Well, I officially got it running last wednesday but wanted to watch to make sure there were no strange things going on like the last problem I was having with posts coming in each time the server would go out and get the contents of the blog. I actually solved that by comparing the link of the blog entry instead of comparing the titles of the blog entries like the original MXNA code does. My CF was a little rusty (read: not good at all) before this project, but I think I've improved my own skills a lot by changing things up and making it work and look better to accomodate different character sets. The one thing I really like about CF is that it is quite intuitive and since I already have an asp background (vbscript) with quite a bit of DB experience under my belt, it's easy to catch on to. I still have to get the FAQ and ABOUT section done, but there is a short explanation on the forum so it'll do for the week I think.
On a different note, I wanted to bring up a point that Alex did in my last entry's comments area of the situation of blogs and getting information in Japan and Japanese. I have found that at this time there aren't a lot of Japanese people who write blogs on web related technical issues. Why? Well I think there are a few reasons. The biggest one is that it just hasn't caught on yet. Almost all the blogs in Japan (that I have seen) are literally just an online diary of that person's life. More personal things, and much less "information". There are of course exceptions. The next reason comes in a close second to the third in that most people probably don't find writing a blog worth it as either they don't know enough to write about certain things, or they know a lot and don't want to share their secrets or it could be that they think people will see them as a "know-it-all". It's a different mentality here and kind of hard to explain, but I think within a year or so the amount of web related blogs will increase quite a bit. As long as there is a way for them to get their thoughts out to a wider audience (hence aggregators) and they realize that the increased attention is actually quite beneficial to them.
On a more personal note. The people I have talked in chat or mail, usually say they just have nothing to say to the world. Though they do have ideas and are constantly improving their skills, they're just not the sort to go about blaring it out on a blog. Another reason is that they think if they put some good code up, or some ideas that they have, they'll lose the edge they think they have and start losing work to people who take that knowledge and do more with it than they do. I think we were all like that at some point maybe, (or of that sort) but once we saw the usefulness or just wanted to be a piece of the community, we hopped on the blog bandwagon and hooked up with some aggregators. Person by person, day by day the community can only grow I think :)
I need some help on the aggregator that I'm hoping to make live tomorrow. It's the MXNA code, so anybody who is quite familiar with it or Coldfusion can hopefully push me in the right direction here.
The problem is that for some blogs, it is importing the same entry more than once when I have set the server to automatically go check. So far out of about 20 blogs, it has happened to 3. One of them is Mike Chambers's blog... I thought maybe it was just because they were old or something but that doesn't seem to be the case. Not only that, for 2 of them it continuously keeps importing the latest entry and only that entry (I guess until there is a new one) and for Mike's blog, it pulls in some old entry from a while back (not the latest entry).
Is there a way I can fix this? I've looked all over but have yet to figure out how to get this worked out. If anybody can point me in the right direction, I would be forever grateful :)
Would you like your blog added to another aggregator? Thanks to the much needed help from Mike Chambers, I'm finally getting up an online blog aggregator for the Japanese community this week. There are quite a few online aggregators out there for English (MXNA, fullasagoog, flog) and other latin based languages but I've only seen one so far in Japanese and weirdly enough most of the entries were English.
The thing is though that in Japan blogging has only just lately caught on and most are just using it as a kind of diary (walked the dog yesterday...) type of thing, sort of a what can we do with this period I think (I could be wrong..). There are some really cool options now like posting pics from your phone (and almost every phone in Japan can do that) so there are quite a few picture blogs out there too.
Though to go with the theme of my site I'm hoping to keep those type of blogs out and concentrate mostly on web, design, development and internet related blogs. I would like to add in some of the more useful English blogs too I think (less chit-chat and more pertainable info) so if you think you have a blog like that please let me know (webmaster AT 3enhancedesigners.com, or use the comments on this entry) and I'll add it in. There are quite a few Japanese des/dev people that can read English quite well but just have trouble writing and speaking it. Of course some can do all, but most of my friends are just best at reading.
I can't wait to see the Japanese community take off a bit more. There are a LOT of web des/dev people here and a lot of potential just waiting to break out and show itself, but I think that there is still the old way of thinking that if they tell all their secrets about how to do something they'll reduce their chances of being better than the other guy. In some ways I can understand that, but I think it's smarter to get into the community and help it grow, as you can most likely get a lot more out of it in the end.
I'm so happy. I can tunnel with a Windows server now thanks to the *major* update to FCS (release 2). I can't believe how many bugs they fixed! (to be honest though, it's about friggin' time! FCS one and a half has been out for how long now?) They must have found quite a few when it came to building breeze I guess because things are really looking up now. :)
Anyways, if you are using a windows server and haven't updated yet, I strongly suggest it so you and (if you have them) your clients will be able to take advantage of the tunneling abilities now (if you hadn't before..). On a last note, there is a really cool option that was added where you can set how much audio can lag before it starts dropping messages. This should be good because there was a nasty tendency for audio to just plain get slower...and slower... and slower.. I can't wait to take advantage of all of this now. May the FCS boys and girls in MM get a big raise and a party to celebrate such a great improvement :)
mental note to self: check the setInterval function thoroughly 'cause supposedly it works now.