Using AgentQL and Pipedream to Fix Missing RSS Feeds / / No Comments Last week I blogged about how I used AgentQL to scrape a web page, this blog to be precise, into pure data. If you don’t remember, AgentQL lets you pass a simple query string that is run against a web page and parsed into data. So for example, I was able to use this query on my home page to get a list of entries in pure data: { blogposts[] { url title date } } The REST API was incredibly easy, and I demonstrated in BoxLang how I could use AgentQL to turn my blog’s home page into a much simpler, smaller, HTML version. This of course begs the question, how else could we transform it? What about creating a RSS feed for a blog that doesn’t have one! Of course, if... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: AgentQL, Feeds, missing, Pipedream, using
Creating a Calendar with BoxLang / / No Comments Chalk this up to – "Here’s a simple idea for a quick and dirty blog post" that turned into a few hours of my holiday weekend. Not only that, this is probably the first of three or so blog posts so… buck up, buttercup, this is going to be a fun ride. A while ago I had written down (well, typed in, I use Microsoft To Do to record writing ideas) the idea of demonstrating calendar creation with BoxLang, specifically creating a dynamic calendar, with or without events, either entirely server-side, or using a combination of client-side code with BoxLang providing the API. For today’s post, I’m going to focus on (what I had assumed would be) the simplest version... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, calendar, creating
Links For You (7/13/25) / / No Comments My goal for this series of posts is to share interesting links every two weeks, and I’ve noticed that sometimes it feels like a split second between when these posts go out. I’m actually a week or so late on this one, which is fine, but dang does time go by quickly. Usually summer is pretty slow, but with the new job, new product launch, and lots of camps for the kids, I don’t feel like it’s ever let up. Despite that, I’ve managed to put in near ten hours of Star Wars Outlaws this weekend, so I’m still getting a chance to catch my breath. I put the controller down for a bit so I can share these fun links with yall. Enjoy! Using Transformers.js to Find Related... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 7/13/25, links
Simple Charting with BoxLang / / No Comments Building a BoxLang and want to know how to do charting with it? The answer is simple… don’t! I kid! Sorry, but for many, far too many, years now I’ve argued that ColdFusion should not include a charting library. It’s a server-side language, and in my (definitely not) humble opinion, client-side code doesn’t belong there. (I’m fine not worrying about that though – I trust that team knows their clients better than I do and knows what they’re doing.) The good news (again, imo) is that BoxLang doesn’t ship with an embedded client-side charting library. That being, I can absolutely see cases where you may be building a web app in BoxLang and want... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, Charting, simple
Extracting Data from Web Pages with AgentQL and BoxLang / / No Comments I discovered AgentQL a few weeks ago and have been thinking about it quite a bit. In a nutshell, it lets you perform queries against a web page. They’ve got a simple query language that kinda reminds me of GraphQL, but simpler. So for example, consider the page you are on right now – if I wanted to get the tags, I could use this query: { tags[] } And it would return: { "tags": [ "#development", "#boxlang" ] } What if I wanted the links? I could change my query to express this: { tags[] { label url } } And then get: { "tags": [ { "label": "#development", "url":... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: AgentQL, BoxLang, data, Extracting, from, Pages
Cleaning Up My Print View with CSS Media Queries / / No Comments I don’t know why this popped into my head today, but I was thinking about the print version of this page, and others, and what steps could be done to improve the result. Specifically, I was thinking a lot about what should be hidden from the print version as it has no real meaning on paper, or in PDF. With that in mind, I did a quick test – just how well do my pages print now? You can see the result below: Honestly, I think that’s just fine! And I give a lot of credit for that to the blog design I paid for and implemented years ago. That being said, note that on page 6, the real content ends and the entire rest of the page, and all of page 7, isn’t really important.... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Cleaning, Media, print, Queries, View
Using GenAI to Create a SDK from Sample Code / / No Comments I’ve been experimenting more and more with AI-assisted coding (not gonna call it vibe coding, even when I do), and the results have been incredibly interesting. Today, I decided to try something interesting – generating a SDK for an API. There are multiple tools out there that can convert an OpenAPI specification to an SDK (and those tools I’ve seen are pretty darn cool), but I wanted to attempt another route. Earlier this month I blogged about the new Foxit PDF APIs I’m working with. These APIs are all really simple, which is good of course, but when prepping for the release, I wanted to build code samples for every possible operation. I did so, and they’re up in... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: code, create, from, GenAI, Sample, using
Creating a Calendar with BoxLang – Part Deux / / No Comments Earlier this week I posted a quick look at building a simple calendar with BoxLang, specifically an HTML one meant for a web page of course. This was a bit complex due to the needs of creating a proper HTML table, but generally I was… ok with the result. Yeah that’s nice and vague, but there’s some code I could state at and think of alternatives for nearly forever and it’s ok to just put it down and walk away. So obviously, I’m returning to it today. Specifically, how to get events on the calendar. Sample Data I started off with some sample data. Initially I thought about finding something online, perhaps a list of holidays, but I really wanted something good for... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, calendar, creating, Deux, part