First Entry with BlogCFC, Database and Layout Updates

Posted At : September 1, 2008 8:38 PM | Posted By : Leif Wells
Related Categories: General

Greetings to you all. As you may have noticed, my blog has been dark for over a month. Although I have been extremely busy, the main reason I have not made an entry is very simply this: I hate my blog.

It's an emotional reaction to a very simple thing; I have never had time to make my blog look good, and thus it has never looked good. I have never wanted to deal with properly adding style to BlogCFC because I didn't want to go through it every time Mr. Camden updates the source (and, OMG, how is one man able to do so much in so little time? It literally takes a hurricane, a frickin act of God, to slow him down and he is still posting on his blog!). My distaste for the lack of a look and feel for my blog bled into my drive to post entries. Thus, here we are.

Now that I have confessed my emotional paralysis on this matter, I have taken upon myself to face my demons. And here it is, a newly laid out blog using Erwin Aligam's Underground style sheet from the Style Shout site. If you are design (or emotionally) impaired, take a look at the templates there. They happen to be pretty good.

"Why now, Leif?" Because Mr. Camden has stopped working on BlogCFC 5, that's why. Ray has said that all of his efforts for BlogCFC have been focused upon BlogCFC 6 from now on, thus the current version (baring any bug fixes, I am sure) will be the last in a long line of updates. I am hoping to not need to change this code at all until I decide to update to BlogCFC 6. The changes to the original code base to get the style sheet to work correctly were many, and I have hopes that Ray might be able to finally reach the "separation of code and content" nirvana in the future. Frankly, after what I just went through with my upgrade to this version, I am not sure I'll be upgrading to version 6 very quickly. The changes that were required to make the new style sheet work were amazingly difficult — hunting to find the errant div here and there — and then having to reload my database three times. Frankly, it's all been a bit much for a holiday week-end.

Although I may sound critical, I want to thank Ray Camden for writing and updating BlogCFC. Without BlogCFC I would have to use some PHP-based product, which goes against my Adobe-leaning ways.

You'll note my addition of a Twitter pod. I modified the embed code that Twitter generates to make it fit the style of the site. I've been Twittering a lot over the past few months, so I thought that it might be a good idea to include my mindless meanderings on my site as well. Be forewarned, those who might like to "follow" me, my tweets may not suit your sensibilities.

So, without further ado, let's test a few things out with this blog:

Here is some fake code to test the code style:

public function helloWorld(str:String):String
{
return str + " Hello World";
}

Now here is a quote to test the quote style: