Tag: Web Development

Added MT-Notifier

After putting it off for awhile, I finally got Movable Type notifications to work. I now know when comments are posted instead of having to obsessively check my blog configuration page. After that I figured it wasn’t that far a stretch to open up notifications for everyone else.

To that end, I installed MT-Notifier from Everitz Consulting. If you would like to subscribe to a particular post, just check the “Subscribe to This Entry” box on the individual entry page. You have to confirm your desire to do so, but then you’re in business.

You see, I don’t suffer from delusions that everybody is eager to subscribe to Aarrggghh!!. However occasionally people ask questions in my comments, and I’m never sure what the etiquette is. Do I email them back, or do I just comment back and let them find it when they feel like it? Now, I don’t have to worry, the reader can make that decision for themselves.

Jim Davis for Govenor (Florida)

I’m happy to share with everyone that ColdFusion is being used to make the world a better place… or at least to make Florida Democratic again.

The crew at Jim Davis for Governor ’06 have created a good looking site that uses ColdFusion, and blogging to reach the state of Florida. The cool thing I like about it is that the main blogger, Matthew Thornton, (disclaimer: a good friend of mine, who comments here from time to time,) gets the blogging medium. If you read the blog, it reads like a blog. It’s got a the right tone and content, as opposed to other candidate blogs that are just a collection of press releases. It’s not just me that thinks so. This guy said it too..

Congratulations to Matt, and the whole crew at the Jim Davis campaign. Now it’s time to win.

Future of Flashpaper

The Internets are a twitter with talk of the now finalized merger of Adobe and Macromedia. Now can I get an answer to the question I’ve wanted to ask, but knew no one would answer:

What’s going to happen to Flashpaper?

I get that pdf is the defacto standard for sharing documents. However, Acrobat Reader is such overkil for reading documents on the web. On the other hand Flashpaper is such a fast, lightweight, and effective way of consuming specially formatted documents on the web. Up until yesterday, I assumed that Adobe would incorporate a superior product into the fold, and make a Flash version of Acrobat Reader or something for consumption on the web. But after Coke broke my heart yesterday, I’m not so sure that superior products win out.

Now that forward looking statements are no longer prohibited, somebody out there better spill it.

ColdFusion and Valid Code

I ‘ve gotten oddly obsessive about webstandards and valid XHTML. The problem is that many of ColdFusion‘s features that make web development easy also make very unstandard xhtml. In order to get this site to validate I had to:

  • Replace Flash <cfform> tags with properly styled XHTML forms.
  • Remove all <cfdump> tags
  • Replace all embedded Flash with Flash embedding using the Satay Method.
  • Clean all Movable Type created content.

Finally when all was said and done, I have one page left that won’t validate. It’s a page on which I use <cfchart>. Nothing I’ve been able to do seems to fix that. I know there are plenty of people who don’t think validation is vital but a large company like Macromedia should shoot for valid output.

Yet Another New Design

As you may, or may not have been able to see, this site has been redesigned. Nothing big, I just got bored of the old look.

I’ve removed Sifr. Not because of a problem with the technology, just because I didn’t need it.

Explore. Enjoy. If anything looks wrong (or I didn’t format for your browser) drop me a line.

Movable Type 3.2 Finally!

Powered by Movable Type 3.2

Finally, Six Apart got back to me with a fix. Under their new fix, I did not have to involve my hosting provider. They gave me a customized Bootstrap.pm, and required me to create an IIS virtual directory. It was a much more elegant solution than the one they gave me on the first try, and it actualy worked, so that was pretty cool. It has something to do with IIS not setting the working directory for cgi correctly.

So onward with Movable Type 3.2!

Movable Type 3.2 You Torment Me!

Movable Type 3.2 won’t work for me. I got support from Six Apart, but the fix ended up breaking all cgi-scripts in my server space. Six Apart gave me a detailed fix that involved changes to the IIS web site properties. It seems like it shouldn’t be that involved a fix.

I have to say Dataride, my hosting provider, has been really cool with this. They’ve been much faster to repond then Six Apart. So once again I heartily recomend them for Cold Fusion Hosting.

Oh well, cognitive dissonance has set in, and now I must have it! I will make it work. As soon as Six Apart gets back to me… whenever that is.

Microsoft MOM

Part of my job is to manage multiple Cold Fusion servers. All told my count is at 14, some are running Cold Fusion 6.1 some are ruuning Cold Fusion 7. Luckily as of now, all are running Windows 2003, as opposed to 2000. Keeping track of them has been hard, and I’ve had to come up with some custom solutions to do so.

However it looks like that’s about to change as we’re getting more serious about using Microsoft Operations Manager. I’ve been using it for a couple of days and I have to say I’m shocked at how good it is. I’ll write more as I go on, but for now check it out.

Microsoft Operations Manager.

Cfeclipse

I think I’m finally converted to Cfeclipse. For those of you that don’t know, it’s an open source Cold Fusion IDE. I’ve been updating an old project and rebuilding the interface from scratch. I can honestly say that I’ve probably sped up my development by at least 50%, especially when dealing with CFC’s. It might not be for everyone, but I would recommend it to anyone who programs CFML for a living. So let me break down the pros and cons, and you can judge for yourself if you want to give it a try.

Pros:

  • Loads faster and seems more stable than Dreamweaver
  • Code Folding, code folding, code folding.
  • Doesn’t require registry altering install, so easy to remove.
  • New feature sets install very easily.
  • Features are added often.

Cons:

  • Requires Java, and can be temperamental to install if you don’t have the right version.
  • Doesn’t appear to like UNC notation.
  • It’s an open source beta, so your stability mileage may vary.
  • Doesn’t handle web design.

If you’re comfortable doing a little work to get your programming environment setup and mostly code CF instead of designing (or you’re properly using web standards to yield lightweight interface code,) then I would tell you to give it a shot. On the other hand if moving to Firefox seemed a bit edgy for you, I would stick to Dreamweaver.

Cfeclipse.org doesn’t have the best instructions for installing it, but you can find them at the old cfeclipse.tigris.org site.