Amazon Order Arrival Date

I expected better from you, Amazon...

Fail.

Using Markdown in ColdFusion

Markdown is "a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)."

Here's a quick post describing how you can use Markdown in ColdFusion.

First, download MarkdownJ, a Java port of the Markdown conversion utility originally written in Perl. Here's a direct link to the download site: http://code.google.com/p/markdownj/.

Next, either put the markdownj.jar file in the ColdFusion classpath or download JavaLoader. I prefer using JavaLoader, so that's what my example will show.

Finally, some code:

<cfset paths = [ expandPath("markdownj-1.0.2b4-0.3.0.jar") ] />

<cfset javaLoader = new javaloader.JavaLoader(paths, true) />

<cfset markdownProcessor = javaLoader.create("com.petebevin.markdown.MarkdownProcessor").init() />

<cfset html = markdownProcessor.markdown("This is a *simple* example") />

<cfoutput>
#html#
</cfoutput>

The above code will produce the following HTML output:

<p>This is a <em>simple</em> example</p>

OK. So if that's the simple example, what about a more complex example?

# This is an h1

## This is an h2

This is a normal paragraph. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor
incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

*  This is a unordered list. Hanging indents allow
 you to wrap a list item onto multiple lines
* List item 2
* List item 3

---
These are horizontal rules
***

This is how to *italicize* something. This is _another way_ to italicize something.

This is how to **bold** something. This is __another way__ to bold something.

1. This is an ordered list
2. List item 2
3. List item 3

This is [an example](http://example.com/ "Title") inline link.

[This link](http://example.net/) has no title attribute.

> This is a block quote. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
> consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor
> incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

 This is a code block.
 To produce a code block in Markdown, simply
 indent every line of the block by at least
 4 spaces or 1 tab

And that's the basics of Markdown. Here's a full set of syntax rules: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax. Pretty sweet if you ask me.

My Mini Library

Link Dump (11-16-2010)

Facebook's New Real-time Messaging System: HBase to Store 135+ Billion Messages a Month
"Keeping with their small teams doing amazing things approach, 20 new infrastructures services are being released by 15 engineers in one year." Also, very interesting that Facebook chose HBase over their own Cassandra.

Instant Previews: Under the hood
Google uses base64 encoded data URIs to display the instant preview images rather than static images to reduce the number of web requests. "...even though base64 encoding adds about 33% to the size of the image, our tests showed that gzip-compressed data URIs are comparable in size to the original JPEGs."

10 Random CSS Tricks You Might Want to Know About
Target IE6 and IE7 without conditional comments: add a * before the property for IE7 and below, add a _ before the property for IE6 and below.

Yet Another Flavour of GORM: MongoDB
Very cool to see Grails support MongoDB, although it would be cooler if Hibernate had native support for more NoSQL databases.

Why Products Suck (And How To Make Them Suck Less)
"People only complain about things that matter to them; better to have complaints than disinterest. And not all complaints are equal: complaints that you don’t support feature X are far better than complaints about how feature Y sucks."

ColdMVC Plugins and Cells in Rails

I haven't posted in awhile because I haven't felt like I've had anything good to write about, but I've been reading Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware and one trick to getting over a writer's block is to just write for the sake of writing. So that's what I'm going to attempt to do in the coming weeks.

Lately I've been continuing to work on ColdMVC, my convention-based framework for ColdFusion inspired by Ruby on Rails and Grails. I've mainly been working on updating the plugin architecture for ColdMVC, with a focus on keeping things modular. I've also split out all of the plugins to their own repositories on GitHub to try to make things easier to manage. Right now they all follow a "ColdMVC-{Plugin}" naming convention and can be found here.

I'm also trying to get an official ColdMVC website up with some documentation and links to all the various plugins, but haven't quite got around to it yet.

On a final note, I've found a couple really good blog posts talking about cells in Ruby on Rails.

• Rails Misapprehensions: Cells don’t break MVC
  


• Rails Misapprehensions: What the f*ck is MVP?
  


• Let’s write a Reusable Sidebar Component in Rails 3!
  

I quickly threw together a cells plugin for ColdMVC. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet, but at the very least it's an interesting concept.