BlogCFC, ColdFire Updates
Two quick updates this morning. I've released a minor update to BlogCFC. This update fixes another date issue (curse the world for daring to treat dates differently!) and adds some more xmlFormatting-love to the RSS output. I have not forgotten about BlogCFC V6 (aka Golden Snitch). With the holidays it has taken a back seat to other concerns, and frankly, I'd rather go slow then badly. I'm hoping to push another update out this month.
Next, ColdFire has been updated with a few minor bug fixes. This was all done by Nathan Mische, so all thanks go to him!
BlogCFC Export/Import Code
I'm now in the export/import business. Well, kinda. If you use BlogCFC and need a tool to export/import your blog entries, download the attachment below. This was tested with the latest 5.9 build of blogcfc. It outputs to WDDX files in a specified folder. You can then use the import comment to read in those WDDX files to a new BlogCFC instance. This may become an official BlogCFC tool for V6, but for now it is an unsupported utility.
A big thank you to digital primates. They needed the tool and paid me to development, then said they were cool with me giving it to the world.
10,000 Downloads - Do I get a gold watch?
Via Ed Tabara, it looks like the downloads of BlogCFC crossed 10,000. Wow! Not that it really matters of course. This puts BlogCFC in second place at RIAForge. FLEXible has me beat by close to 500 downloads. (Ok, time to execute the 'massageMyStats' hack!)
Update #2: BlogCFC 5.9
- Pinging will use CFTHREAD in ColdFusion 8, making the saving of a new blog entry much quicker.
- Added a contact form. I believe Charlie Arehart blogged on this - but I know it is really frustrating to hit a blog and have no idea how to contact a user. Now all BlogCFC installs will have a simple contact form built in.
The readme.txt file describes all the changes.
Now lets have a moment of silence. This is the last release of the BlogCFC 5.X code base. The end of the entire code base. BlogCFC 6 development officially begins next week. (Although I've been playing with some code already.) I plan to do this build much different than earlier versions.
First off - there will be a whole new SVN line. This way I can push any bug fixes to BlogCFC 5.9 and keep BlogCFC 6 in it's own sandbox. Secondly - I'm going to be bringing more people into the process. In the past I've been accused (fairly) of being a bit... tight with my code. I want to make V6 more open. I'll probably even be giving a few people write access. (Breathe deeply, Ray.) I've got some big plans and I'll definitely need help. Please be sure to follow the progress at BlogCFC.com.
Important Update for BlogCFC Users
If you use BlogCFC, please edit your style sheets so that the code style adds "courier new" to the list of fonts and changes the size to 1em. For a while now I've been wondering why code blocks were small on BlogCFC sites, but only on my Mac. I want to thank Chris Jordan for sending me the fix and sharing it on the cfbloggers listserv.
Oops, forgot to paste the final code:
.code {
font-family: "courier new",courier,monospace;
font-size: 1em;
color: black;
border: solid thin #0000cc;
background-color: #ffffcc;
overflow: auto;
max-height: 200px;
padding: 4px 4px 4px 4px;
line-height: 15px;
margin:5px 0 5px 0;
}
Windows Live Writer and BlogCFC
I added XML-RPC support back to BlogCFC a few versions ago, and promptly forgot about it, mainly because it was a royal pain in the you know what to test and work with it. But I know that some people prefer using XML-RPC clients to write their blog entries so I was happy to add it. Dan Vega has written an excellent article which walks you through setting up Windows Live Writer (an XML-RPC client) and connecting it to BlogCFC. (I'm almost tempted to start working on AIR client, but if reading requests from XML-RPC was bad, I can't imagine what generating them would be like.)
BlogCFC and ColdFusion 8
So I thought I'd write a quick note to talk about my plans for BlogCFC and ColdFusion 8. First off - there is a bug that prevents BlogCFC from running under CF8. This was due to me writing some code that worked right but should not have under CF7. I've fixed this bug and have checked into into the Subversion repository. The file in question is /org/camden/render/render.cfc. Grab it if you plan on running BlogCFC under ColdFusion 8.
As for how I plan on using CF8 - right now I don't have many plans. Since my customer base is quite large and covers folks on CF6 and CF7, I don't want to do too much for folks who can't even use it. I can say the first thing I'll do is update Ping support to use cfthread if BlogCFC is running under ColdFusion 8. About the slowest thing in BlogCFC is the ping action. (Well, it is slow if you do a lot of pings.) By using cfthread I can speed up the process quite a bit.
Later this week I'll be making that change - and when I do, I'll blog the code so folks can see the before and after.
BlogCFC 5.8 Released
It has been a while since the last release so I decided to try to clean up some bugs in BlogCFC. Along with a bunch of blog fixes, BlogCFC now allows for what I'm calling "Blended" RSS and front page views. All this means is that you can manually create RSS/views for multiple categories. As an example, I could take all the movie/music/politics/etc type junk from this blog and create one RSS feed for it. I could also do the same for all the technology related categories. I can't show demos here as my blog is still at some ancient version.
Happy Release Day
Hey, buddy. Yeah, you. You wanna some new releases? How about...
BlogCFC 5.7.001 - Includes updated RSS and Search code
Canvas 2 - Yes. Finally. Includes... um, a whole lot of stuff. It still doesn't have an upgrade script for 1.5, but I'm not the first person to release a delayed project out of just pure frustration. Mark Mazelin gets credit for 99% of Canvas 2. He was done months ago. This is my fault.
Harlan 1.0.4 - The ColdFusion Ad Server so poorly written it sends people to PHP!
Lighthouse Pro 2.3.004 - This is just a minor bug fix.
BlogCFC 5.7 Released
This is a big update that covers lots of bug fixes and adds Scott Pinkston's excellent Pod Manager. (In Microsoft terms, I "innovated" his code into the core product.) For more details, see the entry at BlogCFC.com. Yes - my own blog is now way old. When I finally get moved to the new server I'll update then. When I find time. And unicorns, WMDs, and a proper diet.