I'm frequently digging up documentation for various CFML functions. The key, for me, is the convenience and ease with which I can integrate these lookups into my workflow. There are a few ways to do this, depending on your preferences, but I'm happy with the process I've settled on, as it provides fast access to both Adobe's ColdFusion documentation and cfdocs.org.

What's the name of that function? The one that converts the opening numbers of a string into a numeric value? I always forget. For the record, it's val().

I'm making an effort, when I learn something while resolving an issue, to document the process. I'd rather not have to muddle through the haze of déjà vu trying to solve the same problem a second and third time. The writing both helps me learn and serves as a resource when I forget. This is one of those "documentation" posts; hopefully others find it helpful as well.

As evidenced by the dearth of posts, life, both personally and professionally, has been extremely busy of late. I don't see it slowing down any time in the short term. However, I wanted to document my process of moving from LastPass to 1Password, and converting my LastPass folders into 1Password tags. This is more for my own reference than anything else. The process wasn't terribly smooth, but I've been thrilled with making the switch.

The TL;DR of this post, which should be readily apparent from the title, is that Mailgun provides an excellent service for email validation. Most of us don't want or need to know the details of the RFCs; we want an easy way to validate email addresses, so we can get on with building our apps.

While struggling to write a different post, I procrastinated by deciding that, to boost my productivity, I needed the preview of the post to live-reload. It was actually really easy to set up (and it's very cool to use).

This is just an update on the cfscript lexer for Rouge. Here's the TLDR: It's available! Want to get started? Read on.

Well, I submitted by PR for adding CFScript to Rouge, so we'll see how that turns out. I only worked on CFScript - I don't have much use for tag highlighting, at present, and that kept the scope of the project more manageable. I was pretty happy with the result, though it did take more time than I had anticipated. CFML certainly has its quirks, and I even stumbled across a few operators that I was unaware of.

This wasn't supposed to be long post - just a quick write-up on a helpful function that I stumbled upon. It never ceases to amaze me when I encounter an aspect of ColdFusion (function, feature, tool, etc) that's new to me, but has been around for years. This time, the function is callStackGet(), which was apparently introduced in ColdFusion 10, but I had never encountered before.

We recently had the need to validate rich text input in one of our applications. In the past we've rolled our own validation, using various regex strings. While this worked, we're always looking for better ways to solve problems, which is why I was intrigued to find the isSafeHTML and getSafeHTML functions. These were added in ColdFusion 11, but I had not heard of them. While we ultimately didn't end up using them, that's how I fell down this particular rabbit hole.