Realtime ColdFusion Blog Notifications with Adobe Wave

Receive real time notifications for updates on the blog aggregator ColdFusionBloggers.org with Adobe Wave. Just navigate to the ColdFusionBloggers website and click the badge in the lower right for Get alerts with Adobe Wave. Built on Adobe AIR, you can now use Adobe Wave as a single application to receive all your notifications in one place. Adobe Wave runs as a desktop application that sits in a corner of your screen.

The ColdFusion Bloggers website is created and maintained by the ubiquitous, prolific, and super nice guy Ray Camden, ColdFusion Jedi Master. Ray was among the very first to utilize Adobe Wave for the benefit of the ColdFusion community of developers.

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  I'm Twittering This! or Dude, Where's My Blog?

As you may have noticed, TalkingTree.com blog is rather barren these days. I find that while I work, while I relax at home (that is when I'm not working at home), or even when I'm mobile I'm nearly always using Twitter, and less so Facebook.

Unless you've been living under a rock you've heard of Twitter by now. If you're still not sure, Twitter is a bit like group chat where you post a short summary of what you're doing or what's on your mind, and other people that are interested can reply. While I'm not going to explain Twitter fully here -- you can find that on Twitter.com -- it can be very useful for sharing up to date information about a particular interest with lots of other people that share that interest. Most of my Tweeps fall into one of several interest groups... There's those interested in Photography, those interested in Web Technology, and those that happen to otherwise be friends or family. There are several applications you can use to watch Twitter updates. My favorite for use on a computer is TweetDeck, and on my iPhone I use Twitterific. One reason to love using an iPhone with Twitterrific is that I can be anywhere, shopping, getting a haircut, or at a conference and have the ability to take a cell phone picture for upload to Twitter with a brief description about what's going on.

Twitter and Facebook are such interesting places to socialize online while sharing information that I've neglected my blog for quite some time. To address that problem, I'll be posting summaries of recent Tweets to my blog here where you can catch up on some of the things I've been talking about. Although, this is a bit like sitting next to someone that's on the phone since my Tweets here are only half the conversation some time. To get the full benefit of Twitter you really have to follow both sides of the conversation.

To accomplish updating this blog with my Tweets, I whipped up a quick ColdFusion script to pull in my Twitter RSS feed and convert to HTML with all usernames and URLs converted to actual links. I'll next try to automate this so that my blog gets regularly updated with my Twitter summaries.

Of course, if you're already on Twitter, Follow Me, and on Facebook Add Me as a Friend.

How to read tweets

• If a tweet begins with an at sign, its a username, like @JoeSchmoe. Its at the beginning because I'm replying to something that Joe Schmoe tweeted earlier.
• If a @username appears later in the tweet but not at the beginning, then i'm refering to that user, like Hey, did you see that cool widget that @JoeSchmoe built?
• If a tweet begins with RT, that means Re-Tweet, and its kinda like holding up a megaphone. On Twitter you Follow or subscribe to certain people, and in turn other people follow you. The people that subscribe to your tweets may not be following the people that you subscribe to. So by retweeting someone that you subscribe to, you are amplifying that persons tweet by broadcasting to all the people that subscribe to you. Confused yet? If your subscribers are interested in the retweet, they may then follow that original person (a.k.a tweep or twit).
• If a tweet has a word beginning with a pound sign like #photog, that's called a hashtag. Hashtags are used as labels to identify a topic for your tweet. Later people can search by hashtags to see tweets from everyone that talked about that topic. In this case, #photog means the tweet is about photography or a photographer. This in contrast to #photo without the last 'g' and it is used for tweets about a particular photo.

Recent Tweets for Mon June 29, 2009

Mon Jun 29 10:09 PM

2 nights in a row my son doesn't want to sleep coz he's not feeling well. Long nights of frequent rocking, not much sleep for me.

Mon Jun 29 4:45 PM

@JoshuaCurtiss Pretty sure it was CF5 -> CF6 w/ the J2EE conversion. I was on the team at Macromedia that reviewd poss bkwds compat issues

Mon Jun 29 4:39 PM

@jlamoree Holy cow, a fradulent Lactating Lesbians infringement claim from Cream Ridge, NJ. That just, em, *sucks*!

Mon Jun 29 12:52 PM

@jonbcampos Apache XSL-FO http://bit.ly/Xrhar

  Looking for a local vineyard and winery in the Northeast US? Try Nimble Hill.

This past weekend the website and blog for Nimble Hill Vineyard and Winery went live -- a site I constructed with a template from OSWD for the skin, SlideShow Pro for the photo albums, Google Maps API, and BlogCFC for the Journal.

Currently there is one photo album, taken during the first winemaking ever at Nimble Hill, in October 2006. All photos were taken myself. Soon, Nimble Hill will hold the grand opening of the Tasting Room, and I hope to be present to photograph the event for another album.

Nimble Hill is my cousin Gary's winery in the northeast of Pennsylvania. He operates it as a family winery with help from his wife and children. If you're in the vicinity of New York City, New Jersey, or Connecticut then consider taking a country drive for a couple hours to this beautiful part of the state.

This the first time Gary has ever used a blog, and he's just gotten started with his first post. Please stop by to welcome Gary to the blogosphere by posting a comment so that he can see what blogging is all about.

Gary and Ellie opened the winery to have a business where they can work with and alongside their family, whether it be tending vines, crushing grapes, making wine, or minding the tasting room in Tunkhannock.

  Snap Back!

I'm a fan of the Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA) to provide small previews of web pages that I link to from my blog. I think it saves time by giving me a quick idea of the content behind a link so I don't have to click through, change my mind, and then click back. It also helps conserve network bandwidth usage across the internet. In fact, TalkingTree.com was just listed in the SPA 100 on Snap blog.

Go ahead, mouseover some links. You know you want to!

Ok, so maybe you don't want to mouseover the link. Maybe you don't like Snap Previews. Maybe you're just old fashioned that way. Click on the Snap Preview [options] link to adjust the preview delay, or if you're just in a foul mood that day then just disable them completely.

Not feeling cranky anymore? What if you want Snap back? Here's how to turn Snap Previews on again.

Ahhh, isn't that better now? :)

  Adobe Contribute 4 Adds Support for Blogger, Typepad, and Wordpress

Adobe Adds Sophisticated Blogging Capabilities to Contribute 4

Adobe Contribute 4 makes it easy for web designers and developers, as well as web administrators to help their users get started with blogs using the same familiar environment they use to update Web site content. Contribute also supports the most popular blog servers -- Blogger, Typepad, and Wordpress (but not ColdFusion-based BlogCFC unfortunately)-- and gives the option of connecting to in-house blog servers, straight out of the box. Rich media support has been enhanced in Adobe Contribute 4 enabling users to drag and drop images, movies, and now Adobe Flash® video files into their Web pages or blog entries. In addition, users can publish content from a browser to their Web site and blog. Contribute maintains the original formatting and automatically posts the source for the content as well as a link.

With Adobe® Contribute® 4, anyone can quickly, easily, and safely update existing websites and blogs.

With Adobe Contribute 4, anyone can update website content or create blog entries using a single application. True WYSIWYG authoring capabilities let users edit any website or blog in three simple steps, dramatically reducing editing time. Simply browse to the website or blog entry, click Edit to make changes, then click Publish when ready to post the new content. Alternatively, authors can publish directly from within Microsoft Office applications — including Word, Excel and Outlook — with the click of a button. Just open the document that contains the content to publish, click Publish, and select the target website or blog.

Read more about Adobe Contribute 4, available from $179 US.

  Now Using Lyla Captcha

Thanks to Peter Farrell for creating the free and open source Lyla Captcha ColdFusion component to help stop comment spam, and thanks to Brian Rinaldi for instructions and code appropriate for usage in BlogCFC.

Comments now require the guest to type the text rendered in the image into a text field for validation. Soon I will add this to the Contact Me page as well.

To simplify the task for the guest, I create an array of known strings such as company names, well known terms, or other recognizable words, then select one random array item to be passed to the createCaptchaHashReference(String s) method. Yes, this partially weakens Captcha, but I think it should still be very effective.

  Tim Bray, founder of XML, discusses open source, XML, WS, and blogs

Via ACM TechNews, in an interview with InfoWorld, Tim Bray, inventor of XML, discusses the future of open source as a business model, the origin and successes of XML, and the growth and impact of the blogosphere. He thinks the end is near for closed source and software business will sustain itself through subscription support models, and he mentions that there's no money in selling IDEs given that there are three excellent IDEs out there now for free. In his experiences, bloggers are much more accessible than the authors of formal publications and while inaccuracies are bound to occur in both formats, the record is more likely to be corrected in the blogosphere, and quicker too. Curiously, Tim ends the discussion with a hint that Sun JVMs are soon to support scripting languages like Python.

Read the full article

  Updated: Now Playing Pod for BlogCFC

Listen to iTunes for fun and profit!

The Now Playing pod has been updated to take advantage of the additional info present in the iTunes plug-in on Windows such as Amazon Associate ID URL, Amazon album artwork, and Apple Music Store URL. I've also added a Creative Commons license, and changed the pod behavior so when iTunes is stopped a message states that no song is playing but provides text, artwork, and URL of last song played.

The pod will link the album art or title to the Amazon URL with your Associate ID if you configure the Now Playing plug-in that way and if the plug-in sends that information with the now_playing.xml XML packet. The current Mac version of the iTunes plug-in cannot be configured for Amazon or Apple Music store, but if you use iTunes on Windows then you're good to go. At work I listen to iTunes on Mac, so you will only see the linked artwork in my pod on the left when I'm at home.

Download

  Now Playing pod for BlogCFC - What's playing on your iTunes?

Recently envious of Matt Woodward's Now Playing on iTunes pod on his blog, a blog built with BlogFusion, I investigated what might be involved in producing an equivalent pod for BlogCFC software users.

I read the installation and usage guide for the Now Playing plug-in, available for a small charge from Brandon Fuller, and it seemed very easy to setup in iTunes. I logged into PayPal, bought a Now Playing license, and immediately received my key in the mail. The plug-in for Mac has few features than the one for Windows by the way. I think he will implement the Mac features in the not too distant future tho.

The plug-in will upload a small xml file called now_playing.xml to a specified directory on your FTP server where your ColdFusion server and blog reside. For each song played, the now_playing.xml file is uploaded with the metadata associated with the song currently playing. If the song has an artwork image associated with it, that image is also uploaded.

To display the song on my blog, I had to write a pod for BlogCFC that would not only parse the the now_playing.xml file to display info like the song name, artist, and album in the pod, but I also had to design a way for the pod to behave efficiently so as to minimize the number of times it reads the timestamp on now_playing.xml and parsing the file only if the pod detects that the file has been updated.

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  Galleon Home Media Server for Tivo

A coworker recently recommended a free program to enhance Tivo. This weekend I installed it and now I'm hooked. I don't have to get up from the couch to follow what's going on in the blogosphere, weather, movie listings, and local events. For someone that spends 40+ hours a week sitting down already, is this really such a good thing? ;)

Get a lot more from Tivo with the free program Galleon for Tivo. You can now push recordings from your Tivo to your PC rather than having to log on to the PC and then pull them over. Galleon also has very useful features such as viewing your RSS feeds from your TV, plus local movie theater listings, local social events, local weather, as well as listening to your iPods music collection and watching your JPG photos on your TV. ...And you can watch movies on your TV over the network from the program library on your computer.

Here are some pictures of my TV menus when using Galleon...

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  BlogFusion by Jake McKee,... Today!

At noon today (US/EST) Jake McKee will provide an overview of his ColdFusion-based blog (and photoblog) software, BlogFusion. BlogFusion is a powerful, un-encrypted, easy to install, easy to use blog functionality. If you would like to set up a ColdFusion based blog in a matter of minutes, this one's for you. This event is hosted by the Online ColdFusion Meetup Group.

BlogFusion by Jake McKee
Please RSVP here for the meeting and to get the Breeze Meeting URL.
(The Breeze Meeting URL is the link under more information on the RSVP page)

This is a free event at 12:00 noon US/Eastern time today. For time-zone assistance see Time-Zone Converter.

To join the meeting, first RSVP, then open a browser at the meeting time and date and go to the URL shown below under more information of the RSVP page. When Breeze Meeting starts, click the button on the right to enter as a guest, where you will be prompted to enter a name. (ignore the pair of text fields on the left for username and password, just use the Guest login to the right).

Please enter your name when logging in to the meeting if you wish to be eligible to win a giveaway at the end of the meeting. The giveaways will be a BlogFusion license and a book on an Adobe product. Users with unidentifiable nicknames such as "fozzy" or "aaa" will not eligible, and you must send me the link to your member profile on the OCFMG website.

If you've never used Macromedia Breeze, get a quick overview.

The meeting has just been recorded for public viewing later. You can watch this presentation at any time with the following URL:

Archived: BlogFusion 5 by Jake McKee. Approximate running time is 1 hour.

  Getting Started with CFCPhotoBlog by Seth Duffey

Earlier today Seth Duffey released the first public version of his free ColdFusion based photoblog, aptly named CFCPhotoBlog, and is built on the Model-Glue framework by Joe Rinehart.

From the first time I viewed Seth's blog last year I was very impressed with the visual design of the blog, and I can't seem to stop looking at that damn bug. I'm excited to see that Seth has applied his design talents to the production of CFCPhotoBlog. The default skin looks fantastic, and I really like the clever features such as mapping photos on a world map based on the latitude and longitude of the location of the photo, something that you can optionally enter when adding a photo.

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  Scientific American Podcast

Science researchers, students, and enthusiasts now have a comprehensive and reputable source of science news in audio format since Scientific American has started its own podcast.

Scientific American Podcast

About the host:

Join host Steve Mirsky each week as he explores the latest developments in science and technology through interviews with leading scientists and journalists.

Episode 1:

In this episode, Scientific American editor-in-chief John Rennie reflects on the Korean stem cell debacle; the National Inventors Hall of Fame announces this year's inductees; and evolution defender Eugenie Scott discusses the importance of the decision in the recent Dover evolution trial. Also: hear outtakes from the CSI show you're never going to see on TV.

  Best ColdFusion Blogs 2005

Author of O'Reilly's Programming ColdFusion MX, Rob Brooks-Bilson has collected what he believes to be the best ColdFusion blog entries throughout the blogosphere for 2005. I'm very pleased to see that even one of mine has made the cut. Now that I have a couple weeks off for the holidays, Rob just made my reading list for me.

Rob's list of The Top ColdFusion Blog Posts

  Discovering the Adobe Bloggers

My view of the web technology world has been almost exclusively through the lens of two blog aggregators, MXNA and Full As A Goog. To my surprise, several new faces have turned up on MXNA today... native bloggers from Adobe itself. I didn't even know Adobe did blogging, so I'm pretty happy to know about this now.

The MXNA category Macromedia has been renamed to Adobe (formerly Macromedia), and now includes notable Adobe gurus such as:

• Bill McCoy
• John Nack
• Mike Potter
• Tobias Hoellrich
• Ben Watson

This blog, TalkingTree.com, now shows up on the MXNA Adobe category. I choose to run my own domain and site independently, and I've never experienced any pressure to move my blog to the macromedia.com domain, especially since I blog a lot of personal material here as well, although my posts are largely about ColdFusion.

So check out blogs.adobe.com!!,... now if we can only convince the Adobe bloggers to start using the Jedi-grade BlogCFC.

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