This morning I spent a few minutes updating my own BlogCFC codebase to support more e-mail functionality. The current incarnation of BlogCFC (5.5.003) has a drop-down menu where authors choose whether or not to e-mail a new entry to their subscribers. I've taken this a bit further by adding the ability to re-send blog posts to subscribers when editing existing posts. This is a nice feature to have if you make a significant change to an entry. Adding this new feature also fixes a bug in BlogCFC where subscribers would not be e-mailed when releasing a previously un-released entry. Since Ray added the released flag, I find myself starting blog posts even when I don't have time to finish them. This keeps me from forgetting about my planned posts and allows me to play "catch up" when I find more time. However, knowing this workflow meant my subscribers would not be e-mailed made it less than desirable. After today that's no longer a problem.

I've sent these changes to Ray for inclusion in the next minor release of BlogCFC, which should be coming pretty soon.

It figures I would spend the time to get my blog up to date with the latest BlogCFC and then Ray would release a new version. This time I'm going to try and keep up with the releases instead of getting behind. So, tonight I'll be upgrading things to 5.5.003 which includes several bug fixes (one of which has been plaguing my Inbox) and some new features like Contribute support. I'm using this post to test another potential bug where blog subscribers are not e-mailed when an un-released post is finally released. We'll see what happens.

I spent the better part of the entire day yesterday upgrading my blog from BlogCFC version 3.9 to the latest and greatest 5.5. I've been meaning to upgrade for some time but knowing the amount of work that was going to be involved I put it off. While the process went smoother than I expected (always good), it was a major time commitment. It took several hours to create a staging environment to perform all the work, which included getting all my production data pulled down and working in a new 3.9 instance. I already had my blog running on localhost but I wanted to isolate the upgrade in case I ran into issues along the way. The next step involved getting Ray's latest and greatest code from his Subversion repo and creating a vanilla 5.5 install. Super easy.

Now that I had a 3.9 database and a 5.5 database I went about comparing the architecture of the two and writing scripts that would bring my 3.9 database up to par. This consisted of several ALTER TABLE statements needed to add columns to existing tables, some UPDATE statements to bring my existing data into compliance with new columns, and Ray's CREATE TABLE statements for tables that weren't in the 3.9 version. It wasn't a big deal, but I went slow and was very careful to document every single change I made and test all my code against the staging environment. I did this by pointing the staging DSN (for the vanilla 5.5 install) to my newly upgraded 3.9 database. Everything worked flawlessly.

At this point I had my production data on localhost, I had written scripts to migrate my production database, and I had tested the scripts pretty thoroughly. My next step was to merge all the 3.9 customizations I had made - including styles - into the vanilla 5.5 codebase. This step was by far the most time consuming taking somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-5 hours. Ugh. I had applied the aura styles and cleaned them up significantly, not to mention shoe-horned my own custom background images into 3.9. While working with all the styles I recalled how many pain-staking hours it took to originally create the graphics and styles. Not being a designer and certainly not being good at cutting up graphics for a Web site, the work took at least a day and half. To get things right this time - in 5.5 - was not as bad but it's not the kind of coding I really enjoy.

With the database migrated and my customizations in place it was time to load everything up to production. It only took 20 minutes to run the scripts against the live database and upload the new codebase. However, in this small amount of time over 1500 RSS error e-mails were generated. My application level CFABORT and maintenance message stopped no telling how many e-mails, but before I had that in place several minutes had passed. The errors were thrown due to the 5.5 code residing on the server before the database changes were made. Just goes to show, that Ray's blog software works amazingly well if I can get 1500 error e-mails in about 5 minutes. I can't even imagine what my Inbox would look like if a major error was introduced to production code and left unresolved.

So, 5.5 is up and so far is running well. I'll be watching it closely over the next few days; if you notice anything funky please let me know. In an effort to help anyone else upgrading from BlogCFC 3.9 to BlogCFC 5.5 I've zipped all my SQL code and made it available as a download. Use the Downloads pod to the right or simply click here.

The more and more I have an opportunity to work with Flex 2 the more excited I get. It's relatively easy to build complex, rich applications in a fraction of the time it would take to build something inferior in say HTML. I could go on and on about my love for Flex 2 but I wanted to post a quick recommendation for Ray Camden's Creating a Flex 2 Interface for the BlogCFC Application on Devnet. Ray's article is relatively short but right to the point in demonstrating core Flex 2 development with MXML and ActionScript 3. He also demonstrates how to hook up Flex 2 to a ColdFusion MX 7.0.2 backend with Flash Remoting. You'll see Flash Remoting result events handled with Flex 2 ArrayCollections - a best practice in Flex 2 given the automatic translation of server-side datatypes to ActionScript 3 datatypes, better data-binding, data collection sorting, and more. After reading through Ray's article I recommend folks check out the Flex 2 front-end to Ray's blog. While viewing the Flex 2 app you can right-click and select "View Source" to view the MXML code. From the view source screen you can download an entire zip file of the Flex 2 front-end which includes all the MXML for each of the pod components and the ActionScript 3.

Links in this post:

Creating a Flex 2 Interface for the BlogCFC Application
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/flex_blogcfc.html

Flex 2 / BlogCFC Front-End
http://ray.camdenfamily.com/BlogCFC/bin/blogcfc.html

In an effort to support the open source community (which includes the ColdFusion community via projects like BlogCFC and CFEclipse) I've added a new pod on the right that serves up Kalator ads. Kalator is a new ad service created by Rob Rohan that only serves up ads from open source projects. If you have an open source project you can submit it to the Kalator service or you can help support the open source community by picking a banner size and adding the appropriate code to your Web site.

Ray's new version of BlogCFC (version 5) has been in beta for about a month or so now. Ray (and team I guess I should say) have now released the new version as 'Gold.' I've had the beta version running on my localhost (for the Nashville ColdFusion User Group) for a while now. I am now integrating the latest release and will hopefully in the next week or so deploy to production.

I'd like to thank Ray, Scott, Charlie, and all the others for the hard work they put in for this release. There are a ton of cool features (delayed posts, draft mode, CAPTCHA, and more) to check out and test drive.

Five days ago was the 4th anniversary of my blog. It was so uneventful that I didn't even realize it occurred. I knew it was coming up after checking some blog stats a month ago but I had since forgotten about it. It's rather embarassing, but I'd like to share just a few stats on my blogging history. For starters, I don't post near enough to keep the content as fresh as I want to. As of today I have been blogging for 1,466 days having posted 128 entries. While that is pretty pathetic I am not too upset considering the first 3.5 years I didn't try to keep up with the blog much at all. It wasn't until I switched from Greymatter to BlogCFC that I started to keep my posts up.

Having shared some of the bad, what about some of the good? Last month was certainly a milestone in the life of my Web site (6 years old now) and blog when over 70,000 page views were recorded. Ever since November of 2005 my page views have almost doubled every month. Why? One reason is crawlers. The largest reason though is RSS. A lot of my site hits come from people with various news readers like NetNewsWire (Mac) or FeedDemon (PC). Another cool stat, is that my MusicStoreAutoPlay AppleScript has been downloaded over 300 times in just two months. Additionally, all of my sample CF code and tutorials have each been downloaded more than 100 times with the majority of them having been added within the last 40 days.

All-in-all, I'm relatively pleased. I want to continue doing more traffic on the site and continue posting as much relative, interesting, and helpful content as possible. Here's to another 4 years!