Just wanted to make a quick post letting my readers know that I am now using CFFormProtect from Jake Munson to protect my blog from spammers without needing to use CAPTCHA.

The main reason I did this is for accessibility. Since LylaCaptcha is not accessible to blind, low vision, and possible color-blind users, I do not feel it is an acceptable solution.

At first I was going to put in reCaptcha, but I tried it out, and the audio CAPTCHA was hard to hear. Then I saw Dan Wilson's post about CFFormProtect, so I thought I would give it a try. I will report my results in a few weeks.

Please let me know if you have any trouble with leaving comments on the blog. Hopefully this will make commenting easier.

As you may, or may not, have noticed. I have been quiet lately. This sucks. So here is what I am planning to blog about over the next few weeks. I am making a commitment to myself to get back on track.

1. The ColdBox projects I am working on right now (3 of them). I am really enjoying ColdBox, but I am not sure what to write about. Is anyone interested in reading about the basics? The docs are great, but maybe some would like to read about how I am doing it? Anyone? I don't want to write about ColdBox Event Handlers or Layouts & Views if no one is going to read it

2. My generic Transfer decorator. I have, with the guidance of Mark Mandel and Bob Silverberg, created a Transfer decorator for use with business objects to help me validate and populate my beans while still managing my user input and error message feedback cleanly

3. Ajax Security, got some reading to do on this, but it's got to be done.

4. My journey into Flex. With so much else going on, I can't imagine making time for Flex, but I am going to bFlex/bFuson this weekend, and I am not going to let it go to waste.

5. Encryption. I have been putting this one off for some time.

6. An idea for an open source project about which I am too shy to discuss just yet. I will probably be e-mailing some of the gurus to see if it seems like a good idea, or a waste of time.

Thanks everyone for reading, I appreciate you taking the time to read about what I am working on. I hope to continue delivering content (quality or otherwise).

So I have been quiet the last week or so. I'm not happy about it, but things happens. I wish I did not need excuses, but I will offer them, if only to assure myself that this is a temporary situation and that I will begin blogging again soon.

Right now I am working under deadline for a medium-sized side project that needs to be done before Comic-Con starts this week. It is also my first medium-sized ColdBox/ ColdSpring/ Transfer project, so there is a lot of learning and do-overs associated with the project. It is taking a lot longer than I had originally hoped. I am hoping I can get some good blog material out of it.

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So about a year ago the Minnesota Valley Humane Society put out a call for people to help them with their website. I was one of those that answered.

We had several planning meetings, did some research, looked at hosting options, etc, etc and decided to go with a Drupal Site. At the time I had used Drupal on a few other sites and I felt that building a custom CF site would take too long.

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So I am still not sure about this whole Twitter thing. But I thought I would give it a go. I have been using it for almost a week now, been following a few people, making a few posts, etc.

It's weird. I guess that is all I can say about it. But I am going to give it a try and see if it grows on me.

If anyone cares (I'm not even sure if I care), I am at http://twitter.com/JasonPDean.

Well, I think I have finally worked out most of the kinks with my web host change. All said, it went pretty smoothly.

I spent most of the day working on it today and I got a lot done. Please note that all of my links and feeds have changed. I have set up 301 redirects for most everything that was on the old site, but please update your bookmarks and feed readers to the new link. I will keep the redirects around indefinitely, but having the real link is better.

I have had several projects going this weekend and I have been crazy busy. I am working on a site for one of the Humane Societies here in MN that has been taking up a lot of time, I have been doing my blog migration, and I have to prepare a presentation to be shown to 2 CFUG in the next 2 weeks. So I have had little time for the security series. I still plan to have an entry out soon, but it probably won;t be tomorrow. We'll see. It's a good thing I have tomorrow off.

That's all for now. I have to get back to the Humane Society site. We are hoping to launch later this week and I have a lot of work to do on it. I will post an announcement when we launch so readers can check it out. It is a Drupal site and we have been working on it since October of last year. It is a volunteer effort and it has been a huge project.

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Well, as can be expected, my blog is experiencing some growing pains. Which, of course, is one of those good problems to have. I asked to be added to a couple of aggregators and I had no idea that it would increase my traffic so much. I don't know if people are experiencing long load times or slow-downs. Things seem ok to me, but I would love to read comments about that.

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UPDATE: So after reading Ray's Post here and after reading the comments on that post, I think I have to agree with my commenters as well as Ray's that this is not the best idea. The level of complexity that this adds does not make it worth the extra security (perceived or otherwise) that the technique may offer.

For my first security series post, I am going to keep things simple. This one is more of a tip/best practice than an article. At least, that is how I am planning it in my head, we'll see if that changes by the bottom of the page.

Today I want to discuss something that most developers and administrators will find to be very annoying. I know I do.

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Well with Schedule and Priority changes, I have changed my cf.Objective() schedule.

May 2
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM:
   Opening Keynote (Adobe)
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM:
   Setting up a Solid Level Local Development Environment (Kurt Wiersma)
11:25 AM - 12:25 PM:
   An Intelligent Approach to OOP in CF Architecture (Nic Tunney)
1:30 PM - 3:40 PM:
   Workshop: Agile Bootcamp: What CF Developers Need To Know (John Paul Ashenfelter)
4:10 PM - 5:10 PM:
   Model-Glue 3: Back to its Roots (Joe Rinehart)

May 3
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM:
   Leveraging Basic Design Patterns in ColdFusion (Phill Nacelli)
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM:
   Using ANT - Make Your Development Life More Productive (Peter Ferrell)
11:25 AM - 12:25 PM:
   Testing with cfcUnit (John Mason)
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM:
   Introduction to Building Applications with Transfer ORM (Mark Mandel)
2:40 PM - 3:40 PM:
   Refactoring in Coldfusion: from Procedural to OO (Dan Wilson)
4:10 PM - 5:10 PM:
   Application and Database Security (Daryl Banttari)
5:20 PM - 6:20 PM:
   MVC for You and Me (Joe Rinehart)
7:30 PM - 8:25 PM:
   BOF: Source Code Control (TBD)
8:30 PM - 9:25 PM:
   BOF: ColdFusion 9 Feature Brainstorm (Jason Delmore / Adam Lehman)
9:30 PM - 10:25 PM:
   BOF: Automation & Ant (Peter Farrell)

May 4
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM:
   Prototyping Applications in Flex (Scott Stroz)
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM:
   CFEclipse Reloaded (Mark Drew)
11:25 AM - 12:30 PM:
   Leveraging Code Generation to Jumpstart Your Development (Brian Kotek)
1:30 PM - 3:40 PM:
   Workshop: Advanced Techniques With The ColdBox Framework (Luis Majano)