Web Architecture, Management and Marketing

Time to give away a secret. Squidoo. This site allows you to create a page on something you’re interested in (a lens). On this page you can include items for sale that you’d get a cut from, books from amazon, itunes tracks, etc. The cut you end up getting is pretty small though. The big benefit of Squidoo is the authority given to page in google results. Search for my daughters name, Georgia MacDougall (search) or how about Learning Adobe Flex (search). You should see my Squidoo Lenses as result #3 at the time of this writing.

I didn’t give any marketing related thought to either of these pages and still ranking is pretty solid.

Think about it a bit and put up something useful on Squidoo … you’ll end up becoming an authority on the subject pretty quickly.

I’m converting usercore from BlogCFC. Now that my wife is going to start blogging and we’re going to co-write a blog for my daughter, I have seen it wise to chose a unified more polished platform with smooth edges, doilies and the like. Foof on … wordpress, here we come.

I ran across a little experiment I setup earlier in the year. I’ve had an email account that hasn’t changed for about 10 years, matt@funkcat.com. That account got picked up my many email harvesters for years and I have since used it as a spam collector to train bayesian filters. On March 7th of this year I took the spam filter off and let it just collect mail.

I just remembered that I did that.

I have 38,878 messages in my inbox.

This has got to be close to the record of most spam collected by a single email account. Maybe not. That’s about 13,000 spam emails per month. Has anyone beaten this?

I’ve been exclusively using CF8 for development, leaving testing environments on CF7. In some rough testing, I’m clocking the new engine to be about 15 percent faster. I’m still using JRun4 and Java 1.4.2 on my

. I expect even further speed increases on Linux where I do not need to use such an old version of Java. When I’ve bothered to time the improvements, I’m get roughly 15%, yet it feels like more. Much of what I’m doing recently involves working with Fusebox, which when set in developer mode basically recompiles the whole site at every hit. This can get pretty heavy when testing out new stuff. I made the switch on my dev machine to CF8 about midway through the project and do really notice the improvement. So even with the boring stuff like speed enhancements and stability, CF8 is looking well worth it. I look forward to a public launch soon, problems with RC1 have been minor.

I was just taking a look at some of the new iPhone ads and noticed that a 2 yr minimum agreement is required for iPhones. Ouch. Of course the phone companies prefer you to sign on for 2 years but you’d think they’d give you a break for agreeing to that … not 2 years or blow.

I like to have ColdFusion running on OSX as it would on my Linux server using mod_jrun thorough Apache2. The CF8 install process wants me to uninstall Jrun4 but I’ll just move things out of the way. As well Jrun still wants to use my default version of Java. Since I don’t want my entire laptop using Java 1.4.2 which is required for Jrun as far as I know, I’ll need to modify the CF8 startup script. As well, I’ll make sure to clean out my old mod_jrun config entries in my apache2 httpd.conf file.

I’ll include a detailed narrative with command line entries and code. If you have any questions, I’ll monitor the comments on this page. I hope your install goes well!
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Watch this video that came out tonight. It’s well worth the 10 minutes. This new implementation of the Seadragon software is simply incredible. This comes to us from Microsoft though and looks like for the foreseeable future it will only work with Vista. Ha! This new way of smoothly linking public photo data is simply amazing … but I’m not going to get a windows box for it.

See the video here at the ted.com website.

There’s a great little command line utility that I use on my laptop (OS X) whenever I need to burn an ISO disk image to a disk. Last night I grabbed the MythDora ISO to try out on an old box and today I went to burn it. Problem is, I always forget the name of the program that helps me burn. Knowing that when I search for “burn iso osx” in google it’ll come up as the first result does not help me remember.

First off, here’s the osx iso burning trick:

hdiutil burn image.iso

The only thing that I ever change with this command is the name of the disk image. So I should make an alias to this command with something that I’ll remember. To make an alias in OSX or FreeBSD open up your command line preferences file. In OSX my personal command line preferences file is at ~/.profile (that ~ stands for my home directory). So open up a terminal and type:

edit .profile

This should open up your personal .profile file in your favorite editor. Or if you don’t have a .profile file yet, a new one will be made for you. I’ve decided that the alias “burniso” would be much easier to remember than hdiutil. And with an alias, I can also include the “burn” switch that goes along with hdiutil. So, at the end of my .profile, I add:

alias burniso="hdiutil burn"

Now anytime I type the command “burniso”, my computer interprets that as “hdiutil burn”.

Last night I signed up for a checking account online at bankofamerica.com. As I was filling out the form, I realized that I needed an account number that I didn’t have handy. So I went to look for it. By the time I got back my session had timed out and I got a message that I was being logged out. No problem, I understand this is a security measure.

Problem 1: As I went back into the site to start my application again, BOA refused to let me start another application because I already had another one started. Wait a sec, you’re the one that dumped me out of that! I had to help BOA clear my session by closing and reopening my browser. Somewhat annoying since I had other stuff open.

Problem 2: Now here’s the big one. I log into the bankofamerica.com site today in order to pay a credit card that is due in a few days. On login, the BOA site says that it’s going to help me hook up my new checking account to my creditcard account and asks me for my debit card number and pin number. Oh you mean the debit card and pin number that I’ll get in the mail in 7 to 10 days. I don’t have that, I’ll cancel. Hmm, that takes me to the homepage. Try again, I’ll continue … homepage again. So there is no way for me to login to my account to pay my credit card bill online until I get this debit card in the mail. Ouch.

I was reading up on the XHTML spec at w3.org and noticed something I haven’t done in years. For valid xhtml all inline script and style elements must be wrapped with CDATA. I don’t think I’ve done that since working with XML and XSLT in Cocoon v. 1. Not that this isn’t required for all XML files, it’s just been that long

Also on the subject of XHTML validity, this is an interesting article about not using a text/html content type for xhtml but rather application/xhtml+xml. Of course that content type will make the markup even more strict. As the author mentions, and I’m beginning to agree with, xhtml should be avoided in pages for public consumption.