I've just applied the latest security hotfix to my web server, and everything seemed to have worked fine - except that I suddenly started receiving a bunch of ColdFusion error notifications from a couple of my websites.

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.

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 front of me.

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

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.

And this is where threads come in. There are some web services you will use – for instance, payment gateways – where the returned result is critical to the continuation of the page request. But others – as well as Postmark, I also send API requests to MailChimp for mailing list subscriptions – where you really don’t need to know the outcome.

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?

If the content doesn’t reach to the bottom of the window, there’s no vertical scroll bar; if you then navigate to a longer page, you’ll see the content jump about 10px to the left as it’s centered in a slightly narrower window. Sometimes, you’ll even see this jump half-way through rendering a longer page.

As of version 5.3, Mura CMS uses CKEditor 3 as its HTML WYSIWYG editor. Blue River have done a great job of integrating the editor, but there are a few extra customisations you might like to make.

One thing I feel is missing, though, is the ability to send emails from within the app. This seems to me to be a fundamental requirement of nearly every web app – although I also understand Sean’s wish to keep FW/1 as lean and stripped-down as possible.

I first started by creating an email service to handle sending emails, but this meant having to make a reference to the service in every controller that required it; so I decided to try to “extend” the FW/1 framework with a native implementation.

I’ve only just started running a CF dev environment under Apache on my Mac – I was previously running IIS under VMWare. The problem comes when using Apache’s mod_rewrite for URL rewriting.

My (first) FW/1 application consists of two subsystems: public and admin. The public subsystem is the default, so if I invoke a URL action without a subsystem specified explicitly, it will use ‘public’.

Of course, if you use the buildURL() method to create your links (which you should be doing!) it will always prepend your action with public: – which I find a little untidy, especially when using SES URLs.

I have an Application.cfc, written in cfscript, and I want it to include a settings file which contains the different settings between development and production servers (so I can update the Application.cfc file without having to worry about altering settings before copying it to the live server).

It looks something like this (simplified, of course!)...

If I create a new magazine entity, the genre property contains an empty string (confirmed by dumping the object). And the hasGenre() method returns false.

I ran into a problem where my auto-generated setters were being called correctly by the populate() method, but my explicit setters were not. And because FW/1 ignores any error generated here, I couldn’t work out why this was…

I have a user edit page, on which you can edit your personal details and change your password. It’s set up something like this...

The setup was this: a table in my SQL database called “member”. A member.cfc object with the following code...

So I hacked together a very quick tool which will allow you to do just that.

However, I’m struggling to weigh up the pros and cons, so I’m throwing it open to people for comments.

If you are running IIS 6 or higher on your web server, some of the fonts will be disabled by default.