Two weeks ago today I brought aaronwest.net live bringing all my content from trajiklyhip.com and trajiklyhip.com/blog to a brand new, consolidated interface on a new domain. Before I talk about my new site and what I like about it, I want to give a (somewhat) brief overview describing my sites evolution over the last 8 years. Keep reading after the break.
As of the date/time of this blog post I am no longer supporting Internet Explorer 6. That's right, I've joined the IE6 No More campaign. If you're reading this blog post because you accessed my blog and were redirected here, then you are using an ancient, ancient Web browser and you need an intervention. A nice one. =)
It's time to upgrade. It's time to see the light. It's time to get into the modern age of browsers. So please, take a moment right now to click one of the logos below and download one of the fine browsers out there. If you don't, a litter of puppies will die, a thousand fairies will have their wings pulled off, and a hundred unicorns will perish of african sickness. You don't want all that on you do you?
Update: Over the last several weeks other organizations and countries have announced their lack of support of Internet Explorer 6. All of this is further reason to get a better browser:
Last week I accomplished something I had been thinking about for at least a year, moving this blog to my own server. I had been hosting this site with a popular shared hosting provider for nearly four years and had not been happy for a long time. Picking a shared hosting provider in 2005 had been a pretty easy thing to do. I wasn't too comfortable with managing an entire Linux server so having others take care of it while I simply managed and wrote content was a good choice.
Comment spam on my blog has increased immensely over the last four to six weeks. I'm getting, on average, 150 spam comments per week. In order to help combat the scum of the earth I have implemented both Akismet and Project Honeypot by way of activating these two features in CFFormProtect (which ships with BlogCFC).
I've been adding photographs and screenshots to my blog posts for years using simply image tags. I've grown tired of the lack of full screen images and always worrying if the 520px images are even useful. And I've seen all the snazzy imaging tools out there giving users a better interaction with photos on Web sites. This weekend I decided to look into adding Lightbox to BlogCFC and wound up with Slimbox, a visual clone of Lightbox. The major difference between the two is Slimbox is super lightweight and very customizable.
To see Slimbox in action click the photo of my son below. If you want to add Slimbox to your installation of BlogCFC here's how to do it.
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:
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.
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.
Due to some major instability problems on the shared server my site resides I'm having some changes made. Specifically, my site and blog will be moved to a Virtual Private Server - running enterprise Linux and CF 7 - within the next 24 hours. During the switchover from shared hosting to VPS there's likely to be at least some downtime. Hopefully things will be running much better very soon.
I don't know if it's my eyesight, my age, or a combination of the two but I'm not seeing as good as I used to. I visit Web sites every day where I have to squint to read the text. This evening, reading a comment on my own blog, I noticed I was squinting. So, I've increased the font sizes around here and I'm already liking it better.
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!
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.
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.
I've had Skype for a while and I use it on occassion. After reading Sean's post here and Stephen Collin's post here I decided to hook up a little Skype pod to show when I'm available for calls. So, if you have a ColdFusion question or you just want to chat, feel free to ring me. Don't worry, if I'm busy I'll be sure to let ya know. ;-)
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!
© 2010 Aaron West. All rights reserved.
