At the time of writing, it would appear that the Adobe weblog aggregator has exploded in a big mess, and is being moved to some new servers:

It is currently looking like it will be down for some time.  Well, so you know, Feed-Squirrel.com is still working fine and aggregating a lot of the same content, so check it out.

Rare footage from the Scotch on the rocks team:

As mentioned previously, Feed-Squirrel.com is up for nomination in the best aggregator category at this years CFEmmys. 

Please go vote if you like the site, and hopefully we might win something. Voting closes Friday.

It would appear that not many people know about the feed-squirrel.com twitter feed that has been running now for a few months, so I thought I would mention it again as I know some people out there find it genuinely useful.

In a nutshell, every time Feed-Squirrel.com picks up a ColdFusion related post, the post title is twittered out with a link to the item.  This means that if you are running one of the many twitter desktop tools out there such as GTalk or Twitterific , you will get instantaneous notification of ColdFusion news as it happens.

So, how do you set this up? Simple, get a twitter account, and then follow “FeedSquirrel”.  Make sure you have notifications turned on and you’re away.

Stay tuned, as more feeds for Flash and Flex content will be appearing soon.

Todd Sharp has opened up nominations for this years CFEmmys and Feed-Squirrel.com is nominated for best aggregator. When voting opens next week, please vote for FS, and you never know - we might beat the big guns at their own game

Yup, from now on, whenever someone posts a CF related blog post that is aggregated by feed-squirrel the post will now be “twittered” out via twitter.com. This means you can now opt to receive all your CF related news via an IM like system rather than RSS or web based.

For the “twits” please visit Feed-Squirrel here:
http://www.twitter.com/feedsquirrel

So, what’s been going on with Feed-Squirrel recently? Well plenty thanks….

You may have seen a few days ago that Ben Forta had posted that feed-squirrel.com (my main aggregator site) had migrated to CF8. For me, this is a key step that the site needed to take in order for me to try some new and interesting stuff in the near future. But enough of that, let’s get into the nitty gritty of what’s changed…

1. Overall performance. Hopefully regular users will have noticed significant increases in the performance of the site. This is for a number of reasons
• Coldfusion 8. Although it’s difficult to quantify, it’s make an improvement to overall speed.
• Caching improvements - Lots more of the site is cached, meaning a lot less work required on the data tier (which is one of a not so nice parts of an aggregator)
• No more Model-Glue - Now that may suprise a lot of you, but I’ve effectively gone for the anti-framework. All parts of the site are now built in a fairly bespoke way suited to performance and maintainability. There is still a central data object but everything else is split out in a very lightweight MVC style. This has meant that I have been able to get rid of a lot of the bloat that a complex framework brings, and reap the performance benefits. Also, I never really got on with Model-Glue. I found it got in my way.
2. CFFeed. This tag alone makes my life a lot easier. Unless you’ve ever tried to write some RSS aggregation code you would not beleive how many different feed dialects there are out there. Out of the 1,200 odd feeds the site aggregates, I’ve come across around 1,200 different ways of presenting feed data. It would appear Atom vs RSS is only the top of the iceberg. You may notice that some previously dormant blogs are now aggregating successfully….This is down to CFFeed.
3. CFThread. Another superb tag. Right down in the bowels of this site is some import code, this code runs through every feed on a regular basis checking for new items. Due to the fact there are so many, CFThread now means I can check all the feeds on a more regular basis without having the long running requests that I previously would have had.
4. CFLayout. Check out the “Watched Feeds” and “Create Custom Category” pages. These used to be one huge list of feeds. Now, by using the CFLayout tag, this page has been reduced in size greatly, and even makes it easier to find what you are looking for.

So, all’s good then. Well, as with all migrations there are small problems. I had three significant ones which were:

1. Corrupt Table.This is an error that Coldfusion started returning was load was placed on the server. After some quick tracing, I tracked down the problem to cached queries. It appears that sometimes a cached query can go a bit screwy and force the server to return this error every time the cached query is used. Strangely I found that the error was still returned after I removed the cachedWithin attribute from the query. The only way I could find to get of the error was to flush all cached objects from the server with the CFObjectCache tag. Unfotunately I have not seen this since so I can’t really tell you anymore.
2. Cannot create a new thread because the task queue has reached it maximum limitI started getting this error on the importer. A server restart was the only way to fix the issue and I’m a little unsure as to what the problem might have been. After thinking about it for a while I beleive that there is a thread limit built into CF and that that threshold had been met with entirely unresponsive threads. It would appear then that once this thread pool is full, CF just returns this error.
3. CFFeed limitationsI said before CFFeed is a great tag, and it is, but for me there is one limitation. CFFeed can go off and retreive feeds for you, but for some reason Adobe have left out some of the key functionality of the CFHttp tag which is useful from a resilience point of view. Primarily is the timeout attribute - that the tag should stop trying to read the feed after x seconds. Secondly, CFFeed doesn’t play well with Http Authentication. Whilst in development, I uncovered a situation whereby CF was sat spinning a thread due to the fact that the CFFeed tag had tried to retrieve a feed that required Http Authentication. Instead of failing out as you’d expect, CF just sits there for ever and ever, never timing out, and never returning an error. As far as I can tell the only way to kill the thread is via a server restart. There is a workaround though. Simply use the CFHTTP tag to retreive the contents of the feed, before passing it into CFFeed to deserialize.

So, overall hopefully you guys find the site is more pleasent to use and some small touches make it more useful to you. When you consider that the site’s ground up re-write from blank to now took me around four hours, thats not bad going…

Now, on to the new features. Watch this space….

I realised today that there are four major RSS aggregators in the Coldfusion community.  We have Feed-Squirrel (of course), MXNA, Fullasagoog, and now Ray Camden’s ColdfusionBloggers.org.

Each of these aggregators are different in their respective feature sets, and reach in terms of coverage and readership.  However, I’m now starting to think we have quite a high aggregator per community developer count…is there such a thing as too much?

Out of interest, how many people out there use aggregation versus tools like Google Reader (which I personally use*).  Is there anything that these tools don’t do for you which you would love to see?

* My particular reason for using Google Reader versus my own site is a simple one.  I follow around a thousand blogs, of which only a percentage are covered by Feed-Squirrel.  However, Feed-Squirrel does supply 100% of the Coldfusion and Flash coverage.

I’ve been away on Holiday for a bit, but one thing of note I have seen happen while I have been away is that Ray Camden has popped up a another new CF blog aggregator coldfusionbloggers.org.

Whilst I’d love to say that feed-squirrel is the better one that you should use, I do like the site, and impressed by the performance of the server (it’s CF8 on Win2K3). So, check it out (but then come back again ;))

Well, the FS forum has been up and running for a couple of days now, and what have I learnt? Well, for starters, spammers are a PITA which are able to get round almost any system you put in front of them. Secondly, the behaviours of users are very interesting.

Consider this: You have a site, be it a forum, or a social-based site such as mySpace. You have no users, but your concept is reliant on users. Users will not come to an empty site and will probably never return once they have witnessed it’s emptiness. So how do these things start? How does someone attract people to an empty social site? It’s quite an interesting conundrum which I am working out at the moment.

So far traffic to the new forum has been intentionally low, as I don’t want a mass of people seeing an empty forum, and due to this there has been a slow but steady influx of new users - some of which are posting happily. So the next step I suppose is to slowly increase the traffic to the site by increasing the number of external links, and waiting for Google to sort it’s act out. As these happen I would expect the site to hit a critical mass - a point where I believe the community will start to look after itself and the membership will reach a steadily increasing level up to an upper level where it will naturally sit whilst experiencing minor fluctuations as time progresses (a site like mySpaces being obviously a lot larger than that of this site).

So, all in all, I know a lot of people would think me insane for trying to start a forum in the middle of a community awash with sites such as Adobe.com’s forums, and lists such as CF-Talk, but I like the insane, and as I said, its also quite an interesting experiment.