Yesterday I posted about upgrading my blog to BlogCFC 5.9.3. How I went about the upgrade process is probably just as important as getting on the latest version. What follows is a run-down of how I upgraded, what tools I used to make it painless, and the SQL scripts I wrote you can use to get your own blog upgraded. Hit the more link for all the goodness.

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I haven't upgraded my blog software (BlogCFC) since 2006. I've written several customizations that until recently have made it a huge burden to migrate to Ray's latest enhancements without losing my own additions and changes. Last weekend I decided enough was enough and I made a personal goal to get everything running on 5.9.3 before Monday. It wasn't easy but with the help of some nice tools I was able to reach my goal.

I'll post a later entry on the tools I used that made the upgrade process painless. I'll also provide custom MySQL scripts I wrote to upgrade the database architecture, just like I did before. In the meantime, here's a short list of what has been added and changed:

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In just a few hours 2008 will come to a close and I'll ring in 2009 with my wife, son, and inlaws. This past year has brought some real challenges into my life many of which were unexpected. Fortunately, most of those challenges were met head on, were turned into opportunities, and then accomplishments. I played a major role in a very large datacenter migration project, one that involved months of planning and careful execution. That project, which migrated several thousand Web sites we host at Dealerskins was one of the most detailed, scary, and involved projects I've ever worked on. In the end it went very smooth. As they say, spend 80% of your time planning and 20% executing. Well, something like that anyhow.

There were several other major projects at work, some that took a matter of weeks and some that took over four months. During one part of the year I was managing over seven simultaneous projects involving four full-time Web developers, one DBA, two SQL Programmers, and one designer. It was super hard and I'm still learning while making a ton of mistakes. Many many thanks to the great folks that work with me at Dealerskins! It's been a pleasure working through the obstacles and challenges (and easy stuff).

Outside the office I was able to work on a few small consulting projects and create two new Web sites. The Nashville ColdFusion User Group site was a reincarnation of our previous site, and my wife and I launched a family blog at aaronandlindy.com. I continued to function as the user group manager for the NCFUG for the third full year.

During the last half of the year I had the pleasure of speaking at the BFlex conference in Bloomington Indiana, I wrote one article for the Fusion Authority Quarterly, and one article for the new magazine Flex Authority. Lastly, I served as an Adobe Community Expert for ColdFusion (Team Macromedia back in the day) for the sixth straight year.

I traveled to nine different cities spanning the east and west coasts of the United States including San Francisco, Cancun Mexico, and Norfolk VA. The year seemed incredibly busy to me but not when I compare it to other friends and developers (some who are both).

When I peer into my crystal ball I see 2009 being much the same as 2008. My travel kick starts again in a few weeks when I head to New Orleans for the NADA conference. Projects at work are more numerous than I've seen in a long time and we have plans to do some really great things for our customers (some of which have launched in the last two weeks).

On a personal front I plan to blog more, continue writing for magazines, and I hope to speak at more conferences next year. I also want to launch a new personal Web site, one that will replace trajiklyhip.com and trajiklyhip.com/blog. It's shaping up to be a fun and busy year.

To everyone who reads this I wish you and your family all the happiness and success you can stand. Happy New Year!!!

I took Ray Camden's lead and created a new BlogCFC stats page that allows me to display stats for the current year (year-to-date) or any previous years. You can pass a URL parameter called statsYear in order to filter by a specific year, or exclude the parameter to see the current year.

Check it out here: http://trajiklyhip.com/blog/statsByYear.cfm?statsYear=2008

Looking through my blog stats over the past few years I was a bit suprised to see my blogging has tapered off since 2006. From 2002 through 2005 I posted 34 entries or less each year. In 2006 I ramped up quite a bit with 119 entries. 2007 saw a drop to 105 and this year I dropped even further to 89. My excuse? For one, having a child (late 2006) really threw off my evenings. It wasn't uncommon for me to come home and code for hours or write a few blog posts a week. Now, I spend most nights hanging out with my son. I also attribute my lack of blogging to the insane work hours I've kept. I took on a management role in 2006 that I thought was going to make my life less stressful. I was totally wrong. I find myself working 15-20 hours more a week and the type of work I'm doing is definitely more stressful. I've been twittering lately about my vacations encompassing hours and hours of work (examples here, here, here, and here). All of these things taken together mean I'm pooped at the end of the day and the last thing I want to do is sit down and code or blog for hours.

In 2009 I need to find a way to cut the stress. This will not only allow me to blog more but also provide a better overall quality of life. To that end, my goal for 2009 is to increase my post percentage by 224% by posting 200 entries. This is an insane goal but I thrive on really difficult challenges.

I've waited as long as I could before turning on comment moderation here, but due to the amount of spam comments that have ramped up over the last few months it's now in place. My Inbox gets flooded with each spam comment notification and I'd hate to think other folks who subscribe to this blog or specific entries are receiving the same crap. So, until I get my site/blog moved to the VPS each and every comment will have to be approved before it shows up in an entry.

This shouldn't present a problem for valid commenters as I will typically approve comments within minutes or a few hours at most. My iPhone and access to my blog will certainly help me stay on top of it.

For those of you not "in the know," Ed Sullivan is the man behind the user group program, the Adobe Champion's program and more at Adobe. If it weren't for Ed and his hard work there wouldn't be the 300 plus Adobe user group's in the U.S. today.

Ed's now blogging alongside Jonathan Wall (Ed's boss) over at Jonathan's blog. You can check out his first post here:

http://jonathanwall.blogspot.com/2007/08/let-games-begin.html

I'm terribly embarrassed I didn't know this (until yesterday) but you can run blog-specific searches on Google using blogsearch.google.com or selecting the Blog option from the "more" context menu on Google's homepage. Like everything else at Google, Blogsearch is in beta. However, I found it to be really useful when targeting a post I had read several months ago but never bookmarked. Thanks Google.

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.

This evening, between 5:33pm CST and 6:05pm CST, my blog was down due to network issues with HostMySite. According to HMS...

...the service governing the authentication protocol on the server where your website is located became corrupted. Our infrastructure team immediately responded to this incident, and corrected the problem. We are continuing to investigate the initial cause of this issue.

For those that tried to view entries during this time I apologize. On a less important note I pulled Ray's new files from SVN and upgraded the blog to 5.5.003. Thanks Ray!

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.

Tonight I decided to start blogging about music on "the hip" aka trajiklyhip. For years I've focused almost 100% on blogging about technology and my experience therein. That's fine, and I'm certainly not giving it up, but I've decided to also blog a bit about some personal stuff that I really enjoy. To start off I'm going to blog about new music I'm listening to or have recently discovered.

Music is one of the largest parts of my life. It occupies a significant amount of my daily routine whether it's listening to a new album while commuting, sharing a rare gem with my wife, or enjoying music with friends at work. It's no coincidence music is used to evoke an abundance of emotions on TV and film. It can be the simplest head-bobbing track or a complicated piece of art.

So, starting today I'm going to share some tracks and full albums that you'll find prominent on my iPod, laptop, and stereo. I'm also hoping to drag out the TrajiklyHip Flash MP3 player (found on the main part of my site), rewrite it in Flash 8 or Flex and use it to share some tunes. It's a bit tedious to keep it frequently updated right now so a rewrite is in order.

Stay tuned.

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!