If you're a regular reader of my blog, you already know that I've been working for lynda.com since late January of this year. I started out as the Web Interface Architect and have since moved to a new position, Web Production Manager.

We've hired Dan as our Web Application Architect. (If JD can "out" my new job, I can certainly "out" Dan's!)

To those who know both of us, to answer your question... Yes, I am Dan's supervisor. Nope, that's nothing new. ;-)

We're building our web team and are looking to fill a few positions in the Austin, Texas vicinity. Please visit http://www.lynda.com/jobs/ for available openings.

There's a bunch more interviews up on SYS-CON.TV from MAX, including one with Dan Short who is the Lead Developer of Cartweaver, a coder extraordinaire, and more. (Yes, I am quite biased!)

Find out why Dan's asking for "more love" and from whom. View Dan's interview or check them all out, whatever you'd like...

It's almost time for the 2nd Annual March Mingle to be held this Wednesday, March 16th at Dave N Busters in San Diego, California. There's no cost to attend, with free pool and finger foods. Just bring a few bucks for drinks.

There will be about 20 user groups represented this year from all over Southern California, who's focus range from web design, to Macromedia products, to operating systems, and programming languages. ColdFusion, .Net, PHP and general geeks alike (that's a compliment) will gather to eat, drink, shoot pool, socialize and network from 6:30pm to 10pm.

Oh, and you don't have to be a user group memeber to attend either. So even if you're not a user group member, you should come and shoot some pool, meet some people, and possibly win some very cool door prizes.

For the Dreamweaver users attending, Site-Drive Inc. (DWfaq.com) is donating a bundle of all DWfaq.com Dreamweaver extensions and Application Dynamics Inc. (Cartweaver.com) is donating a license of Cartweaver as door prizes.

There will even be some not-necessarily-just-for-geeks prizes, a very cool Cuetec Black Graphite Cue and a poker chip set courtesy of FiveStarBilliards.com. There will be more door prizes from Macromedia, The O'Reilly User Group Program, Sterling Ledet and Associates, and That Technical Bookstore too. With as many prizes as there are to be given away, there's a pretty good chance of winning something.

We've been working on Cartweaver ASP for what seemed like an eternity, and now it is finally available. Dan posted on his blog that he's finally done. Ha, he's too funny. There will be customers to support, add-ons to create and who knows what else... The way I see it, we're never "done". <grin />

Writing a single toolbar to manage multiple Cartweaver server models was no easy task let me tell you. (It's ok if you give me a blank stare, nearly everyone else does when I start talking about coding extensions.) I laid the groundwork for multiple versions from day one, but there were things that I couldn't have accounted for that needed adjusting when the time came to actually support multiple server models.

As it turned out, the ASP version required several more fields in its Setup, so that brought along a whole new interface for the Setup that is similar to the Preferences dialog in Dreamweaver. Then "feature creep" set in and I started adding other new features to the extension. Before we knew it I'd added context help icons for nearly every field in each dialog that pop up a little window that tells you what the field is for and its valid values.

I added a bunch more little features here and there that most people would take for granted. I won't bore you with all of them, but one of them is that if you make a mistake in a certain field, the error message tells you which field, then switches to the right category for you and puts focus in that field so you can make the correction right away.

If you read my post yesterday you know all about DWfaq CCR. Cartweaver ASP uses DWfaq CCR's syntax for conditional regions already because Dan has been using CCR nearly 2 years now. So it was decided among the Cartweaver Team that it would be cool if Cartweaver ASP could render the tabbed regions like you see when using <cfif> in ColdFusion.

So we decided to go ahead and add an ultra-lite version of the CCR translator, of DWfaq's CCR for Cartweaver since I already had the work done. Cartweaver ASP customers will see "CWASP: If" in the tab, but if DWfaq's CCR is installed the If statement itself renders in the tab.

You're still reading this? Wow, that's great...thank you. Anyway, I don't want to bore you so I'll quit while I'm ahead. <wink />

I'm sure I'll end up babbling about Cartweaver here again soon. Thanks for listening...

Since I've been back from MAX it's been non-stop work! I've been coding extensions and making site updates all day and all night... Below is the official announcement of some the work I've been doing in addition to the soon-to-be-released Cartweaver 2 ASP.

If you have any questions please let me know!

CCR began nearly 2 years ago, but never got packaged for public use because I always had one thing or another going on. I can't express how pleased that I am to finally release it! I must take this opportunity to thank Dan for all his hard work and patience. I'd also like to thank Tom Muck for introducing me to writing translators the EDML way nearly 2 years ago. I wouldn't have been able to do CCR without you two...thanks guys! I'll add another tick to the tally of beers I owe you both... ;-)

Happy 28th birthday Dan! :-) Be sure to call your parents and thank them ;-)

Macromedia has announced Studio MX 2004. Naturally I'm most excited about Dreamweaver MX 2004. :-)

I've been trying to add the captions to the TODCON MX Vegas shots, but I'm getting file permission errors for creation and saving of the XML files that store the data. The error I get is to contact my host. Hopefully my host will be able to help me while he's on vacation... Otherwise we may be captionless! Oh no... Please be patient and if you see anything funky happening, it'll get fixed, don't worry. :-)

Had a great time working on some top secret stuff in San Francisco from the 14th thru 18th. (Try not to draw too many conclusions about why we were there.<wink />)There are some pictures in the gallery if you're interested.

While there, we visited Macromedia twice. Billy Ray took us for a long walk up many hills to have sushi. Well worth every step to get there. Billy also took us on a tour of Macromedia, which is spread out over 3 buildings. Our first visit was Thursday and there were hardly anyone left. Apparantly they all went to go see Matrix 2. Didn't anyone tell them we were coming? Oh, the nerve. :-) So we returned on Friday and met many of the Macromedians we exchange email with or see on the newsgroup, including John Dowdell, George Fox, Heather Hollander, Chris Valliquet, Donald Booth, Jeff VonWard, and Scott Unterberg. (Please excuse any mispellings!) It is always nice to put names and faces together.

Only bad thing about the trip was that my laptop died on Saturday night so I didn't get much done after that happened. Luckily Dell will be here by tomorrow (hopefully) to fix it. Meanwhile, I'm stuck on my desktop...

What an evening... Sushi, then Godiva Chocolate Cheesecake ice cream from the container, then a glass of fine champagne while watching a chick flick with a good friend. To finish of the night, I'll be listening to some tunes, and working on a Server Behavior that I'll hopefully send to beta tomorrow.

By the way, I had a couple confessions (see yesterday's post), but none of them turned out to be the culprit. I guess they were just guilty, and not paying attention to the timestamp...busted!

Wow, what a night. Matt (my cousin "Nasby", a radio DJ in Palm Springs) and I were up almost all night working on the new layout and it is looking pretty darn good if I do say so myself... I think I got to bed at about 3:30am and was up by about 8:30. Been working on the site all day. Can't wait to get it finished and online!

I wrote a server format suite yesterday and so far it seems to be working perfectly. I'll package it up and put it into beta by tomorrow. As for the server behavior, I'm getting some feature requests that are going to be extremely difficult to implement. I have to decide if I want to release it as is and add features later or take the time to do them now. I used to be the one that came up with wild feature requests now the tables are turned I feel guilty for my crazy requests. They say what goes around, comes around...well I'm getting it all back now!

Over 24 hours later, my craving is getting satisfied... :-)

The extension I was working on is now in beta. Danilo's trying hard to add features but I'm not budging until I get more votes. ;-)

Finally! It's taken quite a bit of work, but I've done it. I've written a really cool Server Behavior and translator that uses some fancy shmancy conditional code that's new to extensibility in MX (all undocumented stuff of course!). Thanks to Tom Muck for pointing me in the right direction!

This extension is commercial, but I'll have a light version available for free soon as I am able to put that together. (So far this is ASP/VBScript only. I may do a ColdFusion version, but no promises!) As usual, you'll hear all about it here first.

The moment I've been waiting for since July has finally come and I barely know what to say... Dreamweaver MX Killer Tips by Joseph Lowery and yours truly is now available!

Today is my dad's birthday. Happy Birthday Dad, I hope I made you proud :-)

We're official! Dan has just announced our DWfaq Date/Time Server Formats on the newsgroups and on DWfaq. Thanks to everyone for your support and encouragement.

We're only a few hours away from release now. Just working on setting up the store for the product and some last minute touches on the help file. We asked our beta testers and several people who were shown our promotional material (that sounds so professional but all it means is screenshots and demos) and got a wide range of price suggestions. Prices suggested were as low as $20 and as high as $65 (I'm not gonna count the one guy who said $150! We think he was a little too excited and is welcome to pay that much if he'd like :-)). We've settled on "The bargain price of $29.95". Those asked all said that it would take them hours and hours to figure out the ASP and they'd not have the convenience of Dreamweaver to use the code again (except by snippets which isn't as convenient). Dan and I both put a lot of days and time (pun intended) into this one. We hop people find it as useful as we have. :-)

105 server formats! We're in beta now, and hoping for a realease probably on Friday.

Ok, before I go, I had to take a few screenshots of the formats to show you. This is the current (and likely final) layout for all the menu options in the DWfaq Date/Time Formats menu. Here's what the Edit Formats List looks like with the editable DWfaq Formats listed. Last but not least, here is a sample of one of the dialogs used to make your own variations of the DWfaq Date/Time formats. Okay, now I'm really leaving...

Server Formats are all done. I just need to make the final MXP and get it into Beta. I'll do that soon as I get back from shopping. Yep, I'm playing hookie from work for a few hours to spend time shopping and have dinner with my son and husband. Of course when I get in I'll get back to work as always.

Whew! There sure are a lot of server formats in this suite... I'm up to 86 built in ones and have yet to decide what to include for the Past format and Future format. That'll put us definitely over the 100 mark easily. I started doing the math to figure out the potential number of custom format (not counting delimiters as a factor in difference) and I lost count after 2,600. I'm too tired for math right now anyhow :-). It may sound like overkill, but we wanted our customers to be able to have any possible regional format they could imagine, so that's why I built in all the customization stuff. Aside from deciding the defaults for those 2 formats, I'm all done. I'll consult with Dan on those, add them in, and then release the MXP to our beta testers. We'll be ready to release this sometime this week. More on that soon as beta feedback starts rolling in. ;-)

The Server Formats saga continues... I've thought up several more Server Formats that will be done after the Date/Time ones as separate products. I'm about 1/2 way through making the Date/Time ones now. Here's a screenshot of what I've done so far. Yeah I know it looks like a lot of menus, but if we don't do it this way, the main menu would be way too long. We'll have demos up and screenshots within the next few days. We'll run it through some beta testing, and in a week or less it should all be ready.

I know I mentioned a potential price in a previous post I made... Well, so much has changed and improved that we'll have to account for that of course. We've not decided on a price yet, but I'll let you know when we do. (Don't worry it won't be expensive.) If you have any questions about the Server Formats, please feel free to ask me.

We just had a case of Feature Creep. Dan and I spent a whole hour talking about all the potential Server Formats we could add to the suite. This has grown exponentially... by how much, I'm not exactly sure but it is going to be really cool. We'll be letting users create their own formats from predefined ones. For instance, we supply you with Current Month, Previous Month, and Next Month. You could then make your own that will do 6 months ago, or 3 months from now. I spent a bunch of time playing with Weekday Name earlier just for fun. That one can be used to figure out things like what day of the week you were born based on your date and year of birth. Lots of fun to be had with these Server Formats. Stay tuned for more info as it becomes available...

We've added 2 more Server Formats to the list. They are: 13. Seconds Stripper With Dots - 9:50 P.M. 14. Seconds Stripper Lowercase Without Dots - 9:50 pm

You'll notice that the difference betwen 11 thru 14 is whether or not there are dots and if the time of day is lowercase or uppercase. These will all be found under a Date/Time» Seconds Stripper submenu. I've done 11 thru 14 now so that's 4 done and 10 to go.

Dan was proud. :-) He also helped me to better my function as well. Within a matter of a few minutes, we decided to put together a suite of 12 VBScript Date/Time formats that we'll be selling from DWfaq. Right now we're planning on $10 and the list of formats are currently:

1. Week Start
2. Week End
3. Week Range
4. Weekday Name
5. Month Name
6. Days In Month
7. First Day of Month
8. Previous Month
9. Next Month
10. Last Day of Month
11. Seconds Stripper - 9:50 PM
12. Seconds Stripper Lowercase - 9:50 p.m.

We should be done with it in only a few days. Of course Dan and I will both mention it in our blogs when it becomes available. With luck, I'll figure out the ColdFusion equivelants and release those seperately.

Dan's gonna be so proud...I actually wrote my first VBScript function late Saturday night. I spent most of my day on Sunday with my friend for her birthday, but my mind was on getting home to work on converting the function (which I'd already made into a working Server Behavior) into a Server Format. What's the difference you ask? Well first let me tell you what my function does. Dreamweaver offers Date/Time Formats through the Format column of the Bindings panel. None of them output the time in a 12 hour clock format without seconds. For example, look here at my blog. See that the time for this entry is 5:39:27 AM? What if I wanted to remove the seconds so it shows 5:39 AM? I'd use my new function ;-). I originally made it a Server Behavior, but the problem with that is, rather than convert the selectiom. DW assumes I have yet to enter the field on the page. Second problem is that the Server Behaviors panel is cluttered with things enough as it is, and really shouldn't have something that is just done for the sake of formatting. So, I set out to build a Server Format. Now that I've done it once, I think I'm unstoppable... I just need to read up on how to package a Server Format because it requires adding to the Formats.xml file, and I'm all set. Next, I'll see if I can tackle the same concept for ColdFusion, and I'll release both when they're ready. I needed to apply this code to at least 10 pages and I wasn't about to handcode it each time or use Snippets. So "necessity is the mother of extensions", also known as my need to be lazy ;-). As Laurie put it to me on MSN, "laziness is the mother of extensions". Stay tuned for an announcement for the release of "Seconds Stripper" some time (much) later today...

Yesterday was my niece Francesca's 6th birthday. We spent most of the day getting ready for that with last minute gift shopping and all. I'm way behind on work now though, and shouldn't have stayed there so late, but hubby wanted to hang with his family. Actually, for a nice change, I had a pleasant visit.

Today Dan helped me learn how to make ZIP files on the fly so my co-author could download screenshots and not have to have FTP access to the server. I'm not quite done with that page yet, but I sure learned quite a bit.

I'll be spending the rest of today catching up on the book. I've a bunch of writing to get done over the next couple of days... fun!

I've spent today working on the archive for records older than 3 days. It has been quite challenging but I think I finally got it. I'll know for sure once I add a few more records and do some further testing. This time however I had to enlist the help of Dan. Thanks Dan! :-) My issue was that I was getting bad dates returned by the SQL I used. I needed to enclose the date variables in # marks and that did the trick. A few more tweaks and I was good to go.

Woo hoo; I did it! I figured out how to make it so I can have multiple entries for the same day here and only make the date show up once. I'm so proud, LOL! I didn't even harrass Dan for help. Next I need to get the navigation going and then the archives. Fun, fun, fun... I still wish this was being done in CF and I just might convert it for practice later on. After all, absolutely everything is stored in the database. It would really only be a matter of changing the recordsets, changing some If statments to CFIF and changing the page's file extension to .cfm (at least I think that's about all it should take). We'll see though..