Here’s a great article on how to use the new SQL Server 2008 geography data type for proximity searches aka zip code radius search.   I’ve used many of diffent ways to run these searches, including the ones provided by the zip code data providers, but this solution has got to be the fastest I’ve run across.   If you use SQL Server 2008 and need a quick and simple proximity search based on zip code, then you have to read this article:  http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/DataMgmt/DataDesign/sql-server-2008-proximity-search-with-th

If you have SQL 2005, then read this  article:  http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/DataMgmt/DataDesign/sql-server-zipcode-latitude-longitude-pr

I love finding solutions that make life easier. 

Good article on how to remove the “Get smart with the Thesis WordPress Theme from DIYthemes.” from your Thesis Theme install here. One small update to it though.

To clarify you need to: 

1. Make sure that the /wp-content/themes/thesis/custom-sample directory is renamed to /wp-content/themes/thesis/custom
2. edit the custom_functions.php in the the new directory.

That’s it.  Pretty simple.

After doing some searching on google, it turns out that you can run PHP 32 bit on Windows 2003 R2 64 Bit using the FastCGI Extension for IIS 6.0.   Also, using FastCGI is actually faster the the ISAPI dll.  The steps for setting PHP up to use the FastCGI Extension are pretty straight forward.

1. Download & Install the FastCGI Extension for IIS 6.0 from iis.net.  Both 32 bit and 64 are available.
2. Download the latest PHP build from PHP.net
3. Install PHP

During the install, make sure to select IIS FastCGI in the web server setup.

PHP Setup - Web Server Selection

After installing PHP, follow the directions found at:

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/247/using-fastcgi-to-host-php-applications-on-iis-60/

I’m seeing great performance running under this setup as well.   Hope this helps you.

Good Reference Sites:

http://devzone.zend.com/article/2710-FastCGI-and-PHP-A-Users-Story

http://blogs.msdn.com/vijaysk/archive/2007/11/16/iis-6-0-fastcgi.aspx

http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2006/09/29/Making-PHP-rock-on-Windows_2F00_IIS.aspx

I love the new AJAX functionality in ColdFusion 8, but I am running into problems using it.

As mentioned in Ben Forta’s blog you can use the BIND= attribute on a CFSELECT tag to populate the data from a CFC using AJAX.

The problem I had was that even using Ben’s samples I could not get the data to populate.  After alot of tinkering I finally got it to work by remove the onRequest() method from Application.cfc.  Why this affects this functionality is a mystery to me.  Really for the application I’m working on it’s not a big problem but on other projects it could be.

My second part of the problem is that I have a cfc directory that is OUTSIDE of the application’s root directory.  For example:

/website_root
/components
/images

Then I map /cacfc to /components and reference my cfc’s by prepending cacfc to the component IE. cacfc.database.data.   This works great as I can share components among applications easily enough.  But when I call the cfc with the bind attribute of the CFSELECT, ColdFusion looks for the cfc in the root directory.   Here’s an example:



The AJAX debugger looks for the cfc /school.cfc which obviously doesn’t exist.   If I move the cfc to a directory under the web root (ie /cfc) it works.

Either I am doing something terribly wrong or these are 2 bugs in CF8.