Have you heard of the latest trend in web development? It’s called Push Button Development (PBD for short). Really! You don’t believe me?

Have you heard of cloud computing? What about Software As A Service? These are terms that many people throw around without really understanding what they mean.

MySpace is launching the ability for third party developers to build applications using their API. Most of the other major Social Networks have done that already, with the most famous of all being FaceBook.com.

Adobe announced via Adobe Labs their beta release of Dreamweaver CS4, Fireworks CS4 and Soundbooth CS4. You can go right now and download each of the applications to play with and try out.

I was reading a very interesting article on TechCrunch about Facebook becoming the next Microsoft (as in OS).

Very interesting article in Website Magazine today about where should you place analytics code (such as Google Analytics).
Should you place it at the end of the page or at the beginning of the page?
Let’s talk about why at the beginning of the page.
If you have a slow loading page, by placing the code […]

Adobe releases Flash Player 10 beta supporting 3D effects, custom filters, advanced text layout, plus much more…

I ran into an amazing website called Sprout (they just got $5 million second round) which allows you to build Flash widgets easily using the sproutbuilder.com You don’t even have to create an account, you just click on “Get started” and you are off creating these widgets.

MySpace launched their developer platform (check it out)

You have to register to build applications, but you can browser through the “Learn and Play” section without having to register first.

Microsoft Corp. made an unsolicited (yeah right) $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo today.

Basically, Yahoo is desperate and I think this is Jerry Yang’s answer to Yahoo’s problem. Have Microsoft purchase you.

Media coverage is making this as a big deal that a big company has picked Silverlight to run their video. I don’t see the big deal. NBC and Microsoft have been in bed for along time (remember MSNBC?)

Electronista reported today that AOL will stop supporting the Netscape browser.

I had the opportunity to upgrade not one, not two, but 5 ColdFusion boxes we own in ColdFusion (dev and production). Most of the installs were great and without any major issues, but there were a couple of the installs I had some issues with.

We have an “intranet” web site (called SheaTV) in our company where we centralize all of our media assets (videos, podcasts, training on demand videos, etc.). From there, our users can easily find what they want to watch (or listen to) by searching through a variety of subjects.

So I took the plunge and migrated my ColdFusion MX 7 server into Adobe ColdFusion 8. Below, I’ve detailed the steps I took.

I did not uninstall MX 7 prior to installing 8 (this is the developer version since I did this first on my local machine before doing development and/or production to make sure that all of our websites work ok with version 8…I highly recommend you do the same.)

After downloading the developer version from Adobe.com, I went ahead and double clicked ColdFusion-8-win.exe. I then followed the wizard.

Shut down all CFMX 7 services, especially Verify, if you have any collections that need to be transferred over to version 8.
Make sure you have installed JDK 1.6 or above.
Splash screen - Choose language and click OK.
Introduction - Click next.
License Agreement - Accept and click next.
Configure Installer - Enter Serial #, select trial, or select developer edition and click next.

Wow! I can’t belive Coldfusion is in version 8 (and this version comes from Adobe).

I remember when I first used ColdFusion it came with O’Reilly’s Website web server (this is a long time ago). It was known as DBML back then. Before version 1. Then I went through version 1.5, 2, 3, 3.01, 3.11, 4, 4.01, 5, 6, 7 and now 8 (I skipped a few of the .01 and other updates in between).

The product started with Allaire (the original Allaire brothers created it), then it was purchased by Macromedia, and finally, of course, by Adobe (as part of the entire Macromedia merger with Adobe)

For those of you that don’t know ColdFusion, it’s a back end scripting language to create dynamic websites. If you heard of ASP.net (from Microsoft), then think of it as that, except, 10,000 times better (do you think I’m a ColdFusion fan?).

Here is a cool site I learned about when I attended the Adobe CS3 Conference:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/communityengine/index.cfm?event=homepage&productId=1&loc=en_US

This is the CSS Advisor site, where you can learn about all things “CSS”. For those of you who have no clue what CSS is, let me give you a quick explanation.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and it’s used in conjunction with HTML to create websites. With CSS you create the “look and feel” of your site and with HTML, you define your content (or display it). That way, you can keep the look and feel separate from the content of your site, which in turn, allows you to easily change and update how your site looks without having to redesign the content as well.

Adobe has announced seven upcoming online seminars (eSeminars) pertaining to PHP, Flex and Flex 3.0 development.

Flex for Java Developers (3 seminars dates)
Flex For PHP Developers (2 seminar dates)
Buzzword - Raising the RIA Bar with Rick Treitman
Flex 3 Beta Sneak Peak
For more information on these seminars, visit Adobe at

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=462539&loc=en_us

What a fantastic conference! The Adobe CS3 conference was a two day (June 19 and June 20) networking, product immersion and just plain old fun “experience” for only $199; can’t beat that!

That price not only included a bunch of classes and networking opportunities, but also a fantastic dinner on the first day (I mean shrimp, prime rib, Chinese food and even an open hosted bar).

There were plenty of networking opportunities as well, including the lunches and dinners, the get-togethers after the days ended and a bird-of-a-feather meeting.

Pre-conference Sessions
The conference started with a “Pre-Conference Session”. There were 5 sessions to choose from, including Rich Internet Application for Developers, Video, Management/IT, Photographers and Print Service Providers.

I watched the WWDC 2007 Keynote made by, of course, “Mr. I Only Wear Black T-Shirts and Jeans” Steve Jobs on my iMac last night (until 2:30am…I’m so dedicated).

It was a very uplifting, funny and energetic keynote. I like how this guys presents. He will be big one day! ;-) So, Mr. Jobs introduced many new things at WDDC 2007 (World Wide Developer Conference) .

Below is a short summary of some of the cool items (at least I thought they were cool) that was shown in the keynote.

Mac OS X Leopard
1) New desktop. More “3D” like. Full transparency on the windows (kind of like Vista).
2) 3D Dock With Reflections
3) Stacks – This is the ability to “stack” multiple items in your dock, kind of like you do with photographs in Aperture or Lightroom.
4) Spaces – You can open up applications, organize them by category and then create a space for those applications. Then you can create another space and open up some more applications there. Arrange your desktop differently there. Then you can switch between spaces. Neat concept. I can see myself having a “editing space” for when I’m editing and a “web development” space when I’m doing web design / development and then just switching between my spaces.

Warning…Don’t Use the Windows Registry to Store ColdFusion Clients in Production

If you are a ColdFusion developer, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you are not, either read this and learn about ColdFusion or wait until my next blog entry (which will be on the WWDC 2007 Conference).

Getting back to ColdFusion. In production, you should NEVER store your client variables in the registry (see image below).

Why? Simple. The more traffic you get, the more data will be written to in the registry and the potential to getting a “Registry Corrupt” goes up with every hit. Trust me. It happened to us. Many times, before we figured out that is what was causing the constant crashes.

So I was asked by our eMarkeging team to go ahead and implement a 301 redirect for sheahomes.com to redirect to www.sheahomes.com. Why would you want to do this? The basic and quick answer is because the more “domains” you have, the more your presence is diluted on the web.

So if a customer searches for Shea Homes, they should immediately (and hopefully within the first page), get www.sheahomes.com. Some search engines will think of sheahomes.com and www.sheahomes.com as 2 separate sites and that can dilute the search results.

Anyhow, so I did some research on Google and found a quick an easy way to implement this. Since we are a Microsoft Windows 2003, IIS 6 back end, I found out how to implement this 301 redirect at the IIS level (web server level). You can easily do this if you have access to your server, or you can contact your web host and ask them to do this for you.

First things first. After you log into your web server, bring up IIS either by going to “Start–>Programs–>Administrative Tools–>Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager” or by going to “Start–>Run–>Typing inetmgr and hitting enter”.

As a company, you need to think of your online marketing efforts (aka emarketing) as “expanding the reach of your web presence” beyond your website. In order to do this, you, as a business owner, marketing person, or whatever your title is, need to see the entire Internet “as your web site” and need to start crafting and forming your message wherever you are mentioned online.There are many avenues that you can use on the Web to “craft” that message and help extend the reach beyond your web site. Below is just a sample of ideas that you can use to help bring in more traffic to your site, but think of this is as just the “tip of the iceberg”. I’m sure there are plenty of ideas / sites I neglected to mention here due to time, space and/or not knowing about it.

Google is your best friend. Research, research, research and read lots!

Good luck on your eMarketing endeavors.

BLOGS:
Blogs are extremely hot and are great for building trust with your prospects and customers. There are many companies that have blogs that talk about their products, tips and tricks, etc. You can start an “expert blog”, that is, experts within your organization that would like to blog about your industry, be it commentary, news, tips and tricks, etc. All of this information would be indexed by search engines and make your company and website come up in the rankings. All the blogs could end up pointing to your company web sites.

I just upgraded (well, about 3 months ago) to IE 7 and I was just getting comfortable with it when I read a blog entry at http://internetexplorer8.net/ that Microsoft will release version 8 by the end of the year and will start doing upgrades to its browser every 12 to 18 months.

Microsoft announced at NAB 2007 that they will be releasing a competitor to Adobe Flash called Silverlight. From Microsoft’s website, here is what they say it offers:

1) Deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIA…hey the Allaire Brothers….makers of ColdFusion…now Macromedia…err…Adobe coined that term) for the Web.

2) Seamless, fast installation for users (2MB download)

3) Consistent experiences between Macintosh computers and Windows-based personal computers (Yeah right! Microsoft always says that…but has anyone ever tried IE on Mac compared to IE on Windows?)

4) Create richer, more compelling Web experiences (You mean like Adobe is doing today in Flash)?

5) Stunning vector-based graphics, media, text, animation and overlays (Wow! That’s a great new invention…I mean, not like Flash had it for over 6 years already!!!!)

Not too much information about it yet, however, Adobe announced in NAB that they will release an “offline” Flash video player (e.g. like Windows Media or Quicktime) that will allow you to watch Flash videos (.flv’s) offline, just like you do today with Windows Media and Quicktime players.

The video will support live streaming, progressive downloads and protected (read “DRM”) videos. It will also support full screen mode.

Wow! It’s amazing. I was given a new project. The VP of Operations came up to me and told me he wants to webcast a presentation live to over 1000 of our Trade Partners where I work. I’m said “Sure. We can do that.” Then I hung up the phone and started my research.

Boy, I had no clue what I got myself into. It’s a pretty complicated thing to do (with less then 5 weeks to do it in with NAB in the middle of it!).

Anyhow. I started my research on Google, of course! I love Google…Anyhow…Keep your focus Marcelo. So I started with Akamai to see what they have to offer.

They in turn put me in charge with 2 of their partner companies. Multicast and OnStream Media. I spoke with Multicast and the guy there (Chuck I think was his name) really helped me get educated on this process. Here is a short breakdown of what it takes to webcast:

Adobe wants to take over desktop application development, not just web development. Their forey into this arena is called Apollo. What is Apollo? Apollo is a runtime you have to install on your computer that is cross platform.

Think of Apollo just like .Net, except it runs on multiple platforms (Mac, Windows and Linux) and instead of you using VB.Net or C# to write applications, you would use what you already know and love (that is if you are a web developer), web technologies such as Flash, AJAX, HTML, Javascript, Flex, etc.

What’s very cool about this is that you can code applications for the web that can go offline and be used offline in a desktop setting across platforms.