Recently quite a few people have been asking me whether the DevWebPro site is "scraping" my blog or somehow stealing my content. Clearly we're all very touchy about this subject (in light of the outrageous behavior of a certain nameless publishing company)!

So I want to reassure everyone that I have an agreement with DevWebPro that they can republish any of my blog posts that they find interesting - they only publish a fraction of what I write. Here's my author archive with selected blog post re-prints. As you'll notice (I hope) the "comments" link at the bottom of each post on their site links directly to my blog so any comments are always on my blog, not their site (yes, I know they have their own comments tab too).

They choose which blog entries to syndicate, they choose the categories, they choose the title, I get links back to my site on every entry.

Just a heads up that I plan to republish a number of my ArgumentCollection blog posts here as Broadchoice plan to reuse the domain name for an upcoming support / corporate blog to accompany their new support documentation wiki and support forums.

That means your RSS feed may show a number of articles that you have already read on their original dates. I will republish each article using the original date but I can't guarantee they won't show up new for you :)

As you might imagine at this point in my Railo for Dummies series, I'm ready to try it on a real website such as my own. I've been running corfield.org on CFMX7 Standard Edition for a long, long time and never upgraded to CF8. Trying to run corfield.org on Railo has been on my 'todo' list for a long time as well and now seemed like as good a time as any. Here's how it went...

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Here comes The ArgumentCollection! That's the Broadchoice engineering team blog we've been hinting at over the last few days. If you subscribe to ColdFusionBloggers, you'll already be getting the new feed. We'll try to get it on AXNA shortly.

So what does it mean for me, Joe, Brian, Ray and Nico in terms of our personal blogs? Well, posts that relate specifically to what we're doing at Broadchoice will appear on The ArgumentCollection and posts that are more general - or more personal - will continue to appear on our own blogs. We may also post additional commentary on our own blogs, referring to a core technical post on The ArgumentCollection.

We're hoping that the Broadchoice engineering team blog becomes a valuable source of technical information for folks building complex, large-scale systems with ColdFusion, Flex and other complementary technologies. We're also hoping that you all continue to read our own blogs too of course!

Someone who commented several times on one of my blog entries has been bombarding me with email because I criticized them in comments on that entry and then refused to approve any more of their comments. Now they're demanding that I delete all their comments from my blog and they're starting to threaten me.

What would you do if you received an email like this?

The impossibility you imply does not exist. I didn't request that you delete my comments from the public record; I requested that you delete them from your blog.

Running a blog comes with some responsibility. Read up on authorship on the World Wide Web. It is my right to demand that you no longer carry my comments on your blog. You have given more than enough reason to justify my decision.

Oh, and you make a mistake in assuming I'm going to be waiting a long time. I'm giving you the opportunity to do the right thing. Of course, you may continue to ignore it if you want. Then you will learn the hard way.

Here's the blog entry in question that started the exchange with this person.

Some people were not very excited about Apple's keynote yesterday but the 1.1.3 firmware update for the iPhone is plenty enough for me, along with Google's updated mobile apps.

I use Gmail a lot on my iPhone and one of my clients has standardized on Google Mail/Docs for their communications so I'm constantly reading mail and documents on my iPhone. Gmail was OK on the iPhone and Google Docs was bearable but Google Reader was a nightmare. At the weekend, I noticed Gmail suddenly got a lot nicer with a very iPhone-style UI, sliding panels between labels and mail. Great... now what about the other apps?

Tuesday night, I got home from said client's site and eagerly updated my iPhone firmware. The new "location" feature in the Maps application is very sweet (and seems sufficiently accurate for my needs). Then I started reorganizing my home screen. Screens. That's when I noticed that Google had updated most of its apps to be iPhone-friendly. Google Docs makes a great reader now, even for fairly large spreadsheets. Google Reader is a huge improvement!

So now my iPhone has:

• 43actions - a great little GTD (Getting Things Done) task manager
• Calculator
• Calendar
• Clock - with 10 cities
• Maps
• Notes
• Stocks
• Weather

Followed by:

• Google Docs
• Google Mail
• Google Reader
• Belfry Scientific Calculator
• My client's Google Docs
• My client's Google Mail
• ColdFusion 8 QuickDocs
• IMDB - I'm always looking up movies and actors so I need that accessible!

Then my menu bar is:

• Mail
• Phone
• Safari
• Settings

On screen two, I have a row of games:

• Bejeweled
• Code Breader - a simple take on "Mastermind", a childhood favorite
• InARow touch - aka "Connect 4", another childhood favorite
• Mahjong

Then my multimedia tools:

• Camera
• iTunes
• iPod
• Photos
• Text
• YouTube

And, yes, they are in alphabetical groups. Call me anal retentive and see if I care!

Anyway, a big thank you to Apple and Google (and those games companies) for making my iPhone an even more lovable and addictive little toy!

As I did in 2006, here's my review of 2007. For some strange reason, I decided to make some New Year Resolutions in 2006. How did I do? I said I'd do more unit testing - and I did, but there's always room for more unit testing. I said I'd do more open source. Well, I released Fusebox 5.1 and Fusebox 5.5 as well as my Scripting project and a cfcUnit facade for CFEclipse so I think I did alright there. I also said I'd do more Flex and write some Apollo (now AIR) applications. I didn't do so well on those two! I think I'll revert to my usual practice of not making resolutions this year...

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It's almost that time of the year where we tend to take stock of the last twelve months and make resolutions for the coming twelve months. I've never been much for making resolutions but I always provide a review of the last year, based on my blog postings, so expect my review of 2007 within the next week or so.

Whilst not a resolution, I will be embarking on a series of blog postings in the new year that are longer and more in-depth than my regular posts. They will cover a lot of the architectural advice that I find myself giving many of my clients and I will also be covering frameworks in more detail based on requests I've been getting via email over the last year.

I'll also be looking at some anti-patterns that I've been seeing in code that I've reviewed over the last eight months (without identifying anyone, of course!). I hope it will help other avoid these problems in their own code.

I hope folks will find it interesting reading!

In order to make it easier to find information I post about BACFUG, I have created a BACFUG category and so you can subscribe to that that category's RSS feed if you want. I have gone back and categorized all past BACFUG posts so you can easily find details of topics, dates and links to recordings (where available).

This morning I migrated the database behind my blog from a shared server onto my VPS. If you notice any strangeness, let me know. I think I got everything right (although I made a couple of errors along the way so the blog was down for about fifteen minutes - I'm a dangerous sysadmin :)

As many of you noticed (or not?), my site was offline pretty much all of today. A couple of people notified early in the day that there was a problem but I'm used to the occasional outage on a shared host so I didn't think anything of it at first. All the same, I sent an email to HostMySite support asking "wassup?" but instead of the usual (polite, helpful) email response, I got a phone call.

Apparently the shared server was being brought to its knees by unusual traffic to my site (it wasn't clear exactly what - only that my site was bringing the server down again every time they tried to restart it). I'm fairly certain it was a spambot attack, possibly combined with one or more search engines trying to index my site.

They wanted to move me to a better plan where I'd be more isolated from other users - understandable - and, to be honest, both Lou Honick and Neil Heuer at HostMySite have been trying to get me to move to a VPS for a while, partly because they want me to see how it performs and write about my experience I suspect.

I said I was happy on shared hosting but the tech on the phone said they really wanted to move me so I told them to do whatever they felt was necessary. They said it would take several hours - to build out a new VPS and copy everything from my old site. Sure enough, throughout the afternoon, I received a steady stream of emails as parts of the infrastructure were brought up.

Once I noticed the site was actually working again, I started to explore the new site admin console and see exactly what they were offering.

The VPS uses the Virtuozzo Power Panel which allows you to SSH into the server (via a Java applet in a browser window) and also has a lot of system monitoring and management features. My initial impression is that it's very good. I'll write up more detailed notes in the next few days I expect.

There were a couple of lingering glitches that I noticed and when I pinged support again, they called me - on my home phone - and walked me through everything I needed to know about the new setup and resolved the issues I had.

I've always had very good experiences with HostMySite but today's experience was above and beyond the call of duty.

Congratulations to Chris Schmitz! He snapped the site at 999,999 and provided an exact timestamp, per the contest rules!

Thank you to all the other folks who entered - I had about dozen entries in total, with half of those being within a very narrow window, around quarter past midnight!

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Nearly 1,000,000 visitors have come to An Architect's View since I started blogging in June 2002. Dan Wilson suggested that I run a contest for the millionth visitor and then donated a prize so here's the contest!

The counter, as of this posting, is at 999,409. The person who takes a screenshot of the counter when it is closest to 1,000,000 visitors and sends it to me will win the "Flex 2 Essential Training" videos from Lynda.com.

But wait, you Photoshoppers... Sure, anyone can cheat. So to help prevent PhotoshopFraud, you must also send me the time you took the screenshot. This is something I can easily double check (because only I will know the timestamps on all the other screen shots submitted!).

The winner will be announced a few days after the counter reaches 1,000,000 visitors (to allow for folks to get their screenshots in).

The videos are being donated by Dan Wilson who is very keen for this contest to happen and, for some strange reason, really likes my blog!

Many thanx to Dan.

Get screen grabbing!

In the past, I've posted quite a few job openings on my blog. I get a fairly steady stream of requests to post jobs which shows how healthy ColdFusion is. I added Clark Valberg's Developer Circuit widget to my blog a good while ago - and a few weeks ago I blogged that the widget had been updated.

It doesn't show a lot of jobs right now so I've decided that to promote it as a "go to" resource for CFers, I'm going to stop posting job openings on my blog and suggest that folks click on the widget to post job openings on Developer Circuit.

See? There's the widget... on the left hand side of my blog, just below the categories and calendar!

Clark Valberg has just updated the Developer Circuit Flex widget that lets bloggers show jobs in the margins of their pages to help support the community. See the left nav of my blog just below the categories and calendar.

Realizing that my main layout was partially table-based after CSS Naked Day '07, I switched to a pure CSS layout tonight. I changed to a three column layout, placing primary blog navigation on the left, with everything else on the right. I also got rid of that terrible old picture of me - now you get a great photograph of Coit Tower with Alcatraz in the background courtesy of my friend (and ex-Macromedia colleague) Vern Viehe, a name some of you may remember.

Chris Phillips has finally got his act together and started blogging. Read all about his BlogCFC JavaScript Twitter pod. Good stuff Chris! Welcome to the blogosphere!

I don't know how many folks out there have my current cell phone number but it will no longer be valid after Thursday April 5th. I will eventually get a new cell phone(!) but wanted to let folks know you can contact me via my Skype number (bottom of the right hand column on my blog).

In theory I could have migrated it to a personal plan and I wanted to migrate it onto my wife's existing plan. However, after spending three hours on the phone, between myself, my wife and the company that manages Adobe's cell phones, we were unable to persuade Cingular to migrate the number to any acceptable combination of plans. Cell phone companies really don't seemed to have learned about customer service yet, it seems.

Also, remember that my adobe.com email address will be switched off after Thursday and you'll need to reach me via this domain (there's a "Contact me!" link in the right hand column on my blog).

(Posting to coldfusion category only because I know a lot of CFers don't read the non-CF categories on my blog but might still want to know how to contact me!)

If you've been having problems accessing my site in the last few days, it's because another site sharing my server has been behaving badly.

HostMySite are taking steps to remedy the problem:

The problem that you have been experiencing is ColdFusion related. As you know in a shared ColdFusion environment poor code by even a single site can cause issues server wide. This has been happening over the last few days on your server. We have informed the operators of the offending site and are currently working on either getting them to fix their code or migrate to a VPS.

-- from HostMySite support.

I've been asked several times "what blogs do you read?" so I figured I'd post my feed list as an OPML file for folks to have a look at. Provided as-is, no warranty etc etc. Use at your own risk. There are some non-technical blogs on there. You might not like their content. You have been warned.

I've been toying with the idea of doing a podcast for a while and over the last week I've been actively soliciting feedback on the subject. I'm thinking of doing something that is primarily interview-focused but short (under 20 minutes). The (excellent) ColdFusion Weekly already covers the news so I'd mostly steer clear of that but I might wax lyrical about certain technical topics near to my heart. Would folks be interested in a podcast from me? Would you like to be interviewed by me?

I just culled my blog roll, unsubscribing from anything that hasn't posted a new entry in the last six months. I was surprised that my total blog count went down from 226 to just 167. That's nearly 60 blogs that have fallen by the wayside over the last year. Have other folks noticed a decline in blogs this year? I was sad to see some very good blogs had stopped posting but most of the 60 I removed had been fairly half-hearted - some blogs had existed for less than two months (as active blogs).

There are a few "dead" blogs that I've stayed subscribed to in the hope that the authors will come back from hibernation. I'd be interested to hear if you have any blogs in that category...

I'm taking a few days off to help some friends in Montana - we'll be working on their house.

Any comments on the blog will have to wait for approval until I get back.

You can now find Ryan Stewart and Jeff Houser's new podcast, The Flex Show, on iTunes via this music store link.

I'm off on vacation and won't be dealing with comment moderation for a week or so. I get a lot of sp@m comments so if you post a comment between now and my return, be warned that it may get lost in the sp@m and deleted accidentally although I'll try not to!

Happy Thanksgiving (in advance!).

Rob Brooks-Bilson has created a Flickr group for MAX 2006 so you can post pictures of the event or just use it to enjoy MAX vicariously.

As a general principle, I'm tagging this 'adobemax06' which is the 'official' preferred tag for everything related to MAX this year.

I'm off to Salt Lake City in a few minutes for a cat show and will be off-air until Tuesday. Any comments will have to await moderation until I return so don't think I'm ignoring you! There's lots of interesting blog posts and comments around at the moment that I'll be replying to when I get back.

Actually a good 'listen' since it's a podcast. Scott Hanselman is interviewed every week by Carl Franklin. Whilst it is a Windows / .NET focused show a lot of the time, he also covers a lot of more general topics that every ColdFusion developer can benefit from. In August / September topics have covered:

• Vista RC1
• Mock Objects
• Test Driven
• A Better Outlook
• Dynamic vs Compiled Languages
• Open Source Options
• Reflection

I've learned something new from pretty much every one of his podcasts - even the most Windows-specific stuff - that I can apply to my ColdFusion development. Highly recommended.

Updated 8/5/2006 - notifications fixed.

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I've finally gotten so sick of those unpleasant comment sp@mm$rs that I've implemented moderation on comments on this blog.

Any comments you add need to be approved before they post but I have removed all restrictions on validation of the actual comment so you can now, once again, comment on old entries (a common sp@mm$r trick, it seems) and you can put full URLs in your comments again (although I don't currently auto-format them to actual links).

I've also set it up so the moderation email has quick links to approve / delete, for my convenience.

During the last day or so my blog passed the 1,000,000th page view since I created it in June 2002.

A big thank you to all my readers - and commenters!

In about a month I should hit three quarters of a million visitors which is another big milestone.

Ashwin Mathew of the Adobe ColdFusion product team now has a blog, Stake Five. Just a couple of posts up there so far, including the first in a series on caching, but this is definitely going on my subscriptions list. Ashwin and I chat about ColdFusion stuff quite a bit so I'm really glad he's decided to start blogging!

One of our Bengal cat breeder friends just let us know that one of her pet buyers has a blog dedicated to the two male Bengal cats that she sold them a while back. The pet owners obviously love their boys very, very much! If you've ever been curious about the breed that my wife and I work with, this will show you the appeal of this unique and interactive cat!

My apologies to those folk who have commented on an entry here on this blog, only to receive a slew of scummy sp*mm*r comments. I'm adding filters to keep these pathetic time wasters out of the comments. I'm on the verge of adding a CAPTCHA system (although I'm not actually sure how many of these miserable excuses for humanity are organic and how many are mechanic...).

If you're a human sp*mm*r, then you can just FOAD because I'll delete all your comments and add all sorts of traps to my sp*m blockers. You're pathetic and annoying and we will eventually obliterate you.

If you're a machine... well... we'll just continue the dance I guess.

I just looked at the browser share statistics for my blog and Internet Explorer is down to 10%! Firefox has a massive 67%, Safari has 11%, Mozilla has 7% and even Google is showing up with 3%(!). What happened to Internet Explorer?

Has anyone else noticed anything unusual in browser statistics recently?

Between 5am and 5:20am today, some unpleasant p*rn sp*m b*t started posting weird comments to a bunch of recent entries on my blog. Apologies to those of you who had subscribed to an entry and were on the receiving end of those comments. The comments have all been deleted and steps taken to block similar comments in future (I hope).

A few hours later, my blog was hit by a very badly behaved b*t that attempted to spider my site but kept submitting bad links. Called heritrix, it has caused a lot of other people grief apparently. It should now receive 404 errors from any page on my site. It joins the ranks of the other spiders I've "banned" because of bad behavior.

What's really annoying about these unsavory people / programs is that they suck time out of our lives, trying to counter them. They're are vampires, preying on us well-behaved netizens. They disgust me.

I really don't want to have to add a captcha here or moderate comments but I'm getting awful close to that now...

I go away for a weekend's vacation and my site goes offline halfway thru my trip!

HostMySite sent me a notice saying my site was causing performance problems and attached the logs. Two things seem to have contributed to the problem...

A large number of requests in quick succession asking for invalid entries on the blog (I've now added some debugging code to see if I can determine where these are coming from - I suspect a badly behaved spider).

The MXNA web service becoming unavailable. I used to show the top ten most clicked news stories from MXNA using a web service call. It seems that MXNA's web service went offline or was very slow to respond and so my site was also slow to respond, which then resulted in timeout errors and requests piling up. I've removed the top ten pod.

The vacation? A cat show in Oklahoma City. That makes 58% of the USA visited in terms of states!

I just realized that I haven't really blogged much lately. Mostly because my daily blogging reminder emails are building up in my inbox!

It's been an insanely busy few weeks and it looks like the next few weeks will also be insanely busy. I can't really go into much detail because most of what I'm working on right now is all about future product and service offerings but we're going through a lot of the "necessary evils" that startup-style projects have to go through: technology stack decisions, budget estimates, schedule planning and so on.

Adobe handles some of its innovation by incubating startup-style projects within the larger organization. It's kind of the best of both worlds: the freedom of a startup with the support of a large corporation.

Right now I'm developing a lot of architectural concept diagrams as well as estimating hardware requirements and trying to create blocking schedules for things we think we have to deliver. It's an exciting time and I think we'll be creating services that will appeal to a large audience.

Bear in mind that I'm part of the Knowledge Workers Business Unit. That means that you, dear reader, as a software developer are not exactly part of my target demographic for now. However, as we start to build out our systems and solutions, I hope to be able to share some of what makes everything tick behind the scenes - especially where we get to "eat our own dog food".

Back in 2001, after the Allaire acquisition, I created a small team whose remit was to rebuild macromedia.com using our own (new) technologies. In 2006, I find myself in a similar situation but instead of producing a website for product consumers, I'm looking at services for business consumers. The business unit I operate in now includes pretty much all things Breeze-related and PDF-related so it has a different dynamic and a different set of challenges.

I hope you'll stay with me in this new phase and I hope I'll find relevant things to talk about here.

Now that I've solved my podcast woes (with the iRiver), I've been catching up on the ColdFusion Weekly by Matt Woodward and Pete Farrell. I'm really enjoying this series! I'm 22 minutes into 1.2 Beta right now and looking forward to 1.3 Beta, with the focus on open source. Their interview with Jeff Coughlin in 1.1 Beta was great - not enough to make me try FarCry but very interesting all the same. Matt and Pete have good voices for audio (especially Matt's rich tones) and they manage to stay focused and not sound self-indulgent which is a big danger with this kind of "developers in conversation" format, although they've created a good structure for the show.

It was interesting in 1.2 Beta to hear the logic behind the versioning of the podcast and the piece on webcharts3d was very educational - I sort of knew the chart designer was there but had forgotten about it so it was good to have my memory jogged. My only nit with 1.2 Beta is that the stereo effect is a bit strident.

Definitely one to add to your subscriptions - very much an audio magazine and quite professional, even in these early stages.

I have to confess that I have been pretty lame about listening to podcasts. My basic excuse is that I haven't had time and that ought to be a good excuse but I feel really guilty telling people that. I've tried listening to podcasts at work but that just doesn't work: I'm too easily distracted by work to actually listen. For a while I just resigned myself to missing out on the podcasts mushrooming around me.

Then I got an iPod shuffle and figured I'd get around to listening to podcasts as I walked to BART (30 minutes in the morning) or, more recently, drove down to San Jose (30-60 minutes). After autofilling my iPod several times, I began to get suspicious that it was 'avoiding' the podcasts. Not one podcast turned up in the random selection. So I created a new playlist: all the files I'd added in the last four months but not played. Lots of podcasts in that. Ran the autofill... not one podcast. Odd. So I made a playlist of podcasts alone. Autofill selected no files. OK, so that confirms that iTunes' autofill ignores podcasts.

Not to be deterred, I simple used brute force and dragged several podcasts into the iPod shuffle in iTunes. Great! Now I have a bunch of podcasts in my pocket. First walk down to BART, lots of music, no podcasts. Next day I drive to San Jose (I use a cassette adapter to listen to the iPod in the car through the cassette player). Lots of music, no podcasts. Drive home... still no podcasts. Walk to BART the next day... no podcasts. By this point, the random song selection on the iPod was beginning to repeat the few non-podcast items.

OK, one final test: empty the iPod and drag in just a few podcasts only. Try to play the iPod - nothing. Add a song and try again - the song plays. WTF? The iPod won't play podcasts even tho' they're just plain ol' MP3 files. Weird.

No podcasts on the move for me then :(

And then I was given an iRiver U10. It's an impressive piece of technology: very small and light, an FM radio and a music / video player that can also record (voice and radio) as well as a few other things. But it only works with Windows XP and Windows Media Player 10. Well, that sucks. But, hey, I have Virtual PC so I can run Windows XP in emulation. I won't recount my experiences with multiple installations of Windows XP and the problems I've had with them (come on, you know how I feel about Windows!).

Anyway, first off I converted a bunch of videos to the (proprietary) U10 video format and transferred those across and watched / listened to them in the car, driving home from San Jose. By positioning the iRiver on the dashboard, facing away from me, it acted as a "heads-up display" on the windshield, allowing me to watch (loosely) a video while driving without taking my eyes off the road. However, I didn't feel entirely comfortable doing that and couldn't imagine using the video capabilities of the U10 much.

Well, it plays MP3 files so I moved all my podcasts onto it and now I can listen to them in the car. It's not as slick as iTunes: I have to fire up Windows XP under Virtual PC and copy files to / from a network share (actually my Mac) and then sync files to the U10 using Windows Media Player. But the net result is that it works.

So tonight, driving home, I finally go to listen to some podcasts. I listened to all of ColdFusion Weekly 1.0 alpha and most of 1.1 beta and I have to say I'm very impressed. Matt and Pete have a good rapport and are generally well-informed and their show has very little "fluff" (although they need to tone down that cheesy organ music!). I enjoyed the interview with Jared about cf.Objective() in 1.0 and I was just starting Jeff Coughlin's interview on FarCry when I arrived home tonight.

I'm in San Jose on Monday so I'll get to listen to the rest of 1.1 and probably 1.2 as well so I'll have some more comments then. After that, I'll start going through the ColdFusion Podcast and I'll write those up too (I've listened to one or two early episode but wasn't terribly impressed - I'll bet they've gotten into their grove now that they've done over twenty episodes. And then I'll be catching up on Helms' and Peters' Out Loud series (which I love, based on the two or three episodes I've listened to parts of!).

What are your thoughts on podcasts?

I'm attending a three day internal technical event and then I'm off to Dallas on Thursday so I don't expect to be blogging much.

I'll be speaking at the Austin CFUG on Friday and the Dallas CFUG next Monday. "Objects & Persistence" both times. See you there?

A certain CFer's blog just posted some thoughts on how they would develop open source software:

I would think my goal would be to ... make sure the code was as complex as possible ... so that nobody would ever want to spend any amount of time working on the code ...

They have several other things to say about open source software development (including releasing updates "as often as possible") and criticizing a widely-used application framework for being slow (based on just a "hello world" example).

The upside of blogging is that everyone gets to say their piece in public. The downside of blogging is that everyone gets to say their piece in public.

At least they have the decency to say "I am no expert when it comes to Open Source Development" - as if that wasn't obvious.

It's rare that I "roast" anyone in public and very rare that I do it on my blog but this particular blog has been little more than an advertising campaign for a piece of software they produced (almost every single post mentions it - and it appears in all the RSS feeds). This sort of behavior does our community no favors at all.

I'm not sure why but I never got around to adding my blog to Technorati... Nor even using Technorati to search blogs. So I just created a Technorati account and added the embed / links (bottom of the right hand column here).

How many folks use Technorati? What do you think of it?

Randy Drisgill has posted his thoughts about the best Macromedia-related blogs of 2005. I'm flattered to get a couple of mentions but he hits the nail right on the head, in my opinion, by voting Ray Camden as best ColdFusion blog of the year and John Dowdell for best all-round Macromedia blog of the year. Go Ray! Go JD!

I just got a comment which surprised me: someone wondered whether Adobe has a blogging community. I thought it was pretty well known that they do indeed have an active set of bloggers...

blogs.adobe.com

I've been reading their blogs for quite a while... lots of good stuff there!

I finally changed my RSS feed so the links in that match the SES format I use on the blog. Apologies if that causes a slew of duplicates in your news reader (or any other bizarre problems with the feed).

Dave Carabetta's blog should be worth watching... about time he started blogging! What kept you, Dave? :)

I just changed the IDs of all my blog entries to be close to the title of each entry. Sorry if your RSS feed got a bunch of duplicates! I'm just trying to create more friendly URLs on the site.

To make life easier (I hope!), when viewing a single entry now on the blog, where you can already see all the comments, the comments link just takes you to the bottom of the page where the post comment form is placed inline in the page. Adding a comment there will refresh the page, showing the entry and all the comments. This should help users visiting the blog from news readers that have integrated browsers (like NetNewsWire).

Also, if you click on a category that has a lot of entries, you will get the first 100 and a "More articles..." link at the bottom.

And I've added a Skype badge at the bottom of the right hand column.

My site was offline for a while this morning due to "a problem with the Apache configuration" according to the support folks at HostMySite. As usual, they responded very quickly when I sent them an email about the problem. Apologies for any inconvenience!

Since the Dinowitz crew cannot be here in person this year, they have set up a MAX blog to act as a virtual community suite with various guest bloggers.

Just in time for MAX, Brian Meloche is blogging. Like Jared Rypka-Hauer, he will be covering MAX in depth for Fusion Authority.

Will Tomlinson, of ColdFusionGear T shirt fame created a banner for my blog. I like the CF in Corfield. I really do need to get a new publicity shot tho!

Well, half a million anyway!

I just noticed that my blog has now passed 500,000 visitors since I set it up just over three years ago. August saw my highest traffic ever with 21,000 visitors and 31,000 page views. A big "thank you!" to all my readers. In a couple of weeks I'll be back at work and should have a steadier stream of posts and, perhaps, some more interesting stuff to blog about...

For some reason after yesterday's outage, my RSS feed had become inaccessible. Thanx to Scott Stroz for alerting me! It's fixed now. Although I'm not quite sure why/how :)

Yes, my hosting company (SmarterLinux) suffered a fairly complete hardware failure and needed to restore everything from tape so it was offline for longer than they expected. They've been very apologetic for the loss of service (and they've asked me in the past to move off this server so I guess a hardware failure is not too unexpected).

I'm going to be working with them to see if I can migrate to a CFMX 7 server at some point (hopefully sooner rather than later) but it will mean a database migration to a new server too - so it may well require downtime again. I'll keep y'all posted.

If you feel the need to send me emails via the contact page, provide a valid reply email address otherwise I cannot respond (and if it's an anonymous message, I'll ignore it anyway!).

In the run-up to my sabbatical in a month's time, I'm going to be working on a new project that requires me to be pretty much 100% heads-down and focused. In preparation for that I've signed off quite a few mailing lists (and will probably sign off several others over the next few days). Unless you see me actively posting on a list, it's probably reasonable to assume that I've signed off.

So what about this new project? Well, unfortunately I can't really tell you anything about it. It isn't ColdFusion-related. It will require me to learn a bunch of new stuff. I'll also get to use a lot of skills and techniques that I haven't needed for quite a few years. I'm very excited about being able to work on this project so it's frustrating that I won't be able to share what I'm doing.

I'm still around to chat to about ColdFusion and I'll still be talking to user groups and answering email sent to my corfield dot org account.

I probably won't be blogging very much for a while (since I can't talk about what I'm doing) although I'll still keep reading blogs and commenting on stuff that I see.

I'm at a cat show all weekend, working Monday, then at CFUNITED next week. It seems there will not be WiFi in the session rooms at CFUNITED so don't expect real-time blogging (just Internet access for the speaker, for demos). There will be an "Internet Caf´" however, so expect brief, between-session posts from time to time.

I will of course take copious notes and blog after the fact.

No blogging for several days. My wife and I are taking a bunch of cats to Albuquerque for a long weekend (not a cat show, a seminar on genetics, breeding, showing and judging). It's a nice, but long, drive (we went to last year's seminar by road too). I'll be back online on Monday.

Enjoy the weekend!

Regular readers know I'm a fan of the very irreverant BileBlog. The Server Side just published a video interview with Hani, creator of the BileBlog, that gives a lot of background on this great ranter. Some of it is rather surprising, especially the fact that he is a CTO and his company produces application server and portal software!

The title says it all. I've added blog categories for both of these frameworks and gone back and re-categorized all my old posts that refer to them specifically.

While I'm on the subject of new blogs, here's a couple of international ones:

• ColdFusion Developer Portal Site (Chinese)
• Oguz Demirkapi's Notebook (Turkish)

Thanks to Bing and Oguz for bringing those to my attention!

Steve is one of the jaxfusion folks and he has just launched his blog about ColdFusion, SQL Server and life as an independent contractor. He dropped me an email in which he said "I particularly hope that the postings on independent contracting will be useful to many developers out there as I haven't seen much blogged on the topic." Very true. Should be interesting reading.

I added a convenience URL so I could search my blog more easily - then realized other folks would probably like to use it too...

http://corfield.org/search/keyword will search this blog for keyword as if you'd typed keyword into the search field (below, right).

This has been achieved with an Apache mod_rewrite directive (search this blog for mod_rewrite).

Enjoy!

My favorite Flash animator (and good friend) Matazone is now blogging! If you aren't familiar with Mittens the Kitten, Mr Snaffleburger, Little Goth Girl and their friends, then you need to check out his twisted animations. Warning: some of it is not suitable for those of weak stomachs or minds :)

Mike Chambers posted about the new version of MXNA, the Macromedia News Aggregator, that has just started public beta. It is a complete, ground-up rewrite and has a lot of new features, including smart categories (that effectively filter posts by keyword rather than by the standard MXNA RSS categories).

Christian Cantrell's blog has a more detailed list of new features.

I'll be updating my "Top ColdFusion Posts" pod (bottom right here) to use the new web service API shortly.

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Updated: The pod has been updated to use the new web service API. It no longer shows the author since that is not available now, so I show the number of click-throughs. I also cache the categories and languages for a day and the actual posts for an hour which will speed up rendering of my blog.

This entry has been removed.

Over on Hacknot, Mr Ed waxes lyrical about why wikis are flawed. Anyone who has mentioned the very word in my presence knows exactly what my position is on this subject, so I was immensely gratified to see such a thorough (and somewhat humorous) piece appear on Hacknot. Whether or not you like wikis, read it and think hard about the points mentioned in the article...

Safely ensconced in my room (830 in case anyone needs to contact me). Every room has broadband this year ($25 AUD / 24 hours!) so I may be online more than I expected.

Scott Fegette was on the same flight as me but his room isn't ready so he's here, sharing my network connection (gotta love Macs!) and we're both catching up on email etc.

I fly out tonight (Monday) and arrive Wednesday morning. If last year was anything to go by, I may be able to get access to the business center in the hotel until my room is ready. Not sure if we'll have wireless at the conference itself - I know there's an Apple-powered chill out room but I seem to remember some network problems with it last year...

Anyway, blogging will be slow this week. However, I'll be writing the conference up in full for Fusion Authority shortly after I get back!

I've been watching this story unfold with interest. Both Jeremy Zawodny and Robert Scoble have blogged conversations with Mark after the fact and talk about the unwritten rules for bloggers. One thing that comes out of this, particularly Scoble's writings, is how similar Google and Microsoft seem to be. That's both good and bad I guess...

I think I have pretty free reign on my blog - especially since it's not on markme.com - but I have had my knuckles rapped for a couple of comments over the three and a half years of blogging. Just mutterings and vague warnings. I'm not sure what it would take to rile Macromedia enough to fire me but I'd like to think I'm not stupid enough to make such a mistake unwittingly.

Delta targeted a blogger too, a stewardess who posted slightly alluring pictures of herself in uniform (her blog was hilarious!). Frankly I don't think she deserved her dismissal - I think Delta over-reacted.

Mark Jen, on the other hand, clearly deserved what he got - he really did write some pretty dumb stuff about Google's HR practices. I mean, don't bite the hand that feeds you...

Back to Google and Microsoft... I've been approached by both companies - several times by Microsoft and once, recently by Google. I wouldn't work for Microsoft for many, many reasons, not the least of which is their legendary interview process - I went through that **** with ObjectSpace years ago when they flew me out from England for an interview and then treated me like dirt until I walked out of the interview (and they had the nerve to call me up a week later and say they still wanted to hire me - so what was with the insulting interview process?). I really don't appreciate that high-handed treatment in an interview. I don't know about Google. They're very cool, of course, but I suspect they think they're even cooler and that always bothers me. I love what they do but...

As I always tell companies that approach me, I love Macromedia and I have a lot to do here before I'd even consider another company. I've been here nearly five years now and I'm still loving it - and, boy, is there a lot of work I still need to do here... years of work!

But this all has an important message for bloggers: consider your relationship with your employer. If it's restrictive enough to affect your blogging, you might be working for the wrong company...

Some of you wanted user-selectable styles on my blog so I added some. If you add &style={somestyle} on the URL, you'll get a different look'n'feel and it will remember it in a cookie.

It only supports:

• style=blue
• style=green
• style=darkgreen
• style=mono
• style=default

Suggest more in comments. It has a 'fill' color, a 'dark' color for links etc and a 'light' color for text that sits on the 'fill' color.

And, yes, I know I haven't added this to the comments popup yet!

Sorry, I got bored of blue. Thoughts?

A number of people are sending me emails saying that my site is offline. Yes, occasionally, the site is offline. I'm on an old shared server that has been having a few reliability problems. SmarterLinux have already performed some hardware maintenance that improved matters but they're encouraging me to move to one of their newer, more reliable servers. I will, as soon as they have a Blackstone hosting setup for me to move onto. I don't want to have to move twice, especially since it will involve a database move. Bear with me for a while.

I've added a pod at the bottom of the right hand nav here that uses the MXNA Web Service API to show the ten most popular ColdFusion posts, by click-through count, from the MXNA aggregated ColdFusion category.

Here's the code:

I've written a retrospective of 2004 as seen from my blog's viewpoint. It turned out to be a bit too long for a blog posting so I've published it as a separate article: 2004 in Retrospect. Enjoy!

Who? He's a colleague of mine on the macromedia.com Web Team and manages the design and production resources for the site. Read an inside look at macromedia.com.

This so totally rocks! Mike Chambers has created an extension for Firefox that brings Macromedia news feeds directly into your browser. If you've used TattleTale in the past, this brings the same functionality into Firefox only better since you have more control over the pop-up menu appearance and the browser interaction options. I love it!

Please welcome Simeon Bateman to the blogosphere! Simeon is a long-time ColdFusion / Fuseboxer and is also a keen CFEclipse user. He and I are discussing what a Fusebox 4 plugin for CFEclipse ought to provide and then we're planning to build it.

Phil Cruz pointed out that the blog41.zip snapshot of my Fusebox 4.1 wrapper for Ray Camden's Blog CFC application was a little bit, er, confusing since it had two directories in it with different versions of the files.

My apologies for that (and thanx to Phil for alerting me).

I have posted an updated version of blog41.zip that fixes the problem.

Note that you'll still need to download Ray's app separately and the wrapper is written around 3.5.1 - I believe Ray has changed the API a little in 3.5.2 so you might need to perform a few tweaks to get things working cleanly.

So far, my Breeze Me! experiment seems to be going well. There's been a fairly steady stream of folks in the meeting chatting about a variety of things. I plan to blog salient content that gets mentioned in chat and I'm running polls pretty much all the time. Right now there's a poll about CFC usage and a poll about framework usage. I'll let each poll run for a few days and then blog the results.

In future I may well run presentations from Breeze - or encourage other participants to do so (since I can make anyone a presenter). I'm also interested in what you'd like to see done with this permanent meeting.

I've already received some good feedback about Breeze itself which I've passed on to the product team and there have been some suggestions for future polls as well.

I've just added links in the right nav for blogs by various Team Fusebox members. More Team Fusebox information will appear on the Fusebox website in due course.

A Delta Airlines employee, Ellen Simonetti, has been suspended after posting "inappropriate" content on her (personal) blog (since removed). The content in question appears to be a picture of her posing on an empty aircraft in her flight attendant uniform.

Naturally, the store has generated a lot of comment in the blogosphere and a lot of people seem to think that Delta are out of line for suspending her. It's a tricky area. There's no doubt that Delta's action has dramatically increased the amount of attention her situation is getting - which could easily be considered self-defeating.

I'm not sure where I sit on this - I think bloggers should either align themselves with their employer or should distance themselves from their employer but whichever they choose, they need to hold to that position. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts...

You can read the BBC story (including 'that' picture) and The Register's story.

Roger Benningfield pointed out that since my Fusebox 4.1 facelift, the per-category RSS feeds on my blog have been broken. They're now fixed. Thanx for spotting that Roger!

The reason? Ray's rss.cfm expects a mode2= attribute containing the original mode= attribute from the page that displays the RSS links. After my FB41 facelift, that had transformed to do=blog.xxx where xxx was what mode2= should have been. I applied a simple fix to rss.cfm to map do= back to mode2=.

If you use Ray's Blog CFC and you view your blog in Safari, you might notice that the calendar pod actually encloses all of the other pods in the right nav and the archives and recent entries links are centered (Simon Horwith's blog shows this, for example).

The problem is an unclosed <center> tag in the calendar pod. IE and Mozilla / Firefox seem to cope with this but Safari does not. Add </center> near the end of the calendar pod and it's fixed!

Another ColdFusion blog just got into my blog roll: Matt Woodward's blog covers ColdFusion, Mach II and looks like it'll be covering Flex too soon.

Doug Hughes, of Alagad Image Component fame, has a blog! He's already posted some very interesting stuff so this is definitely a blog to watch...

When I replaced the old blog code with the Fusebox 4.1 code, I didn't test it well enough and I broke the RSS feed.

Many thanks to Narayanan on the macromedia.com QA team for discovering this and reporting the problem. Thanx dude!

How did I break it? The Application.cfm file in the Fusebox 4.1 version redirects to index.cfm if the requested file is not index.cfm (or is not a CFC). The RSS feed comes from a file called rss.cfm...

Some people complained that they didn't like the 'new' look (Blog CFC's default look) so I've made a few tweaks to make it more like the old blog... Happy? :)

Since I only migrated articles from July 2003 onwards into Blog CFC, the flat HTML versions of articles from June 2002 through June 2003 stopped being accessible. I have now added a slew of redirects and modified the Mach II app on this site so that old-style links to articles after June 2003 will go to the correct URL on Blog CFC and I've also added links in the right hand navigation to the earlier articles. This should allow Google to reindex the earlier blog entries and restore access to the first year of my blog...

Ranchero has made NetNewsWire 2.0 Beta available. It seems pretty solid for a beta and it is blindingly fast in comparison to 1.0. It also supports Atom. Definitely worth updating from 1.0 and, with the additional features available in the "pro" version over the Lite version, I might actually buy the full version this time.

Oh, they've decoupled the weblog publishing mechanism so you can write your own adapter for whatever publishing system you use. Nice!

Damon Cooper's BLOG: Damon is the ColdFusion product engineering manager so this will be a good blog to watch!

Editors: Blogging changes - this editorial on the java.net weblogs mentions that they have moved their blogging infrastructure onto Movable Type but doesn't talk about what they were using before as far as I can see. I'd certainly be interested to hear more about what they were using before... perhaps some home-brewed Java system?

I find the story interesting because I got a lot of flak for using Movable Type instead of some ColdFusion-powered blog system. I moved to Blog CFC and imported my Movable Type data. Blog CFC doesn't have the full functionality of Movable Type (no trackback, for example) but it does most everything I need (and it has silenced the MT vs CF questions!).

Every now and then I look at the site meter stats for this blog just to see what the trends are. I just noticed that whilst Windows accounts for 76% of my visitors these days, only 46% of all my visitors are using Internet Explorer. Whilst that's still the biggest single browser share of traffic, it's substantially lower than it used to be. Firefox is clearly gaining ground.

I've always been an opponent of the chaotic and unsubstantiated material form of "wiki" sites so I found this article in The Register to be very telling, especially where they quote an advocate of the Wikipedia who clearly believes he's on a mission - and can't spell. The root of his objection to the established media channels is that they claim to have "authority" which he clearly rejects.

By now we should all know that we shouldn't blindly trust information we find on the Internet (or any other source, for that matter) and should verify our sources' integrity and reputation. When 'anyone' can contribute to a publishing project, that verification becomes harder. Blogging is also guilty of this - and I'd strong urge people to at least try to verify independently anything you find on a blog!

I decided to restore the site meter visitor counter today. Looks like the old blog pages are still getting traffic from links elsewhere... perhaps I should update the archive links on the MT HTML pages to point to the appropriate monthly archives on Blog CFC?

Sorry about the intermittent request timeout errors. Apparently there's a customer with a very abusive database-intensive application sharing my database server. SmarterLinux are moving them to a dedicated server so things should improve shortly.

The navigation links to the rest of my site, including the Mach II area, has been added - see the right nav!

As part of my move to Ray's Blog CFC system, I wrote a CF script that can import the data from a Movable Type export file. It's a bit of a hack since it's a one-off but Ray has said he'll include it in future versions of his Blog CFC distribution... to encourage other bloggers to switch from Movable Type to Blog CFC!

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Update: Ray has posted Blog CFC 3.5.1 which includes my importer script.

I believe this is a blog aggregator written in ColdFusion (the user agent field is reported as "arguments.useragent"!). It is a very badly behaved aggregator, requesting my RDF file at least once a minute.

If anyone has any information on who this is, I'd love to know so I can ask them to stop being so rude!

I just imported all of my current Movable Type stuff into Ray's Blog CFC 3.5 system.

The old (pre-July 2003) entries are not currently available. I'll fix that in due course.

I'll all update the UI to include links back to corfield.org pages. Bear with me!