Blog Roundup 7 May 2010

I'm on fire!! A blog round-up two weeks in a row!!

I read and pick the entries for the blog round in Google Reader. There are currently 101 subscriptions listed there, but I'm always happy to add more if someone would like me to consider their blog posts for inclusion in these sporadic updates. You can see the 101 already added listed on my blog roll page.

Lets crack on with the round-up.

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Blog Roundup 30 April 2010

I'm rubbish! I really am... I promise and I promise to keep on top of Blog Round-ups, but I never seem to quite manage it.

I would really like to keep writing this round-ups ever week, but its quite an effort. Can I persuade anyone to co-author these posts with me? Leave me a comment. Drop me an email. Shout me on Twitter.

Anyway, on with the round-up.

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ColdFusion Podcasts Roundup

To kick start my reading of blogs I've started listening to podcasts again.

I used to listen to ColdFusion Podcast and Weekly, but unfortunately they are now deceased, so I had a bit of a search and asked around on Twitter. Here's the podcasts I'm now listening to and a few thoughts.

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Blog Round up 20 September 2009

This blog round up is somewhat later than I had intended, but for good reason.  I've been waiting for a couple of blog posts to emerge into the public domain, so that I could include them in the round up. I can't impress upon you how important it is to read these posts.

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Blog Roundup September 11th 2009

Sorry..... Its been a very very long time since I posted a blog round up. 

I recently moved my blog from hosting on my PC at home to extremely cheap Coldfusion 8 hosting with Hosting A to Z and I've updated to MangoBlog 1.4 with a new site theme, so I've decided its time I got my act together and started posting again.

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What am I reading?

Previously I wrote a number of weekly blog round up of the 100 or so blogs I'm subscribed to, but I've let it get all out of date and I've not been reading as much as I should.

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Blog Round up 19 Feb 2009

Ack!  I really should keep up with these things.  I've been reading through a couple of new blogs, looking at extJS and playing with Sun's GlassFish as a possible alternate java server for ColdFusion.

Well, Gary Fenton joked that I should change my blog slogan to "I read 100 blogs so YOU don't have to!", now I actually do read 100 blogs! Well 102 to be precise! hmmm make that 103...  No idea why, but Adam Lehman's blog wasn't on my list!

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Blog Round up 3 Feb 2009

Errrmmm... Happy New Year! :D  Sorry for not keeping up with my blog round-ups.

I've been looking at my HUGE back log of blog entries and thinking I should do a round-up and then being too daunted by the task.  So finally last week I decided to go back to the 26th of January and only read those blog entries and round-up from there and then mark everything as read!

Now that have a sensible number of blog entries in Google Reader I'm finally starting to read them again, so here goes nothing!!  ;)

 

New Blog in Google Reader
Not sure how Terry Ryan wasn't already in my blog list, but it came to my attention when I noticed various tweets about Terry being in his first staff meeting at Adobe as an Evangelist.  Congrats to Terry on his appointment.  I hope his passion to see ColdFusion in Higher Education reaches us here in the UK.

ColdFusion Conference Stuff
Close to home Andy and Kev have been busy promoting Scotch on the Road (if you missed the news, there won't be a Scotch on the Rocks this year!) and asking would you attend SotR in Manchester, announcing the Edinburgh venue and the ticket price!  Its been a busy few days for SotR. ;)

If you want to learn a bit more about a small percentage of what ColdFusion can help you develop from your desk, I noticed that a bit further back than the 26th Kristen Scofield announcing ColdFusion eSeminars. At this point you will have missed most of the live performances, but Kristen provides a link to view the recordings.

On other conference new Andy Allan, Peter Bell and Bob Silverberg announced that they would be speaking at cfObjective and Sean Corfield notes that cfObjective have posted the schedule for their May conference.

HTML, CSS and Design
All of the blogs I read tend to be from ColdFusion developers of all flavours, but every one of us has a variety of tasks that we undertake on a daily basis, so they also post articles on these aspects as well.
Dan Wilson posted an interesting article on compressing your CSS to speed up your website.

Semantic HTML seems to have come up in my work day conversations a few times over the last couple of months, so this article on Semantics in HTML5 on alistapart was of interest to me, as well as Beta New's post on the beta release of semantic search engine Sagoon.  Personally, the jury is out on Sagoon at the moment....  Perhaps I'm just too used to google...

Ray Camden has posting a couple of interesting articles on jQuery and ColdFusion.
Its alway interesting to read articles on how to do things better and alistapart always seems to deliver - Here's a nice article on advanced javascript debugging.

ColdFusion Techie Stuff
On to the ColdFusion posts I found interesting.
Andy Allan posted an article on bypassing the web server configuration tool.  Its something I seem to do all the time, other than to generate the appropriate mod file Apache, but its nice to have a good write up to remind yourself of what to do.

Its stuff I've seen previously in the past, but you never remember and can never seem to find again.  Mark Kruger has been writing up all his problems and resolutions whilst using cfhttp. Here are those posts.

Kevin Roche has written a couple of articles on using onMissingMethod() to generate generate getters/setters for an object based on the cfproperty tag. This is actually something that farcry has been doing for a long long time now, but its always interesting to see how new(ish) CF features are being used to implement fun tricks like this.

There's also been a flurry of blog post on how to install the various ColdFusion engines on a variety of environments.
Sean Corfield has posted an article for Railo/CF/BD on Jrun. Matt Woodward and Dave Shuck have posted articles on using Tomcat as the underlying java server.  These articles should help you to install any of these java application on to most java servers. (I wish I could find the blog post that reminded its readers that ColdFusion is a Java application!)

Application Updates
A few application updates for you :
Mark Mandel has released an update to ColdDoc
Nathan Mische notes briefly that ColdFire is now listed on the Firebug extensions page
Matt Woodward has posted that Open BlueDragon 1.0.1 has been released.

Podcasts
Not exactly a podcast but Brian Rinaldi and Peter Bell have been continuing their CFArguments.  The latest ones being Hibernate or HiberNOT (ColdFusion and ORM) and http://www.remotesynthesis.com/post.cfm/cfargument-state-of-the-fusion.
Kev McCabe has posted the latest in the CFDoc podcasts from the UKCFUG. Andy Allan talks about conferences and Gert Franz talks about Railo.

Other
A couple of other bits and pieces of worth noting: 
Kevin Roche posted that his colleague Roger Panton has started a London Adobe Business User Group.  Speakers at the first meeting on the 11th will be Claude Englebert from Adobe EMEA, David McLean of PJ Media and Roger himself.

Sargeway has highlighted the online Flash Media Server user group. Given some of the work I've been involved in recently I've just joined myself and now I need to have a read through the various discussions.

A blast from the past dropped into my email from Joost the other - the cartoon TrapDoor. There are 10 episodes on Joost for you to watch.  It really is as good as I remember it being!  

Blog Round up 5 Nov 2008 - The Software release edition

The marathon blog round-up! 390 blog entries to have a read through!
A lesson in never leave a job you should be doing today/tonight until tomorrow!

I'm never going to be able to go through all those posts in one sitting so I'm going to start with the batch of software releases that have been going on the last few weeks.

So lets dive in!

Matt Woodward notes that Open Office 3.0, which I mentioned previously in my round posts, has been released.

Nathan Mische has updated ColdFire on RIAForge fixing a few bugs and an extension for a problem with json. I'd love to know how he comes up with his version numbers. :)

Ray Camden released version 1.5 of SpoolMail with a couple of feature enhancements. If you don't know what SpoolMail is - its handy for when you're developing email feature in application and need to see what is going into the mail queue without them actually have to be sent to real people.

Ted Patrick announced the release of Flash Player 10 and gives a quick overview of the new features. Matt Woodward notes that the Linux edition of FP10 was actually released at the same time, which is a rare event!

Transfer 1.1 Final was release by Mark Mandel.  If you're stuck with a pre v1 copy of Transfer you really must get updated to the 1.1 version.  The performance enhancements are superb, along with the addition of new features such as cache monitoring and object proxies and the stack of bug fixes makes this release a must. If you're on the transfer list you may have noticed me making a bit of a tit of myself, but finally something has clicked and I've spent the last few days having the most fun doing development than I have in a while. Don't get me wrong.  I enjoy writing CFML, but its always nice to do something that is different to your usual routine and makes you feel all warm inside. ;oD   I should probably note here that Mark Mandel has done a CFConversation with Brian Meloche.

Are you an open source developer?  Do you work with databases?  Then you might be interested in Aqua Data Studio 7.  Todd Sharp notes that they offer free licences to open source developers.

The chaps at Broadchoice have been busy releasing and updating their very cool looking AIR application "Workspace".  I really should sign up for a beta account.  I wonder if it comes with free "more hours in the day". ;)

Ray Camden must be making use of those "more hours in the day", because in his relentless application development he's released an update to Lighthouse Pro along with everything else he working on.

Adobe have released a hotfix for ColdFusion 7 and 8 that adds multipart support to cfhttp to support changes with the Google and YouTube APIs.

Well I think thats about all the software releases I can find.  My blog entry count is down to 318 and my head is swimming.  Time to get some sleep.  Please let my son sleep the night through so I get more than 4 hours sleep!

Tomorrow night - "Blog Round up 5 Nov 2008 - In other news". ;)

Blog Roundup 12 October 2008

I keep forgetting what the number of my next round up is, so I've decided I need to change the title.  Hopefully it'll be generally more useful that #1 to n. It also means I can let my Friday lunchtime deadline slide a bit.  I'm on the train coming back from Edinburgh and Andy Allan's stag do! Before you ask - typically, I made it up to Edinburgh, I had a couple of drinks and some food, but then had to cry off because I was suffering from a 24hour stomach bug.  But I'm told lots of beer and fun was had.

First of all I added a new blog, Bob Silverberg, to my Google Reader this week.  I saw a post by Bob on the CFCDev group regarding Object Oriented Validation that interested me given that I validation is one of those things you always have to do but gets in the way of doing the fun stuff.  Bob's created a framework agnostic validation framework that will flexibly generate validation code for your data objects. Take a look - he explains it better than I can in a few words and there are also CS/Transfer examples available.

Ray Camden released an update to Sounding on RIAForge this week. Apparently its just a bug fix release with some user submitted UI improvements. Wish I'd spent the time to install Soundings for a survey recently, rather than use the free survey monkey account. 

If you like a good book for learning tech from, then Ted Patrick is plugging Alaric Cole's new Flex Book - Learning Flex 3. Flash Player 10 is in the works, so Ted also has a post reminding us all to update our flash player detection.

Andrew Shorten has announce free one day flex training courses in London and the UK speakers for Max Europe

Kev McCabe has posted that Fusion Debug has released a beta update in their labs section for version 2.0.2.

While we're on the subject of editors, its nice to see that I'm not completely insane when it comes to setting up my development environment and that Scott Stroz from Alagad has an almost identical set up to me.

Legacy code is always a nightmare, and I'm sure most of us have left some classy snippets lying around, but it looks like Todd Sharp's friend has got their work cut out for them with stuff like this. Todd did show me some other gems....  It doesn't get any better! Along similar lines, John Whish asks "Refactoring - good or bad?" It all kinda rings a bell with me at the minute as I'm rewriting some code I wrote ages and ages ago, because I need to add some features and discovering that its just not that easy to do without the rewrite. If only I could wave a magic wand and replace all this dodgy old FB2 code with shiney new ModelGlue code.

A couple things that I've picked up off of BetaNews this last week that might be of interest.  First is IBM's Bluehouse web collaboration service has entered a free public beta phase. Imagine Basecamp, but more. The other item that grabbed my attention was the review of Open Office 3RC4. I quite like OO, but I struggle with the transition between MS Office and OO. Perhaps its time to give it another look.

Well thats about all for this week, apart from noting that time flies when you're having fun. I've been writing ColdFusion applications since 1996, search engines have gone and been replaced in that time and A List Apart has been around for 10 years.

 

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