Simeon Says

I had promised to blog the links and info, and I intended to do it before now.  But sometimes life just gets in the way.

In the end I think the most important peices of information that I
liked to was regarding the business side of blogging.  From the
Wall Street Journal, I found an article called "Blogs Keep Internet Customers Coming Back" 
The content directly follows the title, and so you can guss where that
leads.  The other article from the MIT Technology Review titled "Sun Microsystems: Blog Heaven". 
The article outlines the lengths Sun goes to to encourage blogging by
its employees, and the benifits that it seems in that platform.

The other item I would like to share, and one that i think i
found most interesting, are the results of a survey of blog
readers.  This is the second year that blogads conducted their
survey, and they received more than 30,000 respondents.  In the 2005 blog reader survey
I was suprised to see that 75% of the respondents were over 30. 
Although this is not so far fetched, the survey also revealed that 43%
of the respondants had household incomes greater than $90,000. 
The final tidbit that I will outline from the results was that in a
question where respondants could select more than one answer, we found
that 75% read blogs for "News I can’t find elsewhere".

So to conclude my findings on this topic, Blogging is important for
businesses because it allows them to connect with  customers
through a personal voice. This also gives customers a reason to come
back to your site between purchases.  But also that the readers of
the blogs are the leaders of their fields, and the decision makers in
their companies.  The people who you reach are the people who are
out there looking for information to make informed decisions.  And
by not blogging you are missing a very important opportunity to convert
more business for your company.

I have been contemplating a new layout for my site for a bit. But in truth I am just not a creative person. So I decided since Leorex is kind enough to make the Aura skin freely available, I would use their work.

The picture of the tree is one my wife took when we went to seattle to see Sean speak earlier this month.

I think that I like this template enough that the next simblog release will also use it. Feel free to leave design comments, as I am certainly not a designer

After the CFUG meeting last week, a few of us took a minute to celebrate the holiday and drink some green beer.

What came from that conversation was some good discussion from all parties on how they use OO in their design and development practices. I found myself sitting on the fence through most of the discussion emphasizing that although I had done these things via OO (i was previewing some code) there was nothing in there that could not be done procedurally.

I have found that I am have a better than average grasp of design patterns and OO design practices, but in this discussion I felt the need to be my own devil’s advocate. This is not my usual method for things. My friends know that when I get excited about something I become a preacher, spouting the ways of righteousness to all within ear shot. So I am wondering what was different about this dicussion that put me on the other side of things?

Well anyway, I came away from that meeting feeling like we had a very good discussion. And then this week I found a couple good articles that cover some of the topics we discussed. So I thought I would share those here for all to enjoy.

The first is another one of Hal Helms discussion peices. In this peice he and Jeff Peters discuss how to look at OO design to make sure you are representing it correctly. They also discuss that although fusebox and mach-ii differ in thier internal designs, the OO aproach that you apply to your domain can be used in both. You can find thier conversation here

The other link I would like to share is from an article over at Java Devlopers Journal. This article called Beyond Patterns: Thinking Objects is a great discussion of an Idea i have tried to share here frequently. That concept is this. Although design patterns are a great tool for OO developers, learning Object Oriented design by studing them is kinda like putting the cart ahead of the horse. Design patterns are a way to reference common trends in software architecture. But if you have not put in the time actually doing OO design, then there are many concepts that will be foriegn making the learning task very difficult. Understanding what the “Abstract Factory” pattern is is very difficult to understand without actually having come upon a reason to need it.

In the end this article although it was published on JDJ, is a great intro for CF developers who are looking to learn how their code can benifit from CFC usage. So to learn more about the shift of designing procedurally to designing Object Oriented please take a look.

Well let me be the first to introduce our new CFUG Manager to the community. Please give a big CF Welcome to….

ME!

As of last thursday I have taken over as the PDX CFUG Manager. I have high hopes for our group and I think we are going to have a great time.

As manager I would like to announce that we have our speakers all lined up for the next 5 months.

In April Spike will be here to present on CFEclipse.
In May we will have Barney Boisvert presenting Fusebox 4.1. For the June meeting Rob Rohan will be here to talk to us about Neuromancer, the js libraries he created. In July George and Kam will from Isite will be presenting on securing the login of your cf apps, and demoing a security framework they have created. Then in August Sean Corfield will be in PDX to present his frameworks talk.

So we have a great line up coming, tell your friends and come on out for the meetings. Good people and free pizza can never be wrong!

Tonights meeting went very well. I presented on blogging. I covered the “What is a blog” as well as the “who are bloggers”. I also covered some stats published from a blog reader survey of nearly 30,000 people. Damon Gentry did a demo for the how portion of the presentation. He demoed a blog app he wrote him self in fusebox based on rays blog.cfc.

The whole evening went pretty well. We doubled our attendence from last month to a whopping 10 people!

I promised in my presentation I would post the links that I referenced, but that will have to wait for tomorrow. So check back then

A break, a laugh, whatever. And I have found that I can always count on bash.org to provide that release that I need.

Bash.org is a site that people can post funny transcripts from irc chats to. A formal warning: Some quotes may not be work appropriate, nor kid safe!

But by the time I have spent 5 minutes reading from the top 100 list, I am ROFL and crying like a little girl. And sometimes I need that

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of my wifes website and blog. If you ever feel like taking a look into my life Simzgirl.com is the place to do it. She has her blog and a photo gallery so there is much to see.

I am very proud of my wife for the effort she puts into her blog. Unlike most of our geek things, this was something she wanted and asked for so that should tell you a litle about the girl I married ( i am not the only geek in the family!)

Congrats Carrie and a great first year of your site!

Just a note to any portlanders who may happen upon this blog. I will presenting this week at the portland cfug.

What topic you might ask? Well on Blogging! We will discuss the “What” “Who” and “How” of blogging and discuss who is reading and how it can add value to your life and business.

Still linux under the hood But I really see this as a trend in the technologist of the world.

ZDNET Austrailia repoorts on the topic

I like mac hardware, and although I am running osx I would not be opposed to running something like yellow dog to bring linux back onto my desktop.

I may give that a try when I next reload my Powerbook. Give it a dual boot. More to come on that

Yesterday I posted some code for using the new Flash Forms in CF7 to have a filter on your cfgrid component. Nahuel Foronda took what I started and made right with the ActionScript.

Its funny, I didnt see to much wrong with what I had done until I looked at his and saw how much cleaner it was. Its amazing what someone poor in AS knowledge will let the public see And nice to see it done better too!

Thanks Nahuel for the straightening out the mess I posted yesterday, and fixing the 2 bugs I new to be present. Below is the actionscript that he updated to make it run better.