Upcoming Speaking Engagements, and Code Break / / No Comments With full-time employment being a bit up in the air this year, I’ve not submitted to nearly as many conferences as I have in the past (but hey, my rejections are at an all-time low!), but I’ve actually got not one, but two upcoming talks this month. First up I’ll be giving an introduction to BoxLang to the Mid-Michigan CFUG user group on October 21st. You can find details here, https://mmcfug.org/. This meeting is 100% open to the public so if you’ve been curious about BoxLang from my posts here, you can get yourself a good intro later this month. Next, and this is somewhat new for me, but I’ll be giving a presentation on something near and dear to my heart, developer... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Break, code, Engagements, Speaking, Upcoming
BoxLang Quick Tips – Better Web Debugging / / No Comments Today’s BoxLang Quick Tip is incredibly quick, but also, really darn useful and something I had wished I knew earlier. The BoxLang MiniServer is a lightweight web server that you can use to test your web applications. I say lightweight but it’s gotten some really good improvements over the past few months, including flexible URL rewriting. Today I’m going to talk about something that’s going to be really useful to those of you who, like me, make mistakes from time to time. As with most of my BoxLang Quick Tips, you can skip to the video version at the bottom of the post. Let’s consider a BoxLang web application that consists of a grand total of one file: <bx:script>... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: better, BoxLang, Debugging, Quick, tips
I Know What You Did Last Summer (with val town) / / No Comments With Halloween a few weeks away, it’s officially spooky season. My wife and I usually plan our costumes months in advance (mine’s been ready since July or so) and we love decorating the house (and yard) with all kind of fun and darkly horrific decorations. Two years ago, I built a great Halloween-themed web app using Glitch and Cloudflare: I Know What You Did Last Summer (With Glitch and Cloudflare) Unfortunately, Glitch is no more. These things happen and I have to thank the Glitch folks for creating an incredibly cool resource and also helping people safely migrate off their platform. One of my projects was the Halloween project from two years ago. While the serverless function... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: know, last, summer, Town
Creating a GenAI Document Summarization Workflow in ColdFusion / / No Comments So this post comes from – I’m mostly sure – me forgetting to show a simple, but powerful demo at my presentation recently at the ColdFusion Summit. It’s nice and simple, but pretty darn useful so I decided to write a quick blog post about it and highlight the code. What’s a Document Workflow? Simply put, a document workflow is any process you would use to handle incoming documents. As an example, and one I’ve built many times over the past few years, you can use a workflow to convert all your incoming documents into PDF for easier handling. pdfRest has APIs for this and I’ll likely share a demo of them soon. (ColdFusion itself can convert HTML, PPTX,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: ColdFusion, creating, Document, GenAI, Summarization, Workflow
Building a Document Q&A System with Google Gemini / / No Comments Document summarization is a powerful and pretty darn useful feature of generative AI, but a proper "question and answer" system can really enable users to interact with a document. This is why you see various document viewing apps, like Acrobat, adding these features to their programs. I thought I’d take a look at building such a system via a simple web app to see how difficult it would be, and honestly, it wasn’t that bad. Having this in your own web app, versus an external vendor, gives you more control over the experience as well. Here’s what I built. The Stack The web app lets you drag and drop a PDF into the page, it then renders a preview of the PDF on the left... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: building, Document, Gemini, Google, system
ColdFusion (2025)’s CFOAUTH Tag / / No Comments Back in May of last year, I wrote up a blog post on ColdFusion’s oauth tag. This was based on a feature from way back in ColdFusion 11 that I thought I’d take a look at to see if it was useful. I’m not going to repeat the entire previous blog post, but in general… it was almost something I’d recommend. The tag did a good job of handling creating the right oauth link for you. So you could (after setting stuff up with your provider of course) drop the tag on a page, and when the user hit it, they would be prompted to login with the third party provider. When returned, the tag would handle getting the access token and such and giving you a nice little structure of data... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 2025's, CFOAUTH, ColdFusion
New Web Thing – Wander / / No Comments I’ve built a few web games in the past (IdleFleet and Cat Herder are two examples), but what I’m sharing today doesn’t really fit into the category of a game. This is going to sound terribly pretentious and I apologize in advance, but what I’m sharing today is more an "experience" for lack of a better term. It’s part technical exploration, and part cathartic dumping, and just kinda weird. But honestly, the web needs more weird and I’m happy to contribute to that. As with most of the things I’ve built, I think it’s more interesting if you experience it first before taking a look at what’s behind it, so with that in mind, click this... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: thing, Wander
Recognizing Abundant, Deficient, and Perfect Numbers / / No Comments Ok, this post falls into the "I’ll never actually use this again" category, which frankly, my normal readers know happens all the time, but it was a fun little diversion and a reminder of why I used to love math so much. Yesterday I found out that one of my kids’ homework was to look at a set of numbers and determine if they were abundant, deficient, or perfect. Right now you are probably (at least I know I was) asking, "what in the actual heck is that???" A quick bit of Googling turned up this explainer that basically boils it down to a simple principal. Given a number, find all the divisors of that number, excluding the number itself, and add them up. If the... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Abundant, Deficient, numbers, Perfect, Recognizing