Just got back from seeing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I wanted to see it when it opened, but was a little busy with the holidays.
It has been a while since I have been excited about development. I hope that today signifies a change in that. I spent most of the day doing some freebie work for one of my clients. You see, I downloaded the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit for IIS 7 today.
A while back I wrote a very quick photo gallery system for a client. Through a management console, they upload a photo and the server, utilizing CF8's CFIMAGE tag resizes the image to a web-safe size. Today I received an email from the client saying "It tells me every time that the photos I am trying to add are too big". I knew I wasn't checking the file size and there was no way the client was trying to upload a photo of over 100MB (server-defined post data limit). So I got to debugging.
New Years Resolutions
Dec 29
It is that time of year. That time where, while still bloated from over-indulging on Christmas feasts, we reflect on how we have lived our lives and resolve to make changes in the coming year.
Yesterday's Christmas feast included, among other things, a huge Clifty Farm country ham (prepared by my mom). After serving about 20 people for supper (2 people's snacking while it was sliced) and 3 more for breakfast there was still at least 3 pounds left. Before I made the drive home I made sure to snag a plateful to bring with me. I just used a small portion of it to make a very delicious ham and potato casserole.
Here's how I made it!
Best Xmas Gift
Dec 25
My cousin Wesley gave me the best gift this year!
One of the things I think is cool about BlogCFC is that "out of the box" it tracks article views and shows that count in the administration panel. But I was bummed that each time I viewed the page it got counted. I figured it would be no big deal to add an IP Exclusion list and just not add those views. Then I noticed something peculiar. As I write this, I have no delusions about how many people are reading my words. So why did it seem that those views were going up by 2 when I viewed them?
Mission Impossible 4 Review
Dec 23
My girlfriend and I went to the movies tonight to catch Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Before last week, when we watched M:I 3, she had never seen any of the series. I own the Blue-Ray set. That said, we both really enjoyed it.
No spoilers here, but I thought it was shot well with a good story and the requisite over-the-top OMG-how the-hell-did-he-get-out-of-that stunts that are an M:I signature. If a friend asked me to go see it with them, I would certainly go see it again. I thought Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker, The Town) more than held his own opposite Tom Cruise.
If you liked any of the previous movies in the series, I think this one is worth checking out. If you haven't but want to see this one anyway, I suggest watching M:I 3 first. You don't need to know everything about the series, but this installment certainly pulls a little from the previous.
In Custom Keywords for BlogCFC Entries Part 1 I described how I updated the administration area to allow for specifying keywords for individual blog entry pages. Now I'm going to review the necessary front-end changes need to be made to utilize these new keywords.
If you've done any search engine optimization work you know about keywords. Keywords don't do much directly for users, but are included as meta data to help search engines understand what the designer/developer/content producer thought was important about the page being indexed. Anyone who works in SEO will tell you that relevant content is king. Keep your content relevant, link to relevant sources and provide relevant meta data. What do I mean by relevant meta data? I mean 3 meta tags that should be included on all pages: title, description and keywords. These 3 components can provide a lot of information about each individual page to the search engine spiders.
One of the things I noticed after installing BlogCFC and setting up this site was that I could set and update keywords for the entire site. Knowing the importance of those keywords, I thought this was great and during setup gave a few generic keywords to be used. But then I realized an issue: my blog is not about 1 specific topic so 1 set of keywords could actually prove to be a negative!
