This year is A List Apart's second year running their Survey For People Who Make Websites. I just completed it (18 pages, average 2-3 questions per page) in about 8 minutes, so what are you waiting for?

I figured since I was finally going to have some proper ColdFusion hosting, I might as well check out the latest and greatest from our various CFML blogging engines. I'd used BlogCFC in the past, so this time I decided to give Mango a test drive. So far, I'm really liking it. Mango has an integrated database setup and the option to import from WordPress exports and BlogCFC. It's apparently got easy but powerful plugin support (which I intend to explore soon), and is supposed to be one of the easier blogs to skin — again, something I intend to explore soon.

With some help from Laura in the Mango support forums, I was able to work through some quirky import issues (pages that belong to a category aren't supported in Mango, but apparently I had them in WP — this was throwing an error during import, should be fixed in an upcoming release, I'm sure) and got all of my old posts and comments imported. I managed to remember what my FeedBurner password was, so I even managed to pull off the switch without upsetting continuity in aggregators like ColdFusionBloggers, Feed Squirrel and AXNA. Although I have to apologize if it ends up causing doubles of anything.

Lastly, I also setup request forwarding from my previous host (on another of my domains still temporarily hosted there) to my new host and domain, pretty much just like Ray did when he moved to ColdFusionJedi.com. Since my old host didn't support SES urls, I had to use the ID from the url to lookup the post title and forward the url to this domain.

So how do you like the new domain? Eh?

Often times I subscribe to people's blog posts when I leave a comment, because I'm interested in other folks' comments as well. Unfortunately, this occasionally means that a spam comment ends up in my inbox:

 

My question is this: Should I report this as spam? I mean, I did kind of ask for it (not really… but yeah… but no). The last thing I want is for GMail to start filtering all blog comment emails as spam. I think this is where some transparency with Google could help. What exactly do they do with a message after we mark it as spam? Or heck, give us configurable white/black lists. What do you do?

I was listening to some back-episodes of the Stack Overflow podcast the other day, and they mentioned the difference between Computer Science and Software Engineering (that the latter is more about working on software in a team, how to design together, etc), and the thought occurred to me that if I wanted to get my Masters Degree, maybe that would be something worth pursuing.

I have my Bachelors of Science in Computer Science. I found it to be a wholly worthwhile program, because as much as I already knew about programming, I got so much experience with different types of programming and the fundamentals behind it all — from Turing Machines in Mathematics of Computer Science to writing my own File System in Operating Systems, to writing a very basic game with OpenGL in Computer Graphics. Between all of my other programming classes, I got to play with VB, C, C++, Perl, Awk, Bash shell scripting, and Java. At work I was writing Natural/Adabas/JCL (IBM Mainframe), ColdFusion, and a touch of VB. When I graduated, I really felt like I had tried everything and I was ready to choose my career path.

I'm really glad I chose to pursue a career in ColdFusion. It's been exciting and rewarding, and a lot of fun. My wife and friends think I'm crazy for coming home from work only to want to sit down and write more CF code — but it's like an infectious disease, and one that I like. Every now and then I've thought about going back to school to get my Masters Degree, but I always write it off to the idea that a Masters in Computer Science would be a waste of time: Nobody is looking for them on resume's, and the content seems like it would be a rehash of my undergratuate work.

But the idea that Software Engineering might be something new — and a way for me to become a better developer — has me kind of intrigued. Is there something worthwhile I could get from a graduate program on Software Engineering that I haven't already gotten from eight years of working in "the industry"?

In Hacking BlogCFC: Part 1 – Replacing the INI file (read) with XML I showed how you can replace the file blog.ini.cfm with an XML file (blog.xml.cfm) and modify part of the core of BlogCFC to read the data from this new XML format. The motivation for doing so was that on some ColdFusion hosts the getProfileString() and setProfileString() functions are considered a security risk and blocked. Today I'll show you how to modify the setProperty() method of /org/camden/blog.cfc to update that XML file, completing the transparency of the change, by giving the appearance that nothing has been changed at all. In Part 1, I had you modify setProperty() and comment out its contents. Now, go back and replace that (leaving the original arguments in place) with the following: [viewcode] src="blog.cfc.setProperty.2.txt" showsyntax=no geshi=cfm [/viewcode] What we're doing here is loading the XML file into memory, using Regular Expressions to find the setting tag that we want to update, and replacing it with a new one built from the name and value passed into the function. Then we write the XML file back out, and all is well. Notice that I'm still using lcase() on the key name, because we want to ensure that the settings file remains in lower case so that our reading function can find the settings it's looking for. That's it! Now you can run BlogCFC on a host that blocks set/getProfileString(). Happy Blogging.