I’ve thougt CFUnited was over priced and didn’t really offer enough to be worth the price, since I attended in 2005. I’ve never attended CF.Objective(), since by the time it got started up, I was moving into Flex development, but since it bills itself as the Enterprise CF Conference, I found it odd that it was dribbling extra technologies, moving away from CF.

All that said, we thought the CF Community was happy with it’s options. I think we might have been wrong. We got a DM the other day, “any chance we can see 360|ColdFusion?  the existing conferences are a big bag of suck”

To make sure that wasn’t a single sentiment we through out a simple survey, which is still open, but as of the writing of this 86% those who’ve responded would like to see a 360|CF event.

I think a 360|CF would be hella fun! I love CF, and when the need arises for back end stuff for 360Conferences, it’s CF. Tom and I met each other as CF Developers at Ameriquest Mortgage, and we definitely still love the technology.

We’re not rushing into anything, ’09 has seen us add 360|iDev, to our line up, but if the community is interested in a 360|CF, we’d love to get involved!

I wonder if the CF Community would know what to do with a conference that was 3-4 days, and cost drastically less than the alternatives… mmmm.

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I finished the SQL for the TMC. Creates the tables and stored procs and creates an admin user.

Don’t be shy to ask questions.

Link to file.

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I was talking to a friend and he was saying he’s starting a flex project of his own. Get a more concrete grasp on the technology. Makes sense to me. While I wait for Roundpeg to land some Flex work I can do I figure I should experiment on my own.

So starting next week I will be devoting as much free time as I can to “flex-ifying” my Time Management Console app. This app is a CF app I wrote to track my time, and manage my invoicing. Seems like a good candidate for a Rich Internet App.

I’m also in the process of Scripting the Database (should be done by Monday) so that I can make that available for download should anybody be interested. In the meantime, I’ve made some minor improvements to the code, added some MX functionality and gotten jiggy with the CFdocument tag. More to come but if you’re interested here’s a link to the zip.

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A few days ago I came across some one’s blog posting about his articles in the Oct CFDJ. I can’t remember where I saw that, but I did download the PDF version. I didn’t read it at that time, but I scanned the cover.

Jump a few hours into the day, one of my clients is talking about an unscoped feature on the site I’m building for him. A search based on zip code proximity, didn’t I just see that somewhere? I did, the Oct CFDJ had an article by Troy Pullis on his implementation of a proximity search.

I read his article and he points to his source of inspiration, an article on webmonkey by none other than my new Pal Rob Capili. I met Rob at Flex training a few weeks ago. I had him send me his code (I couldn’t get webmonkey to load for whatever reason) and away I went. Thanks to his code and article, and Troy’s article in the CFDJ, my un-spec’ed search page was done in an hour or so, including my 5$ zipcode database.

Gotta love the CF Community.

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BUT

I’m working on a site for a client and they want it mostly CSS. More search engine friendly and all. I know enough CSS to fill a shot glass. Prefer other things in my shot glasses, but my CSS knowledge will if needed fit there.

My buddy Tom used one of our co-workers’ books on CSS, and said it had helped him with his immediate need. So.. off to the local B&N I went.

The local B&N actually has a really good section for computer books, I was impressed, and had I not been in a hurry to get back to the house and get working, I woulda stuck around a while.Seeing as I was at a book store I couldn’t come away with just one book, especially if the one ended up not be the one I need. So I picked up the O’Reilly offering on CSS as well. They tend to be pretty good books.

I am well on my way to really digging CSS. It certainly takes some getting used to but it sure is nice once you get going. This site I’m working on is pretty easy to tweak when I need to change a color or nudge something to the left. I’ve really been missing out.

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We used <cf_fake_url> to accomplish the ses conversion. It actually made the transition quite easy. A few pages required some tweaking with how they pass variables but otherwise it was a simple matter of changing all <A href> tags to use page.cfm/var/value/var/value. Worked rather well I must say.

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Stay tuned. I’ll try to post some of my AJAX attempts.

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Well as resident CF Guru the application we needed fell to me. Not only was I the sole developer, I was the technical architect, before such titles existed. Long story short I came up with a pretty damn robust time tracking app, with lots of reporting features. When I left there and the company folded, I modified the application (which I somehow accidentally left on a CD) to be my time tracking and invoicing app for my consulting business. The time entries I made, were then translatable to an invoice that I could print or email. This was all CF5, so none of the cool new features we have today.

A badly planned HD wipe and restore left me with a copy of my app that was 5 months old a few years ago and I never came back to it, since I was a full time employee. Well I’m getting back into consulting again so I’ve resurected the app and am bringing it up to 2005.

Once I get it back to mostly stable I’ll start posting Zips of it for download by anyone interested. Screen shots are available over at my other site.

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For those (are there any) that don’t know, captcha systems are those annoying little things that ask us to type in some random string of letters and numbers.

As Rob points out, for those of us that are color blind these systems are really hard to deal with. Hell I’m not color blind and I often have to refresh until I get a legible string.

So this brings us to my version. I could have used cfx_captcha, but I’m cheap and it woulda cost like $10/month for CrystalTech to host the CFX for me. Pass!

I launched my blog with no spammer protection initially. That, as you can imagine didn’t go well. My comments were flooded with Spam almost immediately. Short of disabling comments I needed a solution, so I came up with something pretty elegant IMO.

On the surface it’s a Checkbox with a label of “I am human”

under the covers, I create a random number and save it to session scope. That number becomes the name of the form field for the checkbox. On the processing end of  the comment processor, I look for a form field that matches my random number. If I have it, the comment passes. If not, I quietly disregard the comment.

On the processing page it’s pretty simple.

If it passes then the post is put into the database, if not the form says thanks and moves on.

I’m not sure how foolproof it is, but since I launched it. it’s never failed me. And it doesn’t offend the color blind.

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