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!

MXNA Mobile, the mobile version of all aggregated MXNA RSS feeds, has been around since the inception of MXNA. Until this morning I had not checked it out but I must say it's pretty sweet.

I spend a fair amount of time on the go and some of that is away from my Mac. Now, I can whip out my Motorola RAZR and read all the latest posts on MXNA.

If you want to check it out, you need a mobile device with Web access. Just enter this URL (http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/mobile/) into your device and you're set.