Crikey

What is it with this current trend with dropping the “e” in web app names such as Flickr and Frappr?

Is there any point to it at all or is it just “cool”?

I just thought I would post a response to Mossy Blog's “RSS Aggregators are a waste of time” post.

Basically, the theme is that due to the sheer amount of content posted to blogs within the Adobe community, shared with the fact that posters are not always strict about what they post and what categories they share it under, that the usefulness of RSS Aggregators such as Feed-Squirrel, MXNA and FullAsAGoog diminishes.

Well, as the author of one of these aggregators I can see exactly where he is coming from (as well as everyone else in the discussion that was originally on the CFAUSSIE list). So, I thought I would jot down a note describing the features that Feed-Squirrel.com has in place to mitigate these problems. All of these features have been in place since launch or soon after, and the feedback I have received from users has helped develop them significantly. So, here we go:

1) Smart Categories - All of the categories within Feed-Squirrel.com (from the links on the left) should be considered smart, i.e they parse the content for keywords and topics and then decide what category the post should go in. Some posts go in more than one category because of this, some don't go in any, but the net effect is that every thing you see in, say, the CF category, has some sort of relevance to CF.

2) Top Items - Whilst the Digg model is very nice, I felt it was too much for feed-squirrel, as I realised people generally vote for items simply by reading the preview text and then clicking the item to take a look at the whole post. Combining this with item age and a couple of other parameters, Feed-squirrel shows you, all the time, the most popular items over the last 24 hours across the entire dataset.

3) Custom Categories - So, if the last two features still don't filter out enough of the rubbish for you, and you know of a few posters that you trust, you can create a “Custom Category”. You can create as many of these as you like, and include in them only the feeds that you find are of interest. So, for instance, you think Ray Camden and Sean Corfield always say the right things? Then create a custom category for them and filter out everyone else.

As with everything else on feed-squirrel at the moment, none of these features require any sort of registration or login and can be used straight away.

As always though, I am sure that these features do not tick the boxes for every user out there, and never will, but if you think you have an idea which might help this, let me know and I'll see what we can do…

If you hear yourself saying that a lot, then you might be interested in what I have planned.

In my head (a crazy crazy place) I have a vision of a tool that users can use to manage their day-to-day tasks, projects and project milestones in a, dare I say it, Web 2.0-y sort of way.

I am aware of a few tools out there already similar to this such as Voo2Do which I blogged about a few days ago, but none of these tools do what I want.

One of the primary reasons for doing this is to get me more involved in open source software. Yup, even though I am intially considering this as only a hosted service, I am also thinking about making this redistributable so people can run this tool on their own Intranets/Networks.

However, I am sure I can't do this alone. I have skills in CF, but my Javascript ain't what it used to be, and I also need at least one other pair of eyes when it comes to funtionality and UI. So, it you are interested in helping, drop me a line and we'll see what we can do together. Also, if you have any ideas for functionality you'd like to see, I'd also like to see you leaving some comments.

Yup, Feed-squirrel was down all day yesterday due to a network outage at our hosts hostmysite.com. It appears some over zealous builders got carried away and cut the datacenter's connection to the internet.

However, we are back now, and firing on all cylinders.

I've just been going through this months stats for feed-squirrel.com and noticed something which hasn't really made itself obvious before, but the majority of users are CF developers or people with a vested interest in CF.

What I want to know is:
1) Do you use Feed-Squirrel (or even MXNA or Goog)?

2) What do you use it for?

3) What features (not purely related to RSS) would you find useful?

For instance, would a forum (to sit as an alternative to adobe.com) be useful to you? Would a move to focus on CF improve the site for you, or are you a closet Flash developer who loves the Flash content? Is there any information that the site could gather that you would find useful? (e.g .NET content)

Let me know, I can only try and make it better for you…

You're probably thinking “well, no suprise there”, but I not meaning what you would initially think.

This morning I received over 100 spam mails in my inbox (a daily occurence) which although on a common theme were promising all sorts of things. For once though, I decided to take a look at a few of these mails and noticed something quite suprising.

These mails are now trying to so hard to get to your inbox that in order to do so they are having to obfuscate their true content so much that they are rendering themselves useless. I have seen examples of spam that contain no contact details at all, some which are so clouded with random characters that they are unreadable, and some with URLs so messed up that clicking them doesn't take you to where the spammer wanted you to go anyway.

So, could we possibly be on the verge of winning the war against email-borne spam? Could the anti-spam devices now be getting so good it is now financially viable for a spammer to use the email medium (which unfortunately means that they resort to something else)?

Oh, and if you know anyone who has ever bought anything from a spammer, please tell them to stop…

I just thought I would post a quick note to “big-up” a site that I have been using today (and collegues for a while) that really rocks my boat in terms of Web 2.0 being useful.

Basically Voo2Do is a task management tool in the same sort of vein as ta-da et al. I won't go into details about how it works and what you can do as thats all on the site, but I can wholeheartedly recommend signing up and trying out.

…and before you ask, No, I'm not being prompted to say this, I'm doing it off my own back…

Earlier today (I'm in the UK) I kicked off a thread on the CF-Talk mailing list asking how people set up their development environments when taking into account multiple developers, multiple environments and source control.

So, I have a few questions which I'd like people to answer so I can get a consensus from the community on the best way to set up an environment.

So
1) How do you currently have your development environment set up?
2) What problems do you have with the way it is?
3) What would you do to solve those problems?
4) What tools, if any, did you wish existed to aid this process?

Hopefully, with people replying other people can get ideas on the best way to develop their Coldfusion (or even other languages) in a typical team environment.

I have a number of applications (including the one you are looking at) running in production on various servers all over the place. Some are CFMX7, some are CFMX, some are 4.5. Of those, they are hosted on a variety of platforms: Windows 2003, Win 2K, RedHat etc etc.

However, something is common to all of these applications which just doesn't make sense, and that is some of the errors I occasionally get from these applications. Initially I thought these errors were mainly due to spiders, bots, bookmarks and URL hackers.

In a nutshell, I have a piece of code which uses an URL or FORM variable for one thing or another, but occasionally (like less that 0.001%) of hits result in an error. The error being symptomatic of the variable not being supplied in the normal way (i.e in the URL). The strange thing is, these are nearly always supplied, and are visible in the cfcatch dumps I capture when recording the error.

Now, I know it's not just me, and not related to any framework I am using as the apps that do it are written in a variety of ways, and by various developers.

So, I have a query, has anyone else received errors that sort of fit this description? Could this be a problem with ColdFusion or maybe even IIS etc?

Someone, please, back me up here…