My company 2nd Byte are looking for two new web developers to add to a rapidly expanding development team.

More info can be found here. If you're interested, drop me a mail at neil.middleton@the google related email service.

Recently, I have been neglecting my blog somewhat, mainly due to spending too much time working on the feed-squirrel main site.

Well, not I am hopefully going to have a little more time to talk CF now, so you should start seeing more from me.

Oh, happy days I hear you cry.

As you may or may not know, I trekked up to London last night's UK CFUG with one of my works new padawan CF developers. After seeing Mark D talk at length about the Model-Glue framework and Reactor, I head off back to the upper-class realms of paying the babysitter.

However, today I am confronted by something the feed-squirrel is telling me, namely who was at the same meeting who is also an active contributor to the UK blogosphere. I knew Mark D was there, obviously, and I also saw Andy Jarrett (the offers still there Andy ;-)) sat down at the front, but other than that, everyone else was a unrecognisable face. Well as it turns out Nick Tong, Kola Oyedeji, Neil Roberts, Martin Laine and Alistair Davidson also made a show, most of which I have exchanged email with in the past at some point.

Tell you what guys, next time, let's get some name badges sorted out, or have some sort of introduction session going. It seems silly us not knowing each other is there. (On the other hand, stick a mugshot on your blog if you haven't already to at least give people a fighting chance.)

Just a quick reminder of the UKCFUG meeting this Thursday:

The Model Glue is a MVC (Model - View - Controller) based framework for ColdFusion applications. It provides a way to easily link your presentation layer (view) to your model layer by the use of controllers. Model Glue provides configuration and powerful control over over this “gluing” of your layers through XML files. Working along side it is the Reactor framework, a “Inline Dynamic Data Abstraction” API, which allows you to very quickly and easily access your database model without the need to write SQL or configure Data Access Objects.

In this presentation Mark Drew will be presenting what these frameworks are in detail (and what they are not!) and also develop from scratch a blog application using these two frameworks to demonstrate the power and speed that you can gain in your development environment.

Where:
Room U215, City University, Northampton Square, (main campus entrance), London EC1V 0HB.

When: Thursday 27 April 2006

* Doors open: 1800
* Meeting starts: 1830
* Meeting ends: 2030

Directions:
By Underground: Angel (Northern Line - City Branch) or Farrington (Metropolitain and City Line). By Bus: Routes 4, 19, 30, 38, 43, 55, 56, 63, 73, 153, 205, 214, 243, 274, 341.”

If you're going, see you there.

..if a little bit late. Here's my (quite surprising) Nerd score:

Over the last few days, you may have seen people talking about a performance test that Webapper have run against a few of the more popular CF frameworks out there, namely Model-Glue, Mach-ii, Fusebox 4.1. Also included was a homegrown app from Simon Horwith.

The results? Well, not so bad, even if the showing from MG was by no means complete. As it turns out, after some more testing, Joe Rhinehart, the author of MG, has found a couple of low level bugs in the framework. Nothing drastic, just some bits that could be a bit cleaner.

So, the framework previously known as MG 1.1 is getting a revision. 1.1.01 is in the pipeline (and also in the MG Subversion repository for anyone wanting to test it).

Just a quickie to note that Firefox 1.5.0.2 has popped up over on Mozilla.org. Obviously, if you are using 1.5+ then this will automatically update. If you aren't then I suggest you go download it now.

I've just been taking my daily run through the statistics for feed-squirrel.com and noticed that traffic has almost doubled since the day before. Freak occurrence? High traffic site linking in? Well partly… Yesterday, we did get a couple of reasonable traffic links from out and about on t'internet, but mainly it looks like Google has done some shifting of data.

As feed-squirrel.com is still relatively new, in the eyes of the search engines, the site was small-fry. Yes, there were a load of indexed pages, but as far as Google went, nothing in the way of incoming links.

Well, yesterday that changed, Google awarded feed-squirrel a page rank of 7 and suddenly started showing over 800 inbound links to the site. Traffic has doubled as result.

So what does this tell us? Well, for me it says, that no matter who you are on the net, no matter what you do, if Google doesn't like you then you are more or less screwed. Yes, there are other search engines, but these days Google is the tour guide of the internet.

Does anyone else feel that this might be a bad thing?