theCircumlocution

BlogCFC to MovableType anyone?

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 16:26:58 -0500

Ever had the need to move blog data from one platform to another? If you've ever worked with clients or more than one blog before, you're sure to have your own favorite blogging platform. Maybe it's MovableType, Blogger, Wordpress, or maybe even BlogCFC. If you're lucky enough, maybe you'll be moving from one platform to another that's made by the same company. Six Apart at least at sometime owned or operated MovableType, Blogger, Vox, and LiveJournal, and typically have a really easy way of porting data from one to the other. Wordpress has a couple of nice tools to importing from other platforms as well. But what I have noticed is that many of these platforms lack one major import tool. And that's the one from what was the only ColdFusion Markup Language blog, BlogCFC.

Are websites software?

Mon, 19 May 2008 20:53:00 -0500

Over on Jesus is my Sword this weekend was a post wondering if websites should be thought of as software and free updates should be expected. It felt to me like he was saying that they should be expected. I don't think that same way. I'm much more under the opinion that a website servers a specific purpose now and that anything other than potential security issues should not be "given" as a free upgrade.

Model-Glue 3 Alpha

Tue, 06 May 2008 22:26:00 -0500

This last weekend at cf.objective(), Joe Reinhart gave a presentation about what's new and upcoming in Model-Glue 3 (gesture) and then announced it's alpha release. That night I downloaded it and got it running with the 6 4-bit Coldfusion 8.0.1 with Apache 2.2 on OS X leopard in no time at all. However, on my test machine running Fedora Core 9 I had a few problems.

Is a CMS the Kiss of Death for a Programmer's Marketability?

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 14:45:00 -0500

Recently the company I work for made a decision to make a decision to choose a content management system (CMS) to use for most of our clients. In all, it sounds like a great idea for us programmers as the workload from designer to programmer would hopefully move from 30%-70% to closer to 50%-50%. But by being able to lessen our work load, do we essentially loose our marketability for the future?

Biking Casualties at Michigan Tech

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:26:00 -0500

Five years at Michigan Tech means I spent a lot of time mountain biking. From the single track to the technical rides, urban assault to road rides, I've tried to ride it all. Lucky I found some great guys that were just as crazy about biking as I am to go along with me. Unluckily for them, 50% were injured. Here's a few pictures of their injuries and even one of an injuring in the making!

There's something in the Air...

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:15:00 -0500

That's right folks -- and it's going to be legendary!

Check it out!

Myrtle Beach: Thanks for Visiting

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 18:49:51 -0500

Just driving to work the other day, I got behind a Myrtle Beach police car that was heading to its headquarters -- which just so happens to be only a few short blocks from my office. The thing that caught my eye this time was not how old the police car was (most of the county and state have gone to 2006+ Chevy Impalas, and this was still an older-style Ford Crown Victory) but what it said on the car. It had the normal, "we're here to protect, but call us if you're in trouble" stuff. So I got to thinking about what the city slogan of Myrtle Beach because I didn't know if there was one. The only other phrase on the police cruiser was "Thanks for visiting."

Welcome to the Tobacco Belt

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 15:25:34 -0500

Soy milk, cottage cheese, bread, and mozzarella cheese. Sure, they have nothing to do with the tobacco belt, but they're where this story begins. Just yesterday after a joyous stop to blockbuster, I ran into the neighboring FoodLion and ran into a not-so-joyous time. Seems the person in charge of scheduling thought it'd be a great idea to only schedule two cashiers on a Friday night at 7.00pm. As I was standing in line, it all happened.

I'd heard around the office that a neighboring city had a bill to ban smoking in public restaurants. Even though it's not news that smoking bans are being passed in many cities, i thought it was interesting that there was one being passed in a city with such a high population so smokers. Moving here from the Midwest and then going back to visit after a year down here, I was astounded by how few people smoke there (or how many smoke here.)

MovableType 4 Beta 2

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 22:07:43 -0500

Tonight I “upgaded” to MT4 beta 2 from MT 3.35. So far, the administration/backend is lovely. I can’t quite yet figure out how to change my picture, but I’m pretty sure I came across something that said that’s not yet implemented. But as I, like a lot of others, don’t simply use the basic MT templates, I ran into a rather huge issue. Ever since I started using MT back in version 2.661, I’ve been a fan of the the tag as I hate the never-ending blogroll pages. However, when I went to rebuild my templates with MT4b2 tongiht, I was told that no longer exists!

The Shad Show

Sun, 06 May 2007 20:14:21 -0500

Recently the project manager and a fellow programmer where I work have begun a podcast, old-skool style. No video, just audio. But none the less, they're doing it. So far there's been two episodes which you can download from the is that what you think website. Over there they describe the show as a place where "you will find topics ranging from Web Development, Video Games, TV, Movies and all kinds of geeky stuff." So if you're a hankering to get your geek on and have an hour a week to spare, check it out.

Coldfusion Scorpio and Ubuntu

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:04:33 -0500

With starting a new job, I've had the opportunity to engulf myself in a new and "interesting" language: Adobe/MacromediaColdFusion. Because I'm starting out as a total beginner with CF and moving from PHP, I thought I'd sign up for some mailing lists from House of Fusion and also to be a beta tester for Adobe. I got a copy of CF 8 (codenamed scorpio) for linux and decided to take my old-school Mac and turn it into a ubuntu server with mysql 5, php 5, apache 2, and CF 8.

So I ran off to Ubuntu and grabbed a copy of their server edition of Edgy 6.10 and installed a LAMP server i just under 2 hours (slow computer and all, takes for a while.)

Installing Ubuntu on a Sun Ultra10

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 21:30:00 -0500

While trying to kill some time at work the other day, I was looking around the internet at my new favorite site, The Museum of Modern Betas, and I just started clicking on links. Eventually I came across a linux called Ubuntu that I thought might be cool to test out. But my real excitement came when I went to download it and saw there were two versions - a live CD that was also for installing the desktop version as well as a Server only install. What really caught my eye was the Ubuntu Server version for the sparc processor. I've had this Sun Ultra10 lying around for a year or two now with nothing to do since I could never quite get Solaris 9 to run apache, mysql and php.

The I.E. (win) Peek-a-Boo Bug

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 10:46:32 -0500

For work, yesterday and today, I was given a new photoshop image to chop up and make interactive for the web. Since it's been a bit slow here recently, I thought I'd challenge myself a bit and make this layout completely table free. Why make it table-free when our product currently is built wholly on tables? Well, the main reason is to make one of the co-workers here mad. He has an issue, no matter how many times we explain the benefits, with using CSS on any site. So not only was I having a little fun with challenging a fully CSS layout, but I'm making life harder for him if he feels he needs to change something later on down the line. And to make things even better, I've got the navigation showing up from right to left instead of left to right, just for fun.

Online Design Portfolio

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 13:40:57 -0500

With the launch of theCircumlocution.com, I've decided that I no longer want to use Movable Type as the backend for displaying my online portfolio. To make things short, it just didn't have the capabilites that I wanted such as being able to highlight a current project or a best project or even finished projects. I do suppose it would be possible to add fields to the database to do this, but then I'd have to do custom programming to show the results. I'm sure there'd be a way to write a plugin for MT as well, but I don't really think I'll be suggesting MT as a blogging/CMS solution to anyone anymore because wordpress is free and fast (PHP), not expensive and slow (perl). So why learn how to program plugins for a, in my mind, slowly dying blogging system software?