Technology, The Web, and Oxford Commas.

by Chris Mallinson


Tag Archives: Mango Blog


Moving to WordPress

by Chris

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.

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URL Trimming in Mango Blog

by Chris

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.

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