I play a little football in my spare time. It’s not hard core. In fact, it’s co-ed flag football, but it’s a heck of a lot of fun, good exercise, and surprisingly dangerous.
Just like with any group I’m involved with, I see the benefit of getting a website up. In this case, Excel spreadsheets were being emailed around to a couple hundred people just to get the schedule and stats distributed. A simple website would solve this. It didn’t take long to get a quick site thrown together with our schedule, game results, individual stats, and a few photos.
Adobe really needs to get this right. Bolt, the soon to be released IDE for ColdFusion, is the talk of the town in the CF community, and let me tell you – it better be good. I have to say, I’m not really that pleased that this is an Eclipse based product. I’ve almost completely dropped Eclipse lately due to instability – at least on the Mac. I think that Adobe could have made this product a stand-alone product on its own platform, and still allowed it to be extensible (If you have not heard, you will be able to write extensions for Bolt with CFML, which is all kinds of awesome).
Am I the only one who just doesn’t understand why so many ColdFusion developers are jumping to Flex? I’m aware that my opinion on Flex and its place may be unpopular in the ColdFusion community, but I’m wiling to entertain the possibility that I may be wrong, so bear with me.
I’ve always thought that as a ColdFusion developer, I should use CF for my own site. It wasn’t even something I’d thought about. I’ve used both BlogCFC and Mango Blog for my own site, and still use both on various other sites. I’ve been really happy with both, and have no plans to swap them out on any other sites.
I found it really easy to add all kinds of functionality using ColdFusion as a blogging platform, and that’s why I’ve stuck with the CF blogs so far. But then I did a little work on my cousin’s blog last year (check it out if you like illustration), and was intrigued. Since then, WordPress has made a bunch of updates, and the admin interface is simply beautiful. I found a very simple template, made some changes to the CSS, and everything worked. My last step is usually to bite the bullet and open up my new sites in IE6 – to see how late I will be up fixing it. For the first time ever, I had absolutely nothing to fix. I know this is due to the good work of the template designer, and not necessarily WordPress, but it speaks to the magnitude of people working on this platform.
Instead of using all the URL shortening services out there, I thought it would be just as easy to write my own, and retain my own domain in the URL. My domain name is not that short, but since I would only be using it to redirect to my own pages, I would only need a few characters to create the links. I use Apache as a webserver, and Mango Blog as an engine. This method, however, also works with BlogCFC, another popular, and awesome, ColdFusion blog engine. Both these blog engines use UUIDs as primary keys in the blog entry tables. I added an integer field in the entry table called “pk”, and made it the primary key with auto-increment turned on. This gives all your blog entries a numeric index. The next step is to create a file somewhere on your site with some code to redirect requests that use your URL shortening service. I called it trimURL.cfm.
There are thousands of web hosting / co-location services out there, but as far as I know, there are none that will co-locate a server that can be shipped in a shoebox, and will treat it like it belongs in a rack, next to the big boys. Macminicolo.net does just that. You send them a [...]
