My blog turns 8 years old today. Wow! That seems like a long time, but I know there are other people out there that started blogs a while before me. I remember when I first started hearing about the term "blog". I ignored it for a few months, and then finally decided to go figure out what "blog" means. I remember thinking that "blog" is a dumb term for what basically seemed like a web journal. The rest is history. :)

I am not a prolific blogger, but I'm not apologizing for that. The way I see it, this is my blog and I don't owe anybody anything for it. If I only post once a month, I'm just hurting myself. So you'll never see me post one of those, "Man...I haven't been posting very often here. Sorry guys!" posts. It is what it is. I post when I want to say something, and when I don't, I don't post. So I generally don't want to say anything. :)

As I always do on my blog anniversary, I'll post some stats*:

Top 10 posts, by page view

*My blog originally was on Blogger (before they were bought by Google). I lost all of the stats from my blog when I converted to BlogCFC. I can't remember when that was exactly, but I think these stats cover at least 4 years, maybe 5 or 6.

As more and more people are using devices where Flash is not available, as a web developer you might be concerned about this trend (especially since Steve Jobs has waged a war against Flash). I found an awesome tool to help us solve this problem. It's a tool called Video for Everybody, which is basically some code you can use in your pages to display a video that will work in ANY device (as long as it can play videos, that is). You have to encode your videos in both MP4 and OGG format. Once you've done that, you use this code and it will do one of the following, depending on what the user's browser supports:

1. Display HTML5 video
2. Display Flash video
3. Display an image with download links for the two video formats

So this way you can support all of your user's video capabilities with very little pain. And for the standard's conscious among us, it tries to use HTML5 whenever it can.

If you are dealing with a lot of spam (who isn't?) and you find that lots of spam is getting through your filters, I just saw a cool idea for this problem. As you may know, I am the author of CFFormProtect. While I find that this works 99% of the time, there is the occasional spam that slips through. I was on a site recently that didn't have a Captcha to protect their comment form, but when I submitted my post their spam filter somehow flagged my as a spammer, and then they asked me to fill out a captcha. I think this is a great idea.

If you are familiar with CFFormProtect, you will know that it has a weighting system to flag spam. Posts aren't blocked for any one problem, but rather CFFP takes up to 8 different tests, and if the posts fails x amount of those, it is blocked. So taking the idea I talked about in the first paragraph, maybe you allow posts through that pass 90% of the tests. A post that only passes 70% of the tests might be asked to do some additional validation (maybe a captcha, or moderation, or an email verification). Anything less than 70% is automatically flagged as spam. These numbers are just an example, your mileage will vary. What do you think of that idea?

I saw Jason Delmore's new wish list last night, and I think it's the best ever. For one reason. He states that Adobe should release a free version. And he uses all the same reasons I've always used. You might be saying, "What's the big deal? Another CFer saying we need a free version...we've heard it before." But this is different. Jason Delmore is the former Product Manager for ColdFusion, and when he talks more people listen than when the average joe CFer says "please release a free version". As far as I know this is the first time a big name in our community has publicly come out in support of a free version (correct me if I'm wrong). People like Sean Corfield and Ray Camden either don't think we need a free version, or if they do they don't talk about it publicly.

By the way, I like most of the other 9 things on Jason's list as well. But this free version topic is BIG, in my opinion. I hope Adobe listens.

To be clear...it's not that I personally want to benefit from this free version. If I wanted that, I'd just use Railo or OpenBD. The problem is that the rest of the web development community is not aware of the free alternatives. The majority of them won't become aware of them UNLESS they first join our community by trying Adobe CF. And they won't even give Adobe a second look because of the huge price tag. I realize there are other reasons that might hold them back, but in my opinion the price tag is the biggest reason that hobbyists continue to ignore CF.

CFFormProtect 2.1 has been released. This new version doesn't have a lot of major new features, mostly bug fixes. One new feature, you can now specify a different config file than the default in the initialization of the CFC. Also, you can how put multiple copies of CFFP into one page (helpful if you have many forms on one page). You can find the new version at the project page.

There were a lot of people that contributed bug fixes and patches, and I don't want to name you all. You know who you are, and thank you. Feel free to drop a comment here to take credit for your work. :)

A few years ago when I was bored I created a simple calculator (you know, the kind you use to do math problems) in Javascript. I was recently cleaning out an old hard drive and found it, and I thought I would share this Javascript calulator for anybody that might have a use for something like this in your web apps. I don't care to dump all the code in this post, you can view source on the page to see how it works.

Dan Wilson made some cool modifications to CFFormProtect that he wants to share with the community. I decided not to roll these changes into the main project, but I want to make them available for those that would find them useful. In short, he made CFFP a lot more OO. :) Here are the details:

• The form initialization code is now CFC based, which is more harmonious with ModelGlue (what Dan uses), as well as other frameworks.
• He made modifications that allow CFFP configuration from ColdSpring.
• He wrote a bunch of unit tests.

If this version of CFFP looks like it would easily slide into your projects, give it a try. There is a readme file in the zip that Dan wrote that should get you up and running. Thanks Dan!

Last month I stated that I might not upgrade CFQuickDocs to contain the tag and function documentation for ColdFusion 9. Well, after some good points in the comments, I decided to change my mind. As of today you can now look up CF 9 tag/function info in CFQuickDocs. Just go to CFQuickDocs using your normal method (browser shortcut, search engine plugin, etc.) and you will notice a new "Chose your docs library" link for ColdFusion 9 at the top. Enjoy!

If you are a ColdFusion developer that runs Linux on your desktop, you are probably aware that you can't get an official Linux version of CFBuilder. Well, there is a way to run CFBuilder on Linux, thanks to Mark Mandel. He has done some leg work to find the files you need from the Windows version and then you can run a script he wrote to get it all working. I haven't tried this yet, but it looks promising.

So my next question is...if Mark can do this, why can't Adobe figure this out and release an official Linux version? Especially since they do have a Linux version of ColdFusion.

I have had a few people ask me if I am going to update CFQuickDocs to include ColdFusion 9 tags and function documentation. The quick answer is...it depends. ;)

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