Social Media Defined:

Learning to Digg, Backflip, or Furl might sound less than Delicious, until you Ask for a spoonful of RawSugar and a quick Wink from Mister Wong, the Frappr, who’s taken a StumbleUpon a Flock of Magnolia after a Spurl last night at the LinkaGoGo, and suddenly your site becomes Mashable on the Newsvine, where, as fast as you can say Blinklist, all the world will Digg by iPhone your Facebook on MySpace before you quickly Squidoo over to YouTube for 43 Things you must Flickr with before you’re forced to Reddit again, plus get Linkedin while praying to the Gods of Twitter that one day you’ll “get” what the Technorati all this social media stuff means.

Tags: socialmedia

I have just read an interesting post on Ben Nadel’s blog regarding jQuery UI’s new Theme creation site.  This is a very interesting site especially for colour blind blokes like me http://ui.jquery.com/themeroller.  Having played with it for a while I can see great things for a history site I am working on with my son who is passinate about history.

Few people realise how important it is to be able to do colour by numbers.  There are other sites I have found that help with colour palettes eg. www.colorcombos.com.

This is a useful resource showing a detailed comparison of the differences between the primary CFML engines.  It compares CF 8, Railo 2 and various versions of Blue Dragon 7 (including Open Source version).

It is a thorough analysis by function and tag.

http://www.cfml-engines.info/wiki/index.php/Comparison

I have just stumbled upon these great videos that describe some of the more interesting facets of Web 2.0.  These are great for explaining how web 2.0 could be used in the corporate world.

http://www.commoncraft.com/show

You can also purchse their videos in hi-def in their online store.

Christophe Coenrates has punlished an excellent example of data synchronization using Adobe AIR and Live Cycle Data Services (LCDS) 2.6.

http://coenraets.org/blog/2008/05/insync-automatic-offline-data-synchronization-in-air-using-lcds-26/

I have downloaded this example and will post on some of the issues of getting it work if a) you are not experienced in Tomcat and b) you are coming from ColdFusion background.

Creating Web Sites on IIS 5

MkW3Site.vbs is a WSH script installed by default to the \inetpub\scripts directory when you install Windows 2000. (You can download MkW3Site.vbs from the Code Library on the IIS Administrator Web site at http://www.iisadministrator.com.)

This powerful script creates Web sites for you. MkW3Site.vbs takes 10 possible parameters.

MkW3Site.vbs isn’t pathed (i.e., placed in a folder that Windows locates automatically by default), so you need to navigate to the \inetpub\scripts directory to execute it. In addition, creating Web sites requires a security privilege, so make sure you’re authenticated as a member of the local administrators group on the server you’re using. Alternatively, you can use the command-line utility Runas to impersonate a user when you run the script.

Although you can run MkW3Site.vbs in CScript or WScript, I recommend CScript so that all screen output is directed to the command window from which you run the code. WScript initiates a series of pop-up windows that you have to close by clicking OK. I executed the command

CScript mkw3site.vbs —r e:\ _
inetpub\wwwroot\sitepath _
—t "sitename" —h _
www.sitedomain.com —n 3 —v

Also read this article on setting values in the metabase

Been revisiting this subject and catching up on best practice.  Found the following useful resources whilst doing so:

1. How to Break Web Software - excellent book on the subject by by Mike Andrews and James Whittaker
2. Google video - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5159636580663884360
3. Mark Krugers blogs and podcasts on the security pyramid - http://mkruger.cfwebtools.com/index.cfm?mode=alias&alias=security.pyramid.intro

Sites dedicated to the subject

1. WebAppsSec - http://www.webappsec.org/
2. OWASP - http://www.owasp.org/documentation/topten.html
3. Security Focus - http://www.securityfocus.com/

I have been assessing Model-Glue and Reactor.  Like many others there is lots of ‘noise’ about frameworks at the moment.  Some useful starting points from all of the reading and listening that I have been doing are as follows:

Listen to episode 16 of ColdFusion Podcast http://www.coldfusionpodcast.com/node/45

Review articles on MVC framework concepts at http://www.benorama.com/coldfusion/

Review Ray Camden’s Quick Guide on Model-Glue

Review Ray Camden ColdFusion Cookbook implementation for a more full on example of using Model-Glue.

I found this great list of free CF framework and applications on  this site.

“There’s millions of lines of free code out there in the form of frameworks, tools, and other packages intended to aid and abet the skilled and professional development of ColdFusion applications.” Examples:

• CFEclipse
• Fusebox
• Mach-II
• ModelGlue
• onTap
• CFCDev.org
• cfLib.org
• Tartan
• COAL
• ColdSpring
• http://www.productivityenhancement.com/plum/WhatPlumCanDo.cfm

As for complete applications, here’s just a few (and there’s more!):

• Galleon Forums
• BlogCFC
• FarCry

I got into a bit of a problem with a server that was being a bit of a pain and after googling for a while discovered that you can issue a command using the command line to the remote machine like this:

shutdown /r /m \\remoteComputer \f \c “The reason why”

/f forces the shutdown and may not be necessary

/r restarts the remote machine

/m means it is expecting a machine 

/c comment

note the name of the remote computer is preceded by \\ e.g. \\193.168.1.123

Useful site with Win 2003 tips

http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/index.htm