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Stressed? See the Sheriff

Nothing takes a stressful day and heightens it quiet like having a visit from the Sheriff’s department first thing in the morning. So we are late out the door to get Sarah to school. Evan, Molly and I lead out and I see a non-descript car sitting in the cove. Driver spots me and rolls over to the driveway. Oh hell. I prepare myself for bad news. Sure enough, it’s a deputy here to serve a summons to court on a bad debt but not for me. He gets out. Molly lunges and barks (brilliant!). He’s looking for my ex-wife and despite the number of times I have communicated back to the company trying to collect on her that she hasn’t been here for the better part of a decade, they still tried to serve her at this address. The deputy was very kind and polite and offered to riddle the records with notes that she doesn’t live here. He said hopefully the collection agency will stop bothering us.

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Today’s Technical Challenge

As a web application developer, I am often asked to put a WYSIWYG editor into the application so that the end-user can use the application without having to learn HTML and CSS. There are plenty of free and commercial wysiwyg editors available. (Note to developers: bookmark that link!)

These editors are designed to be customized for your application. You can typically control what buttons appear, what the interface looks like, and so forth. My challenge is to not only change the appearance of the editor, but when the end-user begins typing I need to have that type appear in a default font family (Arial), font size (12pt), and justified to the left. That means if they cut and paste content the defaults need to be applied.

The editor I chose for this project was TinyMCE. I find it far easier to implement than the ever popular FCKeditor (and no..those are the developer’s initials). My editor of choice is typically Xinha.

I have found numerous references to setting content_css : "defaultcontent.css" in the tinyMCE.init and this does change the text as the end-user is typing but the font family select and the font size select menus remain at their default values. When you save, the font family and font size are not saved. Very frustrating.

Interesting!

May 3, 2007 – Adobe, to embed FCKeditor in ColdFusion 8

Adobe has chosen FCKeditor as one of the great new features of its next major release of ColdFusion, code-named Scorpio. Some reviews of it can be found on the web.

For ColdFusion programmers, it will be as easy as defining a tag to see FCKeditor displaying all its power on their pages, right out of the box.
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