Beware: you could be missing news of some CF technotes

Note: This blog post is from 2008. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

I thought some others might be concerned about something odd I just noticed, regarding the "recent CF technote" feed I just blogged about. I'm noticing that several of these "recent" technotes (even a couple months old) don't show up on the pages that purport to list all the CF technotes! Yikes. That means that if you're not following the feed, you may not otherwise have any way to know that there are new tech notes.

And sadly, the feed lists only the 10 latest, so there may be others you could have missed out on if you've not been getting the feed. What's up with that?

Perhaps the HTML page is just out of synch with the feed but then I'd wonder where the feed is getting its source information? and why isn't the technote page updated immediately with that same info?

Here are a couple of examples that show up (as of today at least) on the recent CF technote feed list but do not show up on the page listing technotes (more on this below):

• Updated ColdFusion 8.0.1 ServerMonitorUI.swf
• CFDocument not compatible with TrueType Collection Fonts (TTC) (ColdFusion MX 7, ColdFusion 8)
• Determine Version Information for ColdFusion 8

I couldn't find any HTML page that listed those (and links to them) on any of the following expected pages.

Not on the Hot Fixes page

Curiously, all three offered a link back to the CF 8 Hotfixes page, but they're not technically hotfixes. Anyway, to my point, they're not listed on the hot fixes page.

(I'll say, for those worried most about hot fixes, that all the technotes I saw listed in the "recent feed" that really were hotfixes are indeed listed on the hotfixes page, so it seems that's kept udpated.)

Not on the Tech Notes page(s)

But the above are indeed technotes, and could be important to some, yet they are not listed on the pages that purport to list CF technotes: the CF Support page and the CF Technote Index page have no mention of these. (Indeed, that 2nd technote index page seems quite old, mentioning nothing of CF8 on it.) These are where I'd expect they should be listed, so it seems that these pages are not being kept updated.

And it's not like the technotes above from the recent feeds are really that new. The one on the ServerMonitorUI.swf, for example, is from May. It should be listed on the technotes page by now, shouldn't it?

Or if it's that these pages aren't meant to be the one all-encompassing list of all CF technotes, then what is?

Not found via searching

Just to make sure I wasn't missing some other meta-list of CF technotes, I used the Adobe site search, and even Google and Yahoo, to search for pages referring to the page titles above. I couldn't find any pages that had these listed. I could only find the individual pages themselves (in other words, short of the feed, I'd only find them by searching for them directly).

The problem restated: any solution?

So again my point is: the recent feeds page has technotes that are not offered in any list anywhere else on the Adobe site. Shouldn't a feed supplement a page that otherwise has the info? Does it make sense that if you don't follow the feed, you have no other way of knowing that the page exists (short of lucking out on finding it via a search on the topic)? Some of us would like very much to be able to always find and review a list of all known tech notes. The pages referred to above would seem by most to be expected to do that, but clearly they don't.

And given that the feed only shows 10 entries, the problem gets worse as new entries are added to the feed. What about those who have only just learned of it? How are they to know of items that are just old enough to no longer be listed on the feed?

Maybe someone needs to set up a page that saves the feed data. (There are other pages that show what's coming from the feed, but when the feed changes, they do too.) I'm talking about something that captures the feed output and keeps old entries while adding any that are new. But should we have to do that?

Any way to get the feed to list more than 10?

Finally, in the meantime, since the "recent feed" stops at listing 10 items, does anyone know a way to get it to list more? That would help us to find more that we might otherwise have missed (and would certainly aid in a tool to capture as many as we can).

I tried adding "?entries=20", as a guess, but to no avail.

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