Presenting at Chamber Business Academy

Posted At : November 4, 2011 2:16 PM | Posted By : Tami
Related Categories: Aiken, HHWD, Internet, Newbies, Clients: Back to Basics, Small Business, Business Builders

I will be presenting 2 'Touch-a-Tablet' seminars at the Greater Aiken Chamber of Commerce on November 16th. This is a hands-on seminar to get business owners familiar with tablets and what mobile devices can do to help their business productivity.

Topics covered include

  • Mobile and Business Trends -- Where we're heading
  • An Apples to Android Comparison -- What's the difference in operating systems
  • The cost of devices and service
  • Business Applications and Apps available
  • Hands-on iPads and Android tablets to play with
  • How Tablets, Smartphones, PCs, and Apples can increase your business productivity

If you are in the Aiken, SC or Augusta, GA area and are interested in what mobile devices can do for your business, please register for the event. There will be 2 sessions, 8-10am and 3-5pm at the Aiken Chamber of Commerce Office on 121 Richland Ave. E, in beautiful Aiken, SC. You can register for the event by clicking on one of the two Business Academy links on the Aiken Chamber Events web page.

Comments (0) | Print | Send | del.icio.us | Digg It! | Linking Blogs | 221 Views

Saving Form Variables as Session Variables the Wrong Way

Posted At : October 11, 2011 6:27 AM | Posted By : Tami
Related Categories: ColdFusion, Quick & Dirty Tricks, Newbies, snippets

A student approached me the other day. She were gathering search criteria in a form and wanted to save the criteria to a session variable. But when she moved from page to page, her session variable lost its values.

<cfif isdefined('form.submit')>
<cfset session.saveformvars = structnew()>
<cfset session.saveformvars = form>
</cfif>

The issue is with the the variable scoping that takes place on a form structure. Forms have a local "non-persistent" variable scope (they are only specific to that page, or the page called from the form and don't hang around).

Session variables are by nature persistent, or can exist beyond a single page, lasting for the user's session length.

When the entire form structure was saved as a session variable structure as above, that session structure received the same scoping as the form structure.

So...

<cfset session.saveformvars = form>
<!--- makes session.saveformvars now a local scoped variable and not a session scoped variable --->

Since this student wanted to only save those form fields that were had been completed and do some data tweaking on the information, I had her rewrite the snipped of code to loop through the form, pick out the variables to keep, then save those to the session variable.

<cfset session.plansearch = structnew()>
<cfloop collection="#form#" item='key'>
<!--- pick out null fields, and son't save the submit button or the "FieldNames" key from the form struct --->
<cfif form[key] neq '' and form[key] gt 0 and key neq 'fieldnames' and key neq 'submit'>
<cfset "session.plansearch.#key#" = form[key]>
</cfif>
</cfloop>

Now this student had her trimmed form list saved as a structure in the format she wanted.

Comments (7) | Print | Send | del.icio.us | Digg It! | Linking Blogs | 401 Views

Why Linking Matters

Posted At : December 18, 2008 9:13 AM | Posted By : Tami
Related Categories: Newbies, Google

Google no longer publicly discloses the number of pages it has ranking, but the estimate is now over 1 trillion pages¹ (1,000,000,000,000). That is an incomprehensible number to imagine. So getting your site at the top of the food chain is not only important, it's urgent! How can you be competitive with that many other sites out there?

By creating a site that is informative to the visitor AND has supporting qualities that aid automated readers (search engines and disability assisting tools). Links, Alt-tags on photos, Title, Keywords, Descriptions, as well as text content are needed for search engines to be able to pick up your site and in Google's case, filter out the other non-related sites so that yours is chosen when a user enters a search query.

Links are those 'connections' that users click on to go somewhere on a site. They can come in a variety of forms, images, buttons, text, even CSS regions. Still there are two major categories of links: Internal and External (or 'inbound').

Internal links are those links on your site that refer to anther page of your own site or domain. These navigate through your site. Search engines use these to index pages that are on your site.

External or inbound link are links that other sites (not your domain) link to you. A search engine that is crawling THAT other site, will see the link to your site and sip off to your site as well. The more external links your site has, the more potential for user traffic to come to your site and the more potential for search engines to revisit your site. In Google's case, the larger the number external links a site has, the more popular Google considers it to be. Thus, the higher ranking it is likely to get.

For more information on Google Link philosophy, You may want to visit Google's Blog 'Straight From the Source' material:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/links-information-straight-from-source.html

______________________________

Footnotes: 1. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html, July 2008

Comments (3) | Print | Send | del.icio.us | Digg It! | Linking Blogs | 957 Views
BlogCFC was created by Raymond Camden. This blog is running version 5.9.1.002. Contact HHWD