Brian Meloche's Blog I'll blog about ColdFusion, weight loss, podcasting and life with too many pets! :-)

I arrived in Minneapolis this afternoon, and am waiting for the fun to begin for CFObjective. My presentation is on Friday, What to Do When OO Fails You in ColdFusion. It should be interesting, and I'm looking forward to presenting it.

If you are reading this on my Blog, you'll see that I've finally got the last couple of kinks out of the new design, and I've just uploaded it. I found the Notepad theme at Skinpress. I made several mods to it, including the background from the main column is completely different, a few font differences and many of the icons are different as well.

Weight loss update: As of last Sunday, I have lost a total of 94 pounds since June, and 51 of that since the surgery on 2/27. I'm probably down even more as I write this, but until I get on the scale, I won't know for sure.

With that, I am retiring the CF_Heavy name of this blog. I may STILL be heavy, although a lot less heavy, and you will see that those days will soon be over. It no longer seems appropriate, and I will discard that just like I have the clothes that used to fit me only a few months ago that are now WAY too big.

UPDATE: I've finally uploaded a pic, which you can see here.

Yeah, I know I don't update my blog as often as I produce CFConversations, my ColdFusion podcast. Part of the reason for that was a long standing change I had to make that I just never got around to. This weekend, in preparation for some personal things coming up, I decided I had better get this done now, and I wanted to get it done before I had to pay another hosting bill.

My blog has been moved over to Host My Site, hosted where CFConversations is also hosted. The old and dated look and feel is on the site for now, but I plan to give it a really nice change in the next few weeks. Thanks to Host My Site for getting me setup, particularly Rory, one of the tech support guys who was very helpful in getting a few remaining things finished in the changeover.

If you are a subscriber, you will notice the emails are now coming from a brianmeloche dot com domain. That was also changed in the process.

I have added some new blogs to the "Other Blogs I Read" pod, all of which are fellow CF bloggers:

• Todd Sharp - I've added fellow Cleveland CFUG member Todd Sharp's CFSilence blog. I've been reading Todd's blog quite a lot lately, and although I don't see my own blog in his long blog roll (that's OK - I'm not sure I'd read my own blog if I didn't write it!), I wanted to give him the credit he deserves.
• Rob Munn - San Diego CFUG manager Rob Munn, whose IT Evolution in Practice blog is a recent entry to the CF blogosphere. Rob's blog has been very interesting reading since I first discovered it, and, since it appears not too many people are reading his blog, I wanted to offer up a permanent link for him on my blog.
• Ben Nadel's Kinky Solutions - A Student's Perspective blog. If you are a CF developer, you should be reading Ben's blog.
• Peter Bell's blog - Another must read blog!
• Matt Woodward - Whom you probably know from the ColdFusion Weekly podcast and Mach-ii. I have also been recently involved in his CHUG open source user group application project.
• Brian Rinaldi's Remote Synthesis blog, both for his open source content, and for his content overall.
• Brian Kotek's blog, where there have been several gems lately...
• and... last but not least, the wonderful Charlie Arehart's blog.

I also updated the great Leo Laporte's blog link.

Are there any blogs I didn't list here that I should be reading? Let me know!

A few weeks back, I got a few people contact me to let me know that they could not post a comment on my blog.

I pinpointed the problem - Captcha stopped working for some reason. I turned it on, but the comment spam started coming in...

Well, for the heck of it, I turned back on Captcha... and it's working again.

I have no idea why it stopped working, and why it's working correctly now. Any ideas?

I've been meaning to either update my BlogCFC (my version is a little behind) or move to MachBlog. Oh well... one of these days!

Why don't I blog more? I get a lot of those questions. The biggest reason has been that I never get through a blog entry without having to close my browser and losing my session. This can happen intentionally or unintentionally, like when Firefox crashes or my computer runs out of memory.

Hopefully, I have addressed that problem. At the suggestion of Dan Vega, I am going to try using Google Docs to write my entries first. Until a few nights ago, I had never used Google Docs, but I am now impressed. It's very easy to use, and I love the auto-save functionality. BlogCFC has always had this problem for me - losing what I write. I often go back, write and re-write what I have written, and I have always seemed to lose the entry before I publish it. This happens a lot less since I upgraded my BlogCFC a few months ago (although I am a little out of date now), but it still happens if the browser craps out. I blame that on my ability to tax a browser/computer over the application itself. Anyway, hopefully, I'll start blogging more with this new process.

Does anyone else run into this problem? How do YOU solve it?

Growing up, my dad's biggest joke near the end of the year was to proclaim, "See you next year!!!" Of course, he'd see the people he said it to a couple of days later... As many things we seem to do as we get older... I notice I now say the same thing!!!

As far as the blog is concerned, I screwed up the joke!!! I didn't realize I went the whole month of December without a blog post... so I guess an update is in order.

A lot has happened since the last post... and I'll update you over the next several posts as to what's going on both personally and professionally...

Stay tuned!

After some grueling times at work over the last several months, I have been needing to upgrade my blog for a long time. This weekend, I was finally able to do it.

My RSS feeds have been disabled for some time. CrystalTech, my web host, noticed a problem that I hadn't been able to get to. I wanted to fix it, but it seemed that an upgrade of BlogCFC was also necessary, from the 3.9 version I had been running to the new 5.5.002. I was really surprised that I couldn't find any documentation about upgrading the blog, and I suppose it would have been easier if I hadn't tried to do it all at once...

I had to make some custom changes to the code to make it work on my hosting account, since the "org" conflicted with another site on the server. The first time I tried to upload the code, I botched it up pretty good, but my second attempt (by separating the old blog from the new) was a success.

Then, there was the data transfer... not such a resounding success!

I needed to upgrade from Access (yes... I know... it was quick to get it up when I needed to!) to MySQL. The hosting problems were being caused by the Access... yes, again, I know. I'm not proud of sticking with Access that long. What can I say? I've been busy... and it wasn't a priority to upgrade.

It probably would have been easier to go with SQL Server, and I could have, but I figured MySQL was easier to isolate from my other apps. There is also something I need to do as a separate project with my SQL Server hosted database to upgrade, so I figured MySQL was a good alternative.

As is often the case when switching databases, there were issues with dates and boolean fields. I had to make custom updates to the records... one at a time. There are also new fields in the new version that didn't get turned on. It didn't automatically publish the entries. Once I figured that out, and published the old articles... everything came back.

It took a substantial portion of the weekend, but this post signifies that the transfer is now complete.

I still have to customize the look and feel... but I'll get to that later.

I am attempting to update this blog to the latest version of BlogCFC. At the same time, I am upgrading the database and correcting the RSS problem. Hopefully, I'll be able to complete this this weekend... if time permits.

Due to a payment snafu, my site was offline for several days. The hosting provider had an old credit card number. I thought they had tried to run the new one I provided, but they hadn't. I was able to straighten it out this morning.

I can happily report that the site is working again. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Hey there!

I am writing this blog entry at the Cleveland MMUG meeting, where I am showing my members how a CFC works through this blog!!!

I figured. It was something stupid, with Ray's help, I got the blog working properly.

There have been some problems with the blog, specifically with the CFLOGIN functionality. I have a workaround... but there are still some problems left with the workaround. At least I can post again.

I am going to check with my hosting provider, and with the BlogCFC author, Ray Camden, to see if there is a solution to the problem.

I have been trying to modify the blog to use 100% width... which just doesn't seem to be working the way I had hoped. I removed Aura, but had all sorts of other issues in the process.

This new style is a combination of the style I came up with, while retaining most of the design I had before... UGGH!!! It's a work in progress, and not touted as the final version.