Seb Duggan

As seems to be required now, here is my contribution to Steve Bryant’s How I Got Started In ColdFusion Day:

Having graduated from university in 1996 with a degree in Classics and – slightly more usefully – a reasonably popular Clint Eastwood fan site (”The Page With No Name”; I had a lot of spare time at uni…), I found myself an entry-level web monkey job at Future Publishing.

I started purely building the HTML pages; all the heavy lifting was done by a few techie guys, using Active Server Pages in VBScript (long before ASP .NET, so in what would now be called ASP Classic). We used various Microsoft technologies – anyone out there remember IE channels? (I think we may have been a launch partner for them…) Over the next few years I picked up bit of ASP here and there, and before long I was a techie guy myself.

It was decided that we should look at moving to a new platform; we sent an expeditionary group off to the BBC to see what they were doing with WebObjects – and in the meantime I took a look at ColdFusion 4.5 and liked it (in particular the fact that it was obviously designed for the Web – simple things like being able to do a database query without opening and closing connections; and even having a built-in function to format decimals!); I even (if memory serves correctly) wrote a review (positive!) of it for Internet.Works magazine. However, in the end we remained with the status quo, and by the time I left in 2000 no change had taken place – but I did have an installation CD for ColdFusion 4.5…

Soon afterwards I left and set up on my own (and have been freelance ever since), and started to learn what I could really achieve with ColdFusion – and haven’t looked back. I honestly don’t think I could have run my own Web freelancing single-handed for all this time if I didn’t have ColdFusion to back me up. I’ve never had any formal IT training, but like to think that, with the help of CF, I’ve become quite a proficient Web developer – and really enjoy throwing myself into all the new features that come along with each new release…

This morning, I couldn't reach my web server. Dead. Nothing.

I contacted my server company, who very quickly diagnosed that the server had blue-screened; they rebooted it and all is now well. Looking at my web logs, I think it was down for about an hour - not disastrous, but definitely inconvenient and not A Good Thing. (Note to self: set up a monitoring service so I know when it's down!)

So I started looking at the system logs to see if I could find what caused it to crash. And there was a big clue, right in fron of me.

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This is something I've been meaning to look at ever since a conversation I had at Scotch on the Rocks 2011. Many of us - even if we use the latest and greatest in source control - still use FTP to deploy our site changes to production. This causes several headaches, among them remembering which files have changed, and getting all those files deployed simultaneously.

After looking around the web, I have found several resources that helped me set up Git to deploy my site.

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I've recently taken to using the excellent Postmark to send out all the transactional emails from my web sites. For just 0.15 cents per email, you get the benefits of increased deliverability and a great API to track and manage any undelivered mail.

If you like, you can send your emails simply by using Postmark's SMTP servers - a really quick way to migrate to their system. But the real power comes when you start using their API. I'm not going to go into detail about how to set this up here, but in short you just have to send your message as a JSON object via HTTP Post.

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A cautionary tale for anyone running their own web server - something I'd never considered previously.

We've all been there - you're setting up your web server, and request a bunch of IP addresses from your hosting provider. You then assign these IPs to your various web sites, and off you go...

But how many of you actually check the history of these IP addresses?

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