Rob Brooks-Bilson's Blog - Blogging

Moderating Comments

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 18:23:00 -0400

Due to the amount of comment spam getting by the captcha these days, I've decided to remove the captcha and instead turn on moderated comments. I hate to have to do this, but the amount of comment spam was starting to get ridiculous, and I really hate to see people who have left legitimate comments on the blog get hammered by spammers. So, please stick with me while I transition to moderated comments. I'll try to get legitimate comments approved as quickly as possible. If your comment doesn't show up right away, don't worry, I haven't forgotten about you, and I certainly won't censor non-spam comments.

Geexoo Aggregates ColdFusion Blogs

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:10:00 -0400

I haven't seen this posted around the ColdFusion blogosphere, so here goes. Looks like there's a "new" aggregator out there called Geexoo that's hosting ColdFusion feeds (although they spell it Cold Fusion). Right now, they are only aggregating 4 CF blogs, including Ray Camden's.

Resources for New ColdFusion Developers

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 16:15:00 -0400

Dave Shuck had a great post today that discussed the seeming lack of content focused on helping those new to ColdFusion development. Inspired by his post, I decided to put together a list of online resources that contain lots of good information, geared toward those who are new to ColdFusion. Getting Started Tutorials from Adobe
Getting Started Guide to ColdFusion MX 7 and Its Resources
Connecting to a Database with ColdFusion MX 7
Displaying Database Data on a Web Page
Multimedia Tutorial Series: Building Your First Database Application with ColdFusion MX 7
ColdFusion MX Web Application Construction Kit: Databases and SQL
Building Advanced Queries in ColdFusion MX
A Beginner's Guide to Using Stored Procedures with ColdFusion
Learning Stored Procedure Basics in ColdFusion MX
Faster and safer database queries using the CFQUERYPARAM tag
Validating Input Parameters with ColdFusion
Creating Better Forms Faster with ColdFusion MX 7
Websites
Adobe ColdFusion MX 7 LiveDocs (documentation)
CF QuickDocs
ColdFusion Cookbook (problems/solutions)
CFLib (UDFs)
EasyCFM (tutorials, reviews, forums, community)
House Of Fusion (mailing lists, articles, tutorials)
Tek-Tips Forums
Blogs
Ray Camden's Blog (general tips, guides, ask a jedi series)
Listservers
CF-Newbie Listserv
While this list is by no means exhaustive, if you know of any other sites that should be here, let me know and I'll be happy to add them. Also, more to Dave's point - while a list like this is a good starting point for nudging new developers in the right direction, what's really needed is more blog and list content geared toward new and lesser experienced developers. Taking that to heart, I'm planning to do more blogging geared toward the beginner crowd.

Another blogCFC Upgrade Gotcha

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 15:29:00 -0400

Over the weekend, I noticed that several of my older blog posts weren't showing up when I searched for them on my site. After a little more digging, I found that several hundred seemed to be missing. I couldn't get to them via a search, by date, or even by their UUID directly in the URL. I checked the database tables, and sure enough they were there. After a little more digging, it turns out the problem has to do with having upgraded from blogCFC 3.x to 4.x to 5.x. Along the upgrade path, changes there were several additions to the blogCFC database, as well as the core CFC code. One of those changes introduced a new field in the tblBlogEntries table called username. The username is supposed to contain the username of the person making the blog entry. In my case, all "new" blog entries from blog CFC 4.x on had a value in this field. Older entries, from the blogCFC 3.x days didn't. Instead, they were NULL. This caused the main method in blogCFC.cfc to return no results for entries with NULL for the username. You can see why in the WHERE clause for the getEntry method:


where	tblblogentries.id = 
and	tblblogentries.blog = 
and	tblblogentries.username = tblusers.username

Once I made an entry in the username column for all of my "legacy" entries, all of the posts started showing up as expected.

Blog Updated to blogCFC 5.1.001

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 10:05:00 -0400

It took all weekend, but I was finally able to get my blog updated to the (almost) latest version of blogCFC. It looks like I wasn't the only one who had a hard time with the upgrade. Admittedly, my troubles were all self inflicted as I had quite a bit of customization to both the look and feel, and some code I had in place to manage two blogs from a single codebase. If you don't use WinMerge, I suggest taking a look. Without a diff/merge tool like this, it would have taken me a heck of a lot longer to perform the upgrade. So far, everything with 5.1 seems to be working ok. I had some errors from the Yahoo slurp spider trying to follow my Print links. Not sure why it's doing that as the links are clearly labeled NOFOLLOW.

Reminder: CFUNITED Flickr Pool

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 17:04:00 -0400

Just a reminder for folks headed to CFUNITED (and those watching from home), there's an active Flickr Pool where you can post and view photos from the event as well as post messages. The group currently contains a lot of photos from last year's event, and I'm hoping it's just as popular this year!

The Best of CFGURU

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 16:26:00 -0400

Other than a blog post by Simon Horwith, I haven't seen much chatter regarding the new CFGURU blog. The CFGURU blog is a companion site to the private CFGURU mailing list. The site is moderated by Shlomy Gantz, with a charter to share useful discussions from the mailing list with the ColdFusion community at large. There are currently only a handful of posts on the site, but you can expect a lot more great content as Shlomy compiles and publishes posts from the list.

New Stats in blogCFC 4.03

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 14:54:00 -0400

In case you missed the announcement, Ray Camden released version 4.03 of blogCFC. Included in the point release is an updated stats template I worked on that has the addition of a linked table of contents as well as stats about TrackBacks.

The Top ColdFusion Blog Posts of 2005

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 17:03:00 -0400

Waxing nostalgic this week, I spent some time looking over some of what I considered the best ColdFusion related blog posts of 2005. These posts represent my own personal slant. They've been culled from some of the most popular ColdFusion bloggers out there. Here they are in no particular order: Factory vs. Service Locator vs. IoC/DI | Dave Ross ColdSpring vs. Anemic Domains: DAO is Good! | Joe Rinehart If It Walks and Talks... | Sean Corfield Designing an OO Backend | Barney Boisvert The Pattern Prerequisite is Pain | Joe Rinehart Asynchronous Development - Things to Consider | Sean Corfield Ask a Jedi: ColdFusion Components and Validation | Ray Camden Sharing Application Scope | Sean Corfield What's an Object? | Matt Woodward Too Small For A Framework? | Sean Corfield DAOs and Composition | Matt Woodward CFCs, Cohesion, and Where I've Gone Wrong |Joe Rinehart ColdSpring AOP Tutorial ? Part Two, Around Advice | Chris Scott ColdSpring AOP Tutorial ? Part One | Chris Scott Head First Design Patterns SimUDuck in ColdFusion | Dave Shuck How ColdFusion Receives and Processes Requests | Steven Erat nOOb's Composition (or How to Avoid an Ungainly Inheritance) | Jared Rypka-Hauer What's Wrong With the F-Word? | Jared Rypka-Hauer I know not everyone may agree with me here, and that's fine. I'm also sure I left out quite a few good posts. To those of you I may have omitted, no offense is meant! If there's something I missed here that you feel should be on the list, leave me a comment!

BlogCFC Tip: Including Code

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 17:31:00 -0400

If you're a blog CFC user, you're probably aware that you can easily include code snippets in your posts by surrounding the code with <code>...</code>. What you may not be aware of is how auto-formatting is handled within the code blocks. Take the following two examples: Example 1:

Example 2:

At first glance, you're probably thinking "what's the big deal? The first example has no indenting and the second one does". You would be partially right. What isn't obvious at first glance, though, is that both code example I posted DO have indenting. The difference is the first example indents using spaces while the second one uses tabs. The color coding method used by blogCFC will only auto-indent code that's been indented using tabs. I know people debate the tabs vs. spaces issue all the time. Bottom line here, though, is that if you want to have your code intented in blogCFC, you'll need to make sure your IDE uses tabs and not spaces for indents.