Note: This blog post is from 2015. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

Just wanted to share word (sorry it took so long) that I'd been selected as a speaker at the upcoming dev.Objective() conference, in Minneapolis in Mid-May. Hope to see lots of my fellow CFers there, and of course new folks who were not CFers.

While the conference name has changed (from cf.Objective()), there are still plenty of CF-oriented topics, and of course as nearly everyone would point out, it's good for everyone to expand their reach and focus.

To that end, I'll be doing a topic a bit different than my normal focus of CF server troubleshooting. Instead, recognizing that there will be folks there who either use other servers, or develop web apps or mobile apps, I'll do a bit of a "soft" topic on how to troubleshoot performance problems more generically, in:

Hey, my web app's slow. Where's the problem?

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Note: This blog post is from 2014. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.

If you haven't heard the news yet, the CFHour podcast has had it's last show, it seems. Dave (Ferguson) and Scott (Stroz) announced the news at the end of their last episode (#213), quietly and without fanfare (or any advanced indications), citing time challenges, etc.

I'm holding a glimmer of hope that it's all an April Fool's prank, but if true it's indeed the end of an era and time to pause and reflect as if on the passing of a friend.

Update: I'm vindicated! :-) The guys announced in their next show that it WAS INDEED an April Fool's prank. Even so, I'll leave this entry, untouched, for posterity. Plus, most of the info is just as valuable to have shared, with them and with readers, whether they did or did not end the show. And like I said below, this gave them a chance like Twain and Nobel to see what folks thought when they thought they were dead. :-)

I also want to give some solace to fans of the show (and the general CFML community) with respect to where they may want to turn now to keep up on news, resources, etc. Fortunately, there are some places being actively updated. (And while surely some will see this as one more nail in CF's coffin, I don't and I'll address that briefly too.)

But first let's give credit where it's due about the podcast...

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Note: This blog post is from 2012. 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.

As the year comes to a close, many bloggers take a moment to document the most-viewed entries of the year on their blog. In that spirit, here are the top-viewed entries of the year for my blog.

I have more to say about the list (and such lists) below, but for those who like to "get to the point", here's the list:

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Note: This blog post is from 2012. 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.

The boys at the CFHour podcast, Dave, Scott, and Matt, are running a relief effort for victims of Hurricane Sandy.

If you'll make a donation of any amount to any relief effort devoted to victims of Sandy (like the popular Red Cross texting program), and then let the CFHour guys know about it, you'll be put in a draw to win a copy of CFBuilder 2.

To enter the draw, either or email them at show(at)cfhour(dot)com (the latter was added after the episode, in a reply to a comment on Adam Cameron's blog, where he too is kindly promoting the effort.

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Note: This blog post is from 2012. 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.

Often we hear some assert that CF's dying, whether they mean CF the product or CFML the language. I want to make one contention against that which I don't hear too often at all:

There are an awful lot of currently active conferences covering CF/CFML for such a "dying" product and/or language.

I count 12 annual conferences (for the current year) which cover the topics (CF or CFML) entirely or as a major track, as listed in the category on CFML conferences which I keep updated in my CF411 resource.

Here first are the next several coming up:

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Note: This blog post is from 2011. 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.

Just wanted to take a moment to recognize a bit of a milestone for the online ColdFusion Meetup.

This week will mark our 175th episode, with Jim Harris presenting on "Security: Hiding Info. from Individuals Not Authorized To See It", being held Thursday at noon US ET. (And the 176th episode will follow just after that "Requirements and Estimating", with Peter Bell.

If you've missed out on any of the past sessions, they're recorded and posted at recordings.coldfusionmeetup.com, and since 2010 are available in either streaming or downloadable (flv, mp3, mp4, wmv) format.

If you want to know about future meetings, you can join the 2400+ other members of the group (for free at the first URL above) to get email notifications, or you can follow the RSS feed of the calendar there, or if you can't get to meetup.com (being a social networking site), you can also just follow us via @cfmeetup on twitter.

Here's to 175 more episodes in coming years. :-)

PS If anyone is wondering, I count the sessions since I began hosting the CFMeetup in April 2007. Steven Erat had organized it originally and run it in 2005-2006. I simply started counting the recordings as I posted them and didn't think at the time to go back and find/count any previous sessions, so technically the number could/should be larger, but we'll leave that as a historical aberration. :-)

Note: This blog post is from 2010. 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.

Did you know CF's being used by Dell, TomTom, BestBuy and others? Well, it is, but through a service they license, but for public-facing parts of their sites, so it's indeed worth noting.

I had noticed today that Budd Wright from PelcoSolutions (aka DVS Interactive) blogged this weekend that "BestBuy Uses ColdFusion". That certainly caught my eye (heck, I was in the store just yesterday.)

Just the BestBuy "trade-in" site, but more than meets the eye

As I read it and saw it was about their trade-in site, I thought, "well, some may bemoan that it's 'just a subsite'", and therefore may not find it quite as compelling as if it were the main site. That may be so.

But on closer examination I found something that is indeed still more compelling. What BestBuy is using (that uses CF) is really a licensed service from dealtree.com. And if one looks at that page (where DealTree lists others using their service), we see that indeed it's used also by Dell, TomTom, Sharp, Buy.com, Gateway, Casio, Ebay, and others. So this is about more than just BestBuy! :-)

These other companies (Dell, TomTom, etc.) would have high expectations

They all certainly wouldn't have chosen if if it wasn't suitable to the task, and you'd think someone higher up in each company had to clear it, since trade-in processing is pretty public-facing (both in-store and online).

Perhaps we can hope it may raise the profile of CF within the companies (though really, it's probably just seen as a utility to most, SAAS that just works, so that may be too much to hope for.)

Still, since these are companies which will require fast response in both the in-store and online sites, it's certainly a nice set of examples of e-commerce CF use that we can point to, so thanks for sharing, Budd.

I figured this was all a little much to put in his blog as a comment. :-) Plus I thought that my blogging it separately might be a nice way to give his entry a little more "link juice" in the search engines. :-)

Who else is using CF?

I'm adding this after a couple of comments below, of people noting other sites using CF. I didn't think to mention it when I wrote this but I do keep a list of resources helping people who may wonder what other sites run CF. It's one of the 125+ categories in my CF411 site:

CFML-Powered Web Sites (who's using CFML?)

To be clear, I'm not keeping a list. Instead, I point there to many sites that do keep such lists.

Note: This blog post is from 2010. 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.

This could be very interesting. Starting today at 4pm EST, and over the next few weeks, the "Mura Show" (a weekly online user group for Mura CMS) will dedicate a few episodes to focus on the conversion of my site, CArehart.org.

In this post, let me introduce the plan.

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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'm sure many readers have seen mention of the upcoming event, A Wee Dram of Scotch. If you haven't taken a look at it, it's shaping up to be quite a good value for getting a considerable amount of training in good development practices, all in one day and for just 20 bucks (10 British Pounds).

They have a great lineup of 7 terrific speakers, presenting on topics that many want to know or know more about: ColdSpring, OO, clustering, Subversion, dev practices, and Railo. And the topics are bring presented consecutively so you won't need to worry about missing a single one. That also makes for an easy read of the web site: it's just a single page, with popups for each talk. Take just a minute to check it out.

Put on by the same folks who run Scotch on the Rocks, I'm sure A Wee Dram will be as fun (and relaxed) as it will be informative. And since I spoke at this year's Scotch event, I say that from pleasurable experience. They've also got a nice lineup of sponsors, who I'm sure are helping make the low cost possible, and who should be thanked. Be sure to visit their booths while there.

(I only wish I could attend, but I've already got a commitment that week, volunteering at the PGA Tour Championship that's held yearly in Atlanta.)

It's being held 2 weeks from this coming Thursday, the 25th, in London. I realize that puts it out of reach for many, but hey, that low price gets you lunch, 2 free drinks, 10% off Scotch on the Rocks 09, and the great lineup of speakers. For folks in the greater London area, it's a no-brainer. And if you'd need to fly in to make it, and your training budget can cover that cost, it's a bargain, a good value, and sure to be a good time as well.

BTW, someone may want to ask, "is it being recorded?" The site doesn't say, so I'd assume not. It's in their interest (and that of the sponsors) to get people to come. Someone else may ask if I could get the speakers to present on the ColdFusion Meetup, and I'd surely like to, but none have offered yet, so do consider going to the event instead. :-)

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.

Thank you, Steve Bryant, for your CF_Blogpicks for the week, a series of weekly blog entries he started on Jan 7, highlighting what he feels are newsworthy blog entries that all CF developers ought to consider.

Last week I praised and highlighted Kay Smoljak's week in ColdFusion blog entries. Then last night I was perusing FullAsAGoog and noticed for the first time one of Steve's entries. What a delight to find that.(It's funny to note that he started his about the same time Kay did hers--funny how that goes.)

I recommend you keep an eye on Steve's list, too. He strives to pick 5 key entries a week that he feels most developers will benefit learning from. (I'm delighted to see he picked one of my entries this week, but really it's totally coincidental that I tripped across it this week while perusing the 'goog.)

Do we really need yet another source? I say yes

Now, some may say, "why do we need these additional resources? Aren't aggregators like the 'goog, MXNA, FeedSquirrel, and ColdFusionBloggers, all one needs? And what about the dzone cf page?"

Sure, those are all great. But here's the thing: Steve's been doing his news for a few weeks, and this is the first I'd seen it (same with Kay's last week). I'm sure many of us miss things that come through the aggregators. Most of us don't have time to read EVERY message they show--and then, which aggregator do you pick? While they mostly show the same things, with different approaches, some blogs aren't in all.

Most of all, I have to admit that I don't even have time to keep an eye on even any one aggregator each day, or really even each week. There's just too much content being created for most of us to stay on top of it all.

That's why I LOVE these attempts to do that hard work for us. Like I said last week of Kay's, and earlier this week about the various CF podcasts past and present (and future?), any sort of manual effort to gather and present key news and info shared is really a tough job, and my hats off to all who try.

I have some approaches in mind myself. One of them is similar to the dzone approach, and feedquirrel's recent addition to let the community of readers vote on entries. Those are both steps in the direction I was headed, though my idea is still different. We'll see. But until then, I want to make sure people know about these various features.