Rob Brooks-Bilson

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.