Then came the process of installing Git on Snow Leopard so that my computer can talk to the repository. In my opinion, the Git website could do a better job with their Mac OS X installer (or at least the instructions).

Fortunately, Hivelogic has a great step-by-step on installing Git on Snow Leopard. If you’re running Snow Leopard, I highly recommend doing everything that they say in the post. If they ask you to touch your nose while spinning in circles, do it.

Now on to figuring out how to get my reCAPTCHA on Wheels plugin into my new repo.

Technorati Tags: ccm, cfwheels, chris peters, clear crystal media, coldfusion on wheels, Git, github, install, installation, polymorphism, scm, version control, web development

1. Latest 5 posts from a handpicked selection of blogs
2. Latest 5 articles that I’ve found on the Web relating to Wheels

For #1, I was able to aggregate the feeds using Yahoo! Pipes. For #2, I created a Delicious account that I can post articles to. All very dynamic. I’ll explain later how I used FeedBurner and CFML to complete the solution.

The end goal

The finished product looks like this (click for larger version):

The easy one: Delicious, FeedBurner and CFML

We’ll do the easy one first because I’m lazy. For the “Articles and Discussion” section on the right, I have it set up where I can just post links to the Delicious account. Once I got that set up, I burned the account’s RSS feed using FeedBurner.

Why FeedBurner?

Why would I use FeedBurner? FeedBurner acts as an intermediary between the user and your RSS feed. By exchanging a little bit of your info with Google (what you pay), you get some great benefits:

• Normalizes your feed into a valid/compatible format
• Track how your feed is being used and how many users are subscribed to it
• The ability to substitute your own title and description (useful in cases where you’re using a third party feed like Delicious)
• Google takes care of the feed hosting for you
• Automatic blog service pinging

I also make the feeds available on the Wheels site so that others can subscribe to them. It’s great to track how those feeds are being used and by how many people.

I’ve written about FeedBurner in a few other posts on Glass Case, my sister internet marketing blog:

• Product Review: Using FeedBurner to supercharge your RSS feed
• How to optimize your blog
• Using FeedBurner? Why you should use their MyBrand

Using CFML to display the feed

After getting the RSS feed set up, I was able to use one line of CFML to fetch the feed:

<cffeed name="articles" source="#arguments.rssUrl#">

But I hate to say that it can’t be this simple. I had to implement a solution to cache the feed for at least 5 minutes. If we fetched the feed in real time every time the page was loaded, Google would get pissed for hitting their servers so often.

To do this, I created a partial called articles. I could then cache the partial so that at most, the feed would only be accessed by my web server every 5 minutes. Here’s how the call in views/community/index.cfm works:

#includePartial(partial="articles", articlesRss=articlesRss, articlesUrl=articlesUrl, numToDisplay=5, cache=5)#

The partial at views/community/_articles.cfm calls a view helper to get the feed data and displays the data. I had to use a view helper to link the partial back to the data that we needed. This was done so the caching could be controlled at the partial level.

<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="true">
 
<!--- URL to RSS feed --->
<cfparam name="arguments.articlesRss" type="url">
<!--- URL to Delicious page --->
<cfparam name="arguments.articlesUrl" type="url">
<!--- Number of items to display from feed --->
<cfparam name="arguments.numToDisplay" type="numeric" default="10">
 
<!--- Note: we are breaking the convention of data access in the view here so that we can cache this partial --->
<cfset articles = articles(arguments.articlesRss)>
 
<cfoutput>
 
<div id="community-articles">
	<h3>
		#Replace(articles.title, "ColdFusion on Wheels ", "")#
		<a href="#arguments.articlesRss#" class="image">#imageTag(source="feed-icon-14x14.png", alt="Articles Feed")#</a>
	</h3>
	<p>#HtmlEditFormat(articles.description)#</p>
	<dl>
		<cfloop from="1" to="#arguments.numToDisplay#" index="i">
			<dt>
				<a href="#articles.item[i].link#">#articles.item[i].title#</a>
				<span class="date">(discovered&nbsp;#Replace(timeAgoInWords(articles.item[i].pubDate), " ", "&nbsp;", "all")#&nbsp;ago)</span>
			</dt>
			<dd>#articles.item[i].description.value#</dd>
		</cfloop>
	</dl>
	<h4>Read More Articles</h4>
	<ul class="calls-to-action">
		<li class="delicious"><a href="#arguments.articlesUrl#">All Articles on Delicious</a></li>
		<li class="feed"><a href="#arguments.articlesRss#" title="Articles Feed"><abbr title="Really Simple Syndication">RSS</abbr> Feed</a></li>
	</ul>
</div>
 
</cfoutput>
 
<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="false">

And lastly, here was the view helper that I stored in views/community/helpers.cfm. It basically fetches the feed appropriately depending on which environment I’m in.

<cffunction name="articles" hint="Fetches latest article data from specified RSS feed.">
	<cfargument name="rssUrl" type="string" hint="URL of RSS feed to check.">
 
	<cfset var loc = {}>
 
	<!--- Design mode will not cache, so let's store data in session to keep FeedBurner happy --->
	<cfif get("environment") is "design">
		<cfif not StructKeyExists(session, "articles")>
			<cffeed name="session.articles" source="#arguments.rssUrl#">
		</cfif>
		<cfset loc.articles = session.articles>
	<!--- This is cached in production mode --->
	<cfelse>
		<cffeed name="loc.articles" source="#arguments.rssUrl#">
	</cfif>
 
	<cfreturn loc.articles>
 
</cffunction>

Voila! A cached list of articles from the Delicious feed!

Feed aggregation using Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is a visual tool for aggregating different types of data, sorting it, filtering it, and then exporting it to RSS or JSON. It’s best used for my use case of having a tool where I can go in and manually add data to the aggregation. There are a lot of different data sources that you can use, but I’ve primarily used the tool for creating uber RSS feeds.

This is the pipe layout that I created (click to view larger):

Each item that I mention is available in a menu to the left of the canvas. You drag the items onto the canvas and then click and drag connectors of each item to connect them.

Here are the basic steps that I followed to create the uber feed.

1. Drag a Fetch Feed item from the left onto the canvas. Enter the URL of the feed. (In this case, I tried to just grab each blog’s ColdFusion on Wheels category.)
2. Chain each feed object into a Union operator.
3. Chain the Union items together if you need more than one.
4. Tie the last Union operator to a Sort item and set that to sort by date descending.

5. Tie the Sort item to the Output item that comes with the canvas.
6. Save and name the feed.

7. Go back to the My Pipes screen and grab the RSS or JSON URL of the feed.

As you’re doing all of these steps, you can click the Output item at the bottom and see a preview of what your feed data will look like in the Debugger panel. If you want to debug any part of the layout, you just click that element to see the preview as well. How slick is that?!

Overall, I recommend playing with Pipes for an hour or 2 to see what kind of data mashups you can come up with. I’m sure there are other uses that I just haven’t thought of yet.

Tying it to FeedBurner and CFML

Because the output of this Pipe is RSS, I basically copied most of the steps that I described above for the Delicious feed. I burned it with FeedBurner and then created a cached partial similar to the one in the Articles example above.

There are some differences in how I displayed the Articles vs. Bloggers feeds, so I could probably spend some time refactoring the common stuff into a base partial. Perhaps that is a discussion for a future post.

Technorati Tags: aggregation, cfml, ColdFusion, feedburner, rss, web2.0, yahoo, yahoo pipes

Click to see a larger version of the image.

You can call it ghetto or whatever you want. But I was storing 3 VMware instances of Windows XP on my MacBook Pro. All so that I could test my websites in the 3 most recent versions of Internet Explorer.

Thanks to SuperPreview by Microsoft, I am able to remove 2 of those instances. I saved quite a bit of space on my hard drive by essentially removing 2 whole computers’ worth of data. And now I can test my websites in Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8. Win-win!

Take a look at the sexiness of comparing 2 versions side-by-side (click to view larger):

Gotta fix that one. Thanks Microsoft!

Technorati Tags: browser testing, browsers, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, microsoft, polymorphism, superpreview, testing, web browsers, web design, web development

I can’t see why this isn’t going to be adopted like crazy, and it makes me excited to know that my clients using Google Apps will probably see this for business use sometime in the near future.

Here is a fairly lengthy demo of the new platform, presented at the 2009 Google I/O conference. Definitely worth a watch, even if you only devote a half hour to it.

Because Google Web Toolkit is Java-based, I’m not seeing why CFML developers shouldn’t take a look at making a CFC API for it stat. I’m going to need to take a look at this.

Technorati Tags: application development, cfml, chris peters, ColdFusion, communication, email, google, platform, wave, web development

Guess what. I had trouble setting up WebDAV on CentOS. But I figured it out. This one’s mainly for people running Google searches trying to figure this out like I had to.

Me + Linux = Slow

I have a love-hate relationship with my Linux server. On one hand, it’s super-reliable. I love that. But on the other hand, I’m a boob when it comes to running Linux commands from Terminal.

I get my Linux, ColdFusion, and PHP hosted at Vivio Technologies, which runs their servers off of CentOS by default. I highly recommend them if you’re looking for solid ColdFusion+Linux hosting.

Setting up WebDAV on CentOS Servers

There were a few pages on the Web that talked about installing WebDAV on Linux. But none of it got me 100% there. Simon posted a great write-up on synchronizing OmniFocus via WebDAV on Gentoo Linux. Unfortunately, I was only able to get a forbidden error message from OmniFocus when setting up the sync point. Do follow his advice on enabling mod_dav and mod_dav_fs though.

My biggest lead for CentOS + WebDAV bliss was from Vivek Gite on nixCraft. Apparently CentOS will auto-include a file at /etc/httpd/conf.d/webdav.conf for WebDAV operations.

And he includes a sample of what you should include in this magical file if you’re looking to enable WebDAV in Apache:

<IfModule mod_dav.c>
    LimitXMLRequestBody 131072

    Alias /webdav "/home/httpd/webdav"
    <Directory /home/httpd/webdav>
        Dav On
        Options +Indexes
        IndexOptions FancyIndexing
        AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
        AuthType Basic
        AuthName "WebDAV Server"
        AuthUserFile /etc/httpd/webdav.users.pwd
        Require valid-user
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</IfModule>

You then need to create a password file for whatever location you specify for AuthUserFile. Do that with this command:

# htpasswd -c /etc/httpd/webdav.users.pwd tom

You will be prompted to enter a password, which will be populated in the password file.

One final tip that I didn’t get from either article was to change permissions for your WebDAV-able directory to 755. So for our above example, we would do this:

# chmod 755 /home/httpd/webdav

Restart Apache using apachectl restart, and you should be golden. Getting OmniFocus and the iPhone working is pretty easy once you have the damn server working correctly.

Did I forget anything?

Did I forget a step or anything? Check on the articles that I linked to and let me know in the comments so I can fix this.

Now I’m off to record and process my “stuff” so that I can feel assured that it will always be with me via my iPhone.

Technorati Tags: apache, centos, iphone, linux, mac, omnifocus, webdav