. Films We'd Want to See Casting can have a huge affect on a film. For instance, imagine John Denver in Officer and a Gentleman, playing Richard Gere's part. Or Mick Jagger playing Franken Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Denver and Jagger were actually considered for those roles at some point, and NotStarring.com has plenty of other examples of actors that were considered for, but did not star in, other parts. How About The Sound of a Bill Being Placed In My Mailbox? Sound101.org needs your help. They're looking for the worst sound in the world, and want you to listen to several sounds, including nails on a blackboard, a child screaming and other unpleasantries. Why? "The aim is to increase awareness of sound psychology by examining what makes a sound unpleasant to hear" according to the website. The research is being led by Professor Trevor Cox of Salford University’s Acoustic Research Centre.
Masks in Motion As you know movie clips can be created using ActionScript and they have properties like position and size that can be manipulated. In this exercise we are going have a quite a few masks — up to 30 at any given time — moving across the screen and the color of the video will change based upon the position of the mouse on the screen. This free article by CMX Partner Tom Green can be found here.
Weekly Content Listing Podcasting for Teachers [FREE] Sheri German Trinity University teamed up with Teach for America to provide a Masters in Education program for some of its teachers in Washington, D.C. Throughout the month of June, I taught 28 young, eager K-12 teachers - mostly of special education students - how to better utilize technology in the classroom. One of our projects was the podcast. This article will tell you all about how we built our podcasts from completely free resources. Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 4c - Filtering Your Queries and the cfqueryparam Tag Adrian Senior In this tutorial you will learned how to filter a database table by using the WHERE clause. We will also look at using the cfqueryparam tag and its attributes to speed up execution times and provide enhanced security for your database. You will also look at preventing errors in your ColdFusion pages by making good use of the cfparam tag. The Let's Learn ColdFusion Series: Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 1 - Installation and the Testing Server Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 2 - The URL Scope, Variable Names and Values Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 3 - Adding Simple Logic and Error Checking Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 4a - Creating a Datasource Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 4b - Building a Dynamic List Menu Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 4c - Filtering Your Queries and the cfqueryparam Tag Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 4d - Error Checking Your ColdFusion Queries Coming Soon JavaScript Dissecting - Automatic Shipping Address Code Paul Davis Dissecting a JavaScript function to find out how it does all the things it does! This article takes apart the JavaScript function from the Automatic Shipping Address article and details its inner most secrets. Creating Simple Reports in ColdFusion: Part 2 Ray West For those of us building what are known as Web Applications (web sites that are intended to provide advanced application functionality that often replace desktop programs) there have always been a number of limitation in the web server and browser platform that affect the user experience compared to traditional applications. Modern platforms like Flash (and even DHTML) are answering some of those issues on the client side. On the server side, one of the problems has been generating true banded reporting and creating printable reports from what is displayed on screen. In the last article, we looked at the most basic use of the cfdocument tag to create PDF and FlashPaper documents out of rendered HTML. Without rehashing the product documentation, let’s look at some of the other attributes of the cfdocument tag that affect how your document is presented. The Polaroidizer for Fireworks 8 Kim Cavanaugh If you had a chance to read my recent article, Create a Polaroid Photograph in Fireworks, you saw how (relatively) easy it is to do this on your own. You can create two simple rectangles, punch the smaller rectangle through a larger rectangle, apply some simple drop-shadows, and Voila! Fairly easy frames that can be applied over the top of a photograph to give the appearance that the picture was snapped with a Polaroid camera like you see in the collage below. While the techniques described in the earlier tutorial were fairly easy, wouldn't it be even better if you could automate the process? Since you might not remember all the things that need to be done to achieve the effect how about it you could just run a command and have the frames created for you? You could then scale and place your own images and get the final outcome you see above with a minimum of muss and fuss. Now you can. When you download the support files for this article you'll find three commands for Fireworks 8 that will create the Polaroid frames for you. Just unzip the files and save into the Commands folder in your copy of Fireworks 8 and instant Polaroid frames are just a few clicks away. Making Time-Triggered Scripts Rob Williams Most developers tend to think of server-side languages as user-driven applications; that is they sit dormant on a server somewhere waiting for a user to connect and make a request before actually doing anything. While this is true on many occasions, there are also times when server-side scripts need to start working without any user intervention. Unfortunately for developers who aren't entirely familiar with server environments and or are just starting out with a language this type of "non-user triggering" is fairly confusing and difficult because there aren't a lot of explanations in the server-side manuals that explain how to do it. In this article we'll take a look at how you can acheive time-triggered (rather than user-triggered) scripting using PHP and a remote Linux server. Fireworks to Photoshop - Rebuilding the CMX Orlando JumpStart as a PSD (and AI) File Jim Babbage I love Fireworks. As I progress through these articles on converting FW PNG files to PSD files, I am quickly learning just how versatile and powerful Fireworks is for design, creation and optimization. The Orlando JumpStart is a perfect example. As you will see, depending on the design you need either Photoshop or Illustrator (and sometimes both) to do what Fireworks does easily in one application. That's not to say either of these other Adobe products is weak; they are designed to do specific things and they do them quite well. You can certainly add vectors to Photoshop or Bitmaps to Illustrator. It just seems to me that this workflow is handled best by Fireworks. In this continuing series, I supply you with an editable PSD version of the main Orlando JumpStart PNG file. For details on most of the conversion process, make sure to read Fireworks to Photoshop - Rebuilding the CMX Vienna JumpStart PNG as a PSD file . NOTE: These articles are based on using the most current versions of Fireworks, Photoshop and Illustrator. Older versions of the software may behave differently or may not even include some of the features/tools listed here. As with any of these conversions, there will be some differences to how I approach the process. In the case of Orlando, it's all about vectors. Complex, custom vectors. In my first conversion (Vienna), I ungrouped all my grouped objects, made sure each object had a name, then saved as a PSD. From there, I tweaked several things in Photoshop, including the re-creation of a few vector shapes. You may recall that saving as a PSD in Fireworks rasterized all vectors except for fonts. With Orlando it is very easy to do the same thing. And assuming your aren't going to use/edit any of the amusement park vector art, clouds or the paths that make up the words Orlando JumpStart, the conversion is quite simple. The PSD file includes all the artwork as flattened bitmaps by default. However, for those of you who still want scaleable vector art, a different approach was taken. Not only did I save the file as a PSD, but I also saved it as an AI file. This preserves all the vector paths. Once both files are created, (PSD and AI), I can work in either Photoshop OR Illustrator. We're going to look at both options here and in fact, you will find both a PSD file and an Illustrator file in the support documents. With this particular JumpStart, there are pros and cons to working in either program. A big part of the decision factor is your comfort level with Photoshop or Illustrator. So let's have a look at both scenarios. Understanding the Movie Clip Architecture - Part 2: Levels Joseph Balderson Ever get confused by all of the different ways that Flash organizes assets and information within your FLA and your SWF? Frames and timelines and levels and layers and depths, oh my! This series will sort it all out, and give you some great tips. If you ever wanted the skinny on the Flash movie clip architecture, this be da place, mon. In Part 2 of this series we will look at levels: what they are, how to use them and what to watch out for in your Flash projects. We will look at library asset linkages in multilevel SWFs, and examine the difference between authortime and runtime objects. In addition we will look at the _lockroot property. As an advanced topic bonus we will also code an implementation of _lockroot for SWFs exported to Flash 6 using AS 1.0. The Understanding the Movie Clip Architecture Series: Understanding the Movie Clip Architecture - Part 1: The Almighty Movie Clip Understanding the Movie Clip Architecture - Part 2: Levels Full-Text Searching with MySQL and PHP Gordon Mackay As a general rule of thumb, web sites that contain a large amount of content adopt some form of fuctionality that allows users to search through content held within their database. The methods for searching database content vary from server model to server model and can often be rather complicated. However, if your web site holds its content in a MySQL database, you can very quickly add a simple but effective search mechanism using MySQL's FULLTEXT indexing. In this tutorial we will look at using FULLTEXT indexing to create a simple content search engine that can quickly be implemented on any web site running PHP and pulling content from a MySQL database. 3D Graphs Using Illustrator Kim Dudley A bunch of facts and figures on a page can be pretty boring to look at. Why not make them a bit more interesting using Illustrator's graph tools. Graphs are great for presenting complex information and numerical data in a simple and compact layout that is quick and easy to understand. In this tutorial we will use Illustrator's Pie graph tool to create a colorful 3D pie chart. Use it in a layout for a brochure or on a web page and quickly spruce up that page full of numbers.
Build Seamless Background Image Tiles out of Shapes in Fireworks Tiled background images where a small shape repeats across the web page have come back into style. There are web sites devoted to providing free patterns for you to download and apply to your sites, but what if you want to create your own pattern? You can create any shape you like, using your favorite graphics program, and then set it as a tiling background image using CSS. However, creating a pattern out of your shape that tiles well—without any seams or gutters—takes some work. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create seamless background patterns using Fireworks (but the principles can just as easily be used in Photoshop or any other graphics program). Note: This tutorial doesn't cover how to draw a shape or apply it to your page as a background. Rather, it shows how to take a shape that you want to turn into a seamless pattern and use Fireworks to do just that. Check out the Article by CMX partner Zoe Gillenwater
Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats! This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of CMX Partner Joseph Balderson Precise Coordinates for Ruler Guides in Flash Rather than positioning your ruler guides according to the ruler, which can lend itself to inaccuracy as you squint trying to hit that perfect pixel, use the Info panel to help. As you drag a guide from the Ruler, watch your cursor coordinates in the Info panel. Where you let go of the mouse is the precise vertical or horizontal position of the ruler. This ensures that your ruler guides are pixel perfectly positioned (say that fast five times!) 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!

Adobe Releases Lightroom Beta to Windows Users

Lightroom is an application for camera enthusiasts who need a simple way of editing, cataloging and viewing their digital photos. It was released months ago for the Mac platform, but Windows users have been out of luck until now. The beta runs until January of 2007, so if you want to try it out and offer suggestions to Adobe to make it better, now's the time. You can download it at Adobe Labs. For some quick information on this beta, check out News.com.

340 Undecillion Can't Be Wrong

Every computer hooked up to the internet has a specific address. Apparently there are only so many IP addresses to go around, and experts say that if we keep going at the rate we're going, we'll run out of addresses by 2009. A new internet address protocol has been developed to save us begging for IP addresses on the street, and it's called IPv6, a 32-bit numbering system. We're currently using a 16-bit system, IPv4, which begs the question, "Whatever happened to IPv5?" But we digress. IPv6 will create at least 340 undecillion more web addresses. 340 undecillion is a lot. Want to see? 340,282,366,920,938,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000. There. That's an undecillion. That's more than the number of people with MySpace accounts. Plenty. Read up on it at TimesOnline.co.uk.

Burn Movies From The Internet to DVD... Legally

CinemaNow.com, one of the biggest (and legal) movie download sites in the world, has started a new service that will allow you to download a dvd to your computer, burn it to a disc - menus and all - and watch it on a stand-alone dvd player. The movies will have some major encryption, and you can only download any given movie once, which should satisfiy movie companies concerned with security. The selection of videos is pretty poor (think Bubble Boy and The Hindenburg), with only a hundred movie titles or so, but this is only a test phase to see if this method of movie delivery is a worthwhile venture for all involved.

Why Use Internet Explorer Anymore?

Have you ever been browsing in Firefox and come upon a website that either doesn't work correctly or plainly states that the website is "IE Only"? Who wants to open up another browser just to view a website that should be accessible in any browser? A new extension for Firefox out of Taiwan lets you open up Internet Explorer in a tab. Not only that, but you can very easily switch the page from IE view to FF view with one mouse click. You can even run Windows Update right within Firefox thanks to this nifty extension. Read all about it and download it from MozDev.org.

Time For a Dumb Criminals Break

Thanks to the internet, there is a whole new kind of crime, and a whole new batch of idiots to perpetrate it. Case in point: A kid decided he wanted to burn down his school principal's house, and let everyone know about it via his MySpace page. Sheesh... Read about this guy and other folks who are one clown short of a circus at NewsFactor.com.

Satisfied Customers Speak Out!

"Thanks for such a great tutorial. I've not had time to do many tutorials lately as I have been busy doing my friends travel website... but I saw this one today, completed it and automatically found a use for it within the current website that I am designing. Keep the great tutorials coming, one day they will make me an expert."

CMX Subscriber Stuart L., commenting on Zoe Gillenwater's FREE article "Create a Teaser Thumbnail List Using CSS: Part 1"

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:

"Few things in the world are more powerful than a positive push. A smile. A word of optimism and hope. A "you can do it" when things are tough." — Richard M. DeVos

Comcast's New Role: Censor

A recent story on the internet version of ABC's Nightline television show had a segment that included a story about a Comcast technician who was caught napping on a customer's couch as he stayed on hold with Comcast technical support for about an hour. The customer got the nap on film, adding insult to injury, creating a very unflattering depiction of Comcast in general. Before Nightline hit the internet, Comcast snipped that whole part of Nightline's segment out of the broadcast, effectively censoring Nightline's content. This is a slippery slope, especially with everyone being concerned with net neutrality. TechSearch.com has the story, with links to the edited and unedited segments of the program from Consumerist.com.

Trim The Fat

A fresh install of Windows XP brings with it a lot of bulk that most folks just don't need. For instance, NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing is one serice that's pretty useless if you don't intend on running Netmeeting. TechTree.com has put together a great article that will guide you through many of the services you probably don't need, and lets you know which are safe to disable. Before disabling anything, you should be absolutely sure you don't need that service, but if you're looking to trim some of the fat off of XP, this is a good place to start.

Crazy Or Genius? You Decide.

Last week we linked to this News.com article about Kyle MacDonald, who traded a paperclip for something on CraigsList.org, and kept trading up until he actually got a house. This is one crazy idea that turned out to be genius, not unlike The Million Dollar Home Page, which netted Alex Tew a million dollars simply for selling a million pixels for a dollar apiece. The TechNewsHub has several more examples of ideas that no one thought would work, but surprised everyone.

MySpace.com: Creating a Whole New Breed of Web Developers

There's no doubt that MySpace.com is popular. With so many people using it, there are bound to be some personal pages that are not quite as aesthetically pleasing as Phyllis Diller's nose hairs. Zefrank.com had a contest recently to find some of the ugliest MySpace pages available, and you will not be disappointed. It's difficult to tell which of these are honest-to-goodness personal pages and which were created just for the contest, but at the same time, we're not sure it makes any difference...

If It's Good Enough For Your Dog...

This falls into the "It would be brilliant if it wasn't so idiotic" category. Thanks to iAttire.net, your iPod, Shuffle or Nano can be as stylish as your music. Put a beret on it, dress it up as a cowboy or a fairy princess, or even Frankenstein. On the bright side, your iPod will never get fat, so you don't need to worry about it outgrowing its garments. On the non-bright side, you could lose all your friends and get kicked off the bus.

The Polaroidizer for Fireworks 8

If you had a chance to read my recent article, Create a Polaroid Photograph in Fireworks, you saw how (relatively) easy it is to do this on your own. You can create two simple rectangles, punch the smaller rectangle through a larger rectangle, apply some simple drop-shadows, and Voila! Fairly easy frames that can be applied over the top of a photograph to give the appearance that the picture was snapped with a Polaroid camera. While the techniques described in the earlier tutorial were fairly easy, wouldn't it be even better if you could automate the process? Since you might not remember all the things that need to be done to achieve the effect how about it you could just run a command and have the frames created for you? You could then scale and place your own images and get the final outcome you see above with a minimum of muss and fuss. Now you can. When you download the support files for this article you'll find three commands for Fireworks 8 that will create the Polaroid frames for you. Just unzip the files and save into the Commands folder in your copy of Fireworks 8 and instant Polaroid frames are just a few clicks away.

Check out the Polaroidizer from CMX Partner Kim Cavanaugh

Fun and Freebies

Ron Burgundy Tries Out For ESPN

If you saw the Will Ferrell movie "Anchorman", then you know how perfectly dense Ron Burgundy is. Here he is (via YouTube.com) trying out as a sportscaster on ESPN in an inspired commercial.

Films We'd Want to See

Casting can have a huge affect on a film. For instance, imagine John Denver in Officer and a Gentleman, playing Richard Gere's part. Or Mick Jagger playing Franken Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Denver and Jagger were actually considered for those roles at some point, and NotStarring.com has plenty of other examples of actors that were considered for, but did not star in, other parts.

How About The Sound of a Bill Being Placed In My Mailbox?

Sound101.org needs your help. They're looking for the worst sound in the world, and want you to listen to several sounds, including nails on a blackboard, a child screaming and other unpleasantries. Why? "The aim is to increase awareness of sound psychology by examining what makes a sound unpleasant to hear" according to the website. The research is being led by Professor Trevor Cox of Salford University’s Acoustic Research Centre.

Masks in Motion

As you know movie clips can be created using ActionScript and they have properties like position and size that can be manipulated. In this exercise we are going have a quite a few masks — up to 30 at any given time — moving across the screen and the color of the video will change based upon the position of the mouse on the screen.

This free article by CMX Partner Tom Green can be found here.

Weekly Content Listing

Podcasting for Teachers [FREE]

Sheri German

Trinity University teamed up with Teach for America to provide a Masters in Education program for some of its teachers in Washington, D.C. Throughout the month of June, I taught 28 young, eager K-12 teachers - mostly of special education students - how to better utilize technology in the classroom. One of our projects was the podcast. This article will tell you all about how we built our podcasts from completely free resources.

Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 4c - Filtering Your Queries and the cfqueryparam Tag

Adrian Senior

In this tutorial you will learned how to filter a database table by using the WHERE clause. We will also look at using the cfqueryparam tag and its attributes to speed up execution times and provide enhanced security for your database. You will also look at preventing errors in your ColdFusion pages by making good use of the cfparam tag.

The Let's Learn ColdFusion Series:
Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 1 - Installation and the Testing Server
Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 2 - The URL Scope, Variable Names and Values
Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 3 - Adding Simple Logic and Error Checking
Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 4a - Creating a Datasource
Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 4b - Building a Dynamic List Menu
Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 4c - Filtering Your Queries and the cfqueryparam Tag
Let's Learn ColdFusion: Part 4d - Error Checking Your ColdFusion Queries Coming Soon

JavaScript Dissecting - Automatic Shipping Address Code

Paul Davis

Dissecting a JavaScript function to find out how it does all the things it does! This article takes apart the JavaScript function from the Automatic Shipping Address article and details its inner most secrets.

Creating Simple Reports in ColdFusion: Part 2

Ray West

For those of us building what are known as Web Applications (web sites that are intended to provide advanced application functionality that often replace desktop programs) there have always been a number of limitation in the web server and browser platform that affect the user experience compared to traditional applications. Modern platforms like Flash (and even DHTML) are answering some of those issues on the client side. On the server side, one of the problems has been generating true banded reporting and creating printable reports from what is displayed on screen.

In the last article, we looked at the most basic use of the cfdocument tag to create PDF and FlashPaper documents out of rendered HTML. Without rehashing the product documentation, let’s look at some of the other attributes of the cfdocument tag that affect how your document is presented.

The Polaroidizer for Fireworks 8

Kim Cavanaugh

If you had a chance to read my recent article, Create a Polaroid Photograph in Fireworks, you saw how (relatively) easy it is to do this on your own. You can create two simple rectangles, punch the smaller rectangle through a larger rectangle, apply some simple drop-shadows, and Voila! Fairly easy frames that can be applied over the top of a photograph to give the appearance that the picture was snapped with a Polaroid camera like you see in the collage below.

Polaroid example collage

While the techniques described in the earlier tutorial were fairly easy, wouldn't it be even better if you could automate the process? Since you might not remember all the things that need to be done to achieve the effect how about it you could just run a command and have the frames created for you? You could then scale and place your own images and get the final outcome you see above with a minimum of muss and fuss. Now you can.

When you download the support files for this article you'll find three commands for Fireworks 8 that will create the Polaroid frames for you. Just unzip the files and save into the Commands folder in your copy of Fireworks 8 and instant Polaroid frames are just a few clicks away.

Making Time-Triggered Scripts

Rob Williams

Most developers tend to think of server-side languages as user-driven applications; that is they sit dormant on a server somewhere waiting for a user to connect and make a request before actually doing anything. While this is true on many occasions, there are also times when server-side scripts need to start working without any user intervention. Unfortunately for developers who aren't entirely familiar with server environments and or are just starting out with a language this type of "non-user triggering" is fairly confusing and difficult because there aren't a lot of explanations in the server-side manuals that explain how to do it.

In this article we'll take a look at how you can acheive time-triggered (rather than user-triggered) scripting using PHP and a remote Linux server.

Fireworks to Photoshop - Rebuilding the CMX Orlando JumpStart as a PSD (and AI) File

Jim Babbage

I love Fireworks. As I progress through these articles on converting FW PNG files to PSD files, I am quickly learning just how versatile and powerful Fireworks is for design, creation and optimization. The Orlando JumpStart is a perfect example. As you will see, depending on the design you need either Photoshop or Illustrator (and sometimes both) to do what Fireworks does easily in one application. That's not to say either of these other Adobe products is weak; they are designed to do specific things and they do them quite well. You can certainly add vectors to Photoshop or Bitmaps to Illustrator. It just seems to me that this workflow is handled best by Fireworks.

In this continuing series, I supply you with an editable PSD version of the main Orlando JumpStart PNG file. For details on most of the conversion process, make sure to read Fireworks to Photoshop - Rebuilding the CMX Vienna JumpStart PNG as a PSD file .

NOTE: These articles are based on using the most current versions of Fireworks, Photoshop and Illustrator. Older versions of the software may behave differently or may not even include some of the features/tools listed here.

As with any of these conversions, there will be some differences to how I approach the process. In the case of Orlando, it's all about vectors. Complex, custom vectors.

In my first conversion (Vienna), I ungrouped all my grouped objects, made sure each object had a name, then saved as a PSD. From there, I tweaked several things in Photoshop, including the re-creation of a few vector shapes. You may recall that saving as a PSD in Fireworks rasterized all vectors except for fonts.

With Orlando it is very easy to do the same thing. And assuming your aren't going to use/edit any of the amusement park vector art, clouds or the paths that make up the words Orlando JumpStart, the conversion is quite simple. The PSD file includes all the artwork as flattened bitmaps by default.

However, for those of you who still want scaleable vector art, a different approach was taken. Not only did I save the file as a PSD, but I also saved it as an AI file. This preserves all the vector paths. Once both files are created, (PSD and AI), I can work in either Photoshop OR Illustrator. We're going to look at both options here and in fact, you will find both a PSD file and an Illustrator file in the support documents. With this particular JumpStart, there are pros and cons to working in either program. A big part of the decision factor is your comfort level with Photoshop or Illustrator. So let's have a look at both scenarios.

Understanding the Movie Clip Architecture - Part 2: Levels

Joseph Balderson

Ever get confused by all of the different ways that Flash organizes assets and information within your FLA and your SWF? Frames and timelines and levels and layers and depths, oh my! This series will sort it all out, and give you some great tips. If you ever wanted the skinny on the Flash movie clip architecture, this be da place, mon.

In Part 2 of this series we will look at levels: what they are, how to use them and what to watch out for in your Flash projects. We will look at library asset linkages in multilevel SWFs, and examine the difference between authortime and runtime objects. In addition we will look at the _lockroot property. As an advanced topic bonus we will also code an implementation of _lockroot for SWFs exported to Flash 6 using AS 1.0.

The Understanding the Movie Clip Architecture Series:
Understanding the Movie Clip Architecture - Part 1: The Almighty Movie Clip
Understanding the Movie Clip Architecture - Part 2: Levels

Full-Text Searching with MySQL and PHP

Gordon Mackay

As a general rule of thumb, web sites that contain a large amount of content adopt some form of fuctionality that allows users to search through content held within their database.

The methods for searching database content vary from server model to server model and can often be rather complicated. However, if your web site holds its content in a MySQL database, you can very quickly add a simple but effective search mechanism using MySQL's FULLTEXT indexing.

In this tutorial we will look at using FULLTEXT indexing to create a simple content search engine that can quickly be implemented on any web site running PHP and pulling content from a MySQL database.

3D Graphs Using Illustrator

Kim Dudley

A bunch of facts and figures on a page can be pretty boring to look at. Why not make them a bit more interesting using Illustrator's graph tools. Graphs are great for presenting complex information and numerical data in a simple and compact layout that is quick and easy to understand.

In this tutorial we will use Illustrator's Pie graph tool to create a colorful 3D pie chart. Use it in a layout for a brochure or on a web page and quickly spruce up that page full of numbers.

Build Seamless Background Image Tiles out of Shapes in Fireworks

Tiled background images where a small shape repeats across the web page have come back into style. There are web sites devoted to providing free patterns for you to download and apply to your sites, but what if you want to create your own pattern? You can create any shape you like, using your favorite graphics program, and then set it as a tiling background image using CSS. However, creating a pattern out of your shape that tiles well—without any seams or gutters—takes some work. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create seamless background patterns using Fireworks (but the principles can just as easily be used in Photoshop or any other graphics program). Note: This tutorial doesn't cover how to draw a shape or apply it to your page as a background. Rather, it shows how to take a shape that you want to turn into a seamless pattern and use Fireworks to do just that.

Check out the Article by CMX partner Zoe Gillenwater

Tips, Tricks and Dirty Cheats!

This week's Tip, Trick or Dirty Cheat is courtesy of CMX Partner Joseph Balderson

Precise Coordinates for Ruler Guides in Flash

Rather than positioning your ruler guides according to the ruler, which can lend itself to inaccuracy as you squint trying to hit that perfect pixel, use the Info panel to help. As you drag a guide from the Ruler, watch your cursor coordinates in the Info panel. Where you let go of the mouse is the precise vertical or horizontal position of the ruler. This ensures that your ruler guides are pixel perfectly positioned (say that fast five times!)

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!