Flash 10 - Welcome to the stone age

The latest and greatest flash release from Adobe is a complete failure. It renders wonderful education and entertainment sites such as youtube to less useful than a paperclip.

After installing Flash 10 and checking some of our sites I realized that every site had issues. Every site that uses flash videos, or other widgets would pop the message "Additional plugins needed, please install flash". Of course this issue only applies to Firefox, IE on the other hand seemed to behave appropriately, playing the much desired interactive media.

Without that form of media the internet was just not the same. Flash really does bring life to our world.

After this little trip of aggravation at this newest release it was quick to uninstall Flash 10. Luckily I kept the flash 9 installer :P

j-3media.com/flash9

State of the Twittersphere

Hubspot has released its "State of the Twittersphere Qtr 4 2008 Report".
According to Hubspot

• 5,000 to 10,000 new user accounts per day were opened on Twitter during the fourth quarter of 2008.
• 70% of all Twitter users joined in 2008;
• 20% of all users have joined in the past 60 days.

Whether Twitter goes mainstream like Facebook or MySpace remains to be seen. Twitter users are still miniscule compared to these two social media giants.

So what is Twitter?

• Twitter is a microblogging tool.
• Twitter is kind of like a chat room, but you choose who you follow, and who follows you.
• Twitter is an instant messenger, but messages are archived and searchable.
  
• Twitter is a human powered news feed.
• Twitter is a social networking site, but you don't spend hours setting up and maintaining your profile.
• Twitter is a content syndication tool. Web sites such as twitterfeed.com will automatically post your rss feeds to your Twitter account.
• Twitter is a photo sharing tool.
• Twitter is a PR/Marketing tool.
  
• Twitter is portable. You access it via the web, through your phone, or from desktop applications like TweetDeck.

The ColdFusion open source community is alive and well

ColdFusion is often given a bad rap because it's not an open source language - neither is ASP and Java. However, there is a strong open source community among ColdFusion developers.

Brian Rinaldi maintains a list of ColdFusion open source projects on his blog.
Other open source ColdFusion projects are available from riaforge.org
Charlie Arehart maintains a comprehensive list of both open source and propietary ColdFusion resources at http://www.carehart.org/cf411

There are too many open source ColdFusion frameworks for me to list. Go to Charlie Arehart's resource page for a complete list of frameworks available.

The latest open source ColdFusion content management system to become available is Sava CMS , listed as one of the 26 best content management systems.
Finally, Adobe's CF8 server is not the only ColdFusion server out there.
There are free and open source alternatives:

• Blue Dragon: http://www.newatlanta.com/products/bluedragon/open_source/overview.cfm
• Smith Project: http://smithproject.org/
• Railo: http://www.railo-technologies.com/en/index.cfm
  (not really open source, Railo follows a model similar to MySQL)

Cfopen is a ColdFusion open source initiative aimed at promoting open source ColdFusion application servers. It's mission:

Spread information, enable developers, encourage growth all as it relates to open source ColdFusion applications, compatible with open source CFML processors

ColdFusion is alive and well. With Adobe planning it's next ColdFusion release in 2009, and more releases planned for 2010 and 2011, you can be assured that ColdFusion will not be going away any time soon. Follow what's happening in the ColdFusion world, both open source and otherwise, by going to coldfusionbloggers.org. There you will find 454 ColdFusion related blog feeds aggregated into one spot.

10 Things NOT to do in 2009

This is a great article on how to navigate the current treacherous economic waters:
http://www.talentzoo.com/news.php?articleID=1441

Links really do matter.

Findability by Google and other major search engines is always a top concern of our clients. Web sites built with intuitive navigation, and that employ best practices for linking, image alt tags, and headers will be easily spidered by Google and other major search engines. Therefore, one thing we can not emphasize enough to our clients is the importance of good linking strategies in designing and maintaining their web sites. Easy to find links within your site make it easy for search engines to crawl your site. Links from other web sites to your web site make it easier for people, and for search engine spiders, to find your site.
Google has published an excellent series on how to use linking strategies to make your site more user and search engine friendly.

Do you tweet? There's more to Twitter than you think.

If you've been wondering what Twitter is all about, here is an article on the ten most creative uses of Twitter. Some uses are really clever, others are just silly. Like, do you really need Twitter to remind you to water the plants?

Major Security Hole in Internet Explorer

Another major security issue has been found in Internet Explorer. You may read about it here.
To protect your self switch to a different web browser like Firefox.

Writing good meta tags

Found this article on writing good, google friendly, meta descriptions:
http://www.newebia.co.uk/blog/index.cfm/2008/12/16/Writing-Title-and--Meta-Description-Tags-For-Google