It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single programmer in possession of a web development skills, must be in want of a blog...1
Alternately:
Call me Daniel2
This is a blog for occasional thoughts on Coldfusion programming by a part-time, Portland area programmer. I enjoy following the existing Coldfusion Blogs, but we all need a place for longer comments and off topic posts.
I'm also evaluating Blog applications, so this should be a good test. I've already looked into the following:
- Blogger (Google Hosted)
- Wordpress
- Mango Blog (This site)
Hopefully I'll get a chance to look at Blog.cfc as well.
Quick thoughts on Mango Blog:
- Good: Simple, straight forward installation. I was up and running very quickly!
- Good: Simple, clean, user-friendly, interface.
- Good: Nice set of useful plugins that are REALLY EASY to configure.
- Undecided: Really basic rich text editor - probably a good thing. Good writing doesn't need too many bells and whistles.
- Undecided: Caching seems a little bit agressive. Many changes, even blog post updates, seem to require a visit to the Cache page.
- Undecided: The excerpt feature is useful, but seems unnecessarily redundant in implementation. I prefer Wordpress' use of a specific HTML comment to add a page break.
- Bad: Adding new categories cannot be done on the fly. (Like BlogCFC for an example).
- Bad: It doesn't like to display Coldfusion code in a posting.
- It strips Coldfusion tags in the HTML window
- It escapes Coldfusion tags in the rich text window, but there is no Code format option so it applies HTML formatting which looks bad.
- It's possible to break the escaping so that I end up with ugly gibberish:
<cfscript> - Update: Mango Blog and Remote Synthesis each have work arounds to this behavior to make adjustments tolerable.
I'm looking forward to digging into the templating features and custom pages
1 Blatant rip off of Jane Austen's, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
2 and again for Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
From 100 best first lines from novels