Thoughts from the mountains

I've wanted to setup a blog to store recipes to share with friends and family for a long time and recently found the motivation to get it done. I wanted a light color theme for this blog, so I ported the Fresh Pick theme from styleshout.com over to Mango. If anyone wants to use the theme with their Mango Blog it can be downloaded from my projects page or here.

While reading the article titled, "Lessons from a lost decade: Developing for a disposable Web", I noticed the mention of ColdFusion at the end of the second paragraph. I found the article to be interesting and made valid points, but again I'm sad to see ColdFusion portrayed as a defunct language in the main stream tech media. Am I defensive or do others feel the same way?

For the last year or so, I had been using cfhttp and rssatom.cfc to read and parse rss feeds so that I could display the content on a site running on ColdFusion 7. I recently upgraded the server to ColdFusion 9, but shortly afterward started to receive the error, "An error occurred while Parsing an XML document. Content is not allowed in prolog". The error was not consistent, but occurred twenty to thirty times a day. I figured it was a good time to move to the more current cffeed tag that became available in ColdFusion 8 and see if it would resolve the issue.

Today, I had to create charts from percentage values stored as integers in a database. The idea was to create a bar or pie chart that would show the number of results in different ranges of percentages. The data was collected through a text input that allowed integer values between 0 and 100. I used the sql CASE operator select counts of the number of responses in each desired range.