I think I overloaded myself with sessions again this year. Sunday, I have the “Building High-Performance ColdFusion Applications” class all day which will hopefully give me some insight on making my own applications more robust. Monday is sprinkled with AIR, Flex and more ColdFusion, Tuesday is a lot of AIR sessions and Wednesday is more advanced ColdFusion.

For fun our little group is hitting Alcatraz Monday for the twilight cruise. It sounds like it’s going to be a great time, and I plan on taking a bunch of photos. Hopefully, I hit it big again during the big event on Tuesday. Last year, I took home a copy of the CS3 Master Collection for winning best hand at a Texas Hold ‘em game.

I’ll be looking for the ColdFusion people and say I if I can. Always nice to match the faces with the names.

Hope to see you there.

My Current Setup

Right now, I have “Ganymede” the current version of Eclipse. Along with that I installed a few plugins that are a vital part of making the application so powerful:

CFEclipse

CFEclipse is the essential plugin for ColdFusion developers. There so many features that make this plugin great. Some of the more powerful features:

Code Folding - Which manually or automatically collapses code from view.

Bracket Highlighting - Which changes the pairs brackets, parens, and squiggles different colors when your are next to one.

Integrated Browser - Run your pages from within Eclipse

Scribble Pad - This has kept my project code from being littered with test.cfm type of pages. It is a defined page within is accessed by a toolbar button which allows you to run your code inside of Eclipse before you add it to your project. It works nice for small chunks of code.

Dynamic Snippets - add variables to your snippets before they are inserted onto the page.

TODO task list - Simply add the text “TODO:” to your ColdFusion comments and they are all reference in a “Tasks”. Good for going back to finished incomplete code or assigning tasks to other team members.

SnipEX - This is a wonderful feature to create and share snippets. You can host your own SnipEx snippets to share with your team or get them from public servers. Some notable SnipEX server URLs are the following:

http://cfsnippets.org/model/snippets/snipEx/snipEx.cfc

http://www.cflib.org/snipex/snipex.cfc

ColdFusion 8 Extensions for Eclipse

This plugin is release by Adobe and is a CFC and AS code generation from you database schemas. It also give you a “Components Explorer” view gives you a look at the available components.

Subclipse

This is plugin or Eclipse that plays nice with the CFEclipse perspective to give you the functionality to get at and manage your SVN code repository. Subclipse works well for team development and you don’t need to use Tortoise or go to a command line for commits, updates and syncronization.

Aptana

Aptana is good for syntax highlighting of CSS files and it’s boasts itself as an IDE for creating Adobe AIR applications. It also gives you an environment for developing in PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Python.

This are the plugins I have been using for the last few weeks that has made it a joy to code in Eclipse. I’m curious to know what CF developers are using for their plugins. Let me know, I’m still finding pieces in the toolset to make me code more efficiently.

Quick Overview

Dropbox is a fast and easy way to share and store files remotely with the ability to access the files using PC, Mac, or Linux operating systems. The files are versioned so you can actually restore previous versions of a file and even restore deleted files. The basic account comes with 2GB of storage and premium accounts are $9.99 a month, or $99.99 a year.

Windows Experience

Once you install the application is installed, Dropbox sits in your notification area in the lower left of the desktop. Right click on the icon and you can see your remaining storage space as well as other options. When you click on “Open My Dropbox”, Explorer opens up a file location inside of your My Documents folder called “My Dropbox”.

Drop and drop files to the location and they sync to Dropbox’s servers automatically. It’s like SVN without having to manually commit and update. It only takes a few moments for others to see the items you just placed in shared folders. Also, you can choose to see any updates to your shared folders so you know when new items are added.

Mac Experience

Installing Dropbox on the Mac was just as easy. I downloaded the installed, dragged the program to the Application folder, signed into my account and I had Dropbox running on my G4 Mac. I didn’t have to have an Intel Mac to run the software (yeay!). The program adds Dropbox to two locations on the Mac. The first is in the area of Finder next to the Documents and Pictures. The second is in the top right of the page with and icon to see the same options as on the PC.

First Impressions

Right now, I carry around a few thumb drives in work bags to move around large files between work and home. Now, I can simply drag and drop those files to a folder on either my Mac or PC. I’d say that’s pretty convenient. Sharing files with friends is great too, already my friends and I have traded some large image files which wouldn’t send well in email. I’m pretty excited on how easy the service is and will be using it in the foreseeable future.

Getting quality inbound links is an important part for getting targeted traffic and to encourage search engine spiders. The Link Building Wiki covers almost every conceivable aspect of link building. You can educate yourself with link building references on popular webmaster and SEO forums such as SE Roundtable, Cr8asite, Webmaster World, and Abacus to name a few.

The Link Building/SEO Blogs and Posts section has required reading from the leaders in the industry. The XML is on the page and is ready to be added into your feed aggregator for each blog. There are even blogs that dabble in the “grey hat” and “black hat” realms of link building which often involve shady or unorthodox methods. Those blogs are interesting to read because the authors are very intelligent and know their stuff when it comes to getting links.

If you are link building yourself then you need an arsenal of tools to help you analysis your competitors and look for linking opportunities. Listed are an extensive list of tools which include entire software packages, online tools, and Firefox add-ons. I use a good handful of the tools listed when I am in the link building phase of a project.

Another option is to look into link building services if would like a quality, professional team to do the work for you. A good team knows where to find the great links that your site needs to get it in front of the right people and high in the SERPs.

The attack would append a <script> tag pointing to a .js file usually in China at the end of every text field in all the tables in the database. We have over 300 tables and the script added about 7gb of data to the database.

We have been using the <cfqueryparam> tag for the fields when creating queries, but thought the injection was still slipping through. The logs from our host did not give us an exact point of entry. I decided that we would needed a different method to stop the injection code from being executed.

For the URL variables I created a block code that sits in the onRequestStart function in the Application.cfc. This checks for the existence of a URL variable and if it finds one, then loops through the variable trying to match “4445434C415245″ which is the hex equivalent of “DECLARE”, which was part of all the injection scripts that were attempted. If the pattern was matched it would send an email and abort the page. The script was catching a lot of attempts, so after a few hours we commented off the email response.

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<cfif NOT StructISEmpty(URL)> 
	<cfloop list="#StructKeyList(URL)#" index="i">
		<cfif URL[i] CONTAINS '4445434C415245'>
	     	  	<cfmail to="webmaster@site.org"
            			   from="info@site.org"
                   		   subject="SQL Injection Attempt"
                   		   type="html">
            			   <cfdump var="#URL#">
           			   <cfdump var="#CGI#">
            	     </cfmail>
                     &lt;cfabort&gt;
          </cfif>
    </cfloop>
</cfif>

The second method we are using obscufates harmful string patterns in text submitted on forms. The script simply looks for four different patterns that were part of the injection attempts and replaces the character with ASCII codes. We don’t have any WYSIWYG editors on the public side of the site, so we were not worried about breaking HTML formatted form content.

The script loops through all of the form fields based on the existence of the generated field list when a form is submitted. Of course, more conditions can be added as needed. This also goes in the onRequestStart function in the Application.cfc.

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<cfloop list="#FORM.FieldNames#" index="i">
    <cfscript >
        FORM[i] = replace(FORM[i],'<','&lt;','ALL');
        FORM[i] = replace(FORM[i],'>','&gt;','ALL');
        FORM[i] = replace(FORM[i],'"','&quot;','ALL');
        FORM[i] = replace(FORM[i],'''',' ','ALL');
    </cfscript >  
</cfloop>

Aside from the cfqueryparams and these two methods, we also changed the constraints in SQL to not allow certain text patterns as well as limit permissions to the tables.

Have you been hit by these type of SQL injection attacks? If so, what have you been doing to prevent them? I would like to further protect the tables seeing these to methods aren’t bulletproof.

The first page looks very nice. The blue is a bit softer than the original giving the page a fresher, dare I say, Web 2.0 look. The tags associated to the listings are arranged below the number of saves to the item and when you mouseover the word “Tags” is displayed on the right column. Same goes for when you mouseover the save count, it displays “people” on the right. I would assume this would benefit people who are new to social bookmarking and are curious as to what those elements are.

A new stat on the home page appears for the number of saves in the last minute. It seems to hover around 200 saves on average. The quick math gives Delicious a count of 288,000 saves per day.

According to the Popular Addons page, it seems that they took removed the “recent saves” count next to each listing. As a person who dabbles in social media optimization, I liked seeing the count, but it was not a critical feature.

Delicious has added a support forum. Delicious team members are active in the forum answering user’s questions and responding to the wide range of opinions on the new site.

A great new feature is when you save an item, a bit of AJAX opens the form around the item, and you can save the item without reloading the page.

I really enjoy the “top 10″ stat on the right of any item when you click on the number of saves on my post 11 Powerful Firefox 3 Add-ons That Can Replace Standalone Applications, you can see the number of times a particular tag was associated to the post.

Blue is the new red. The number of times an item is saved the background of the count is darker blue in relation to the number of saves. Before, it was red and was sometime difficult to read the number when the post had a massive amount of saves.

Also, if any has the original URL saved in their bookmarks of del.icio.us, you will now see that it redirects to www.delicious.com.

All and all, I like the new design and functionality. The team did a good job making it look clean while maintaining the minimalist look Delicious is known for. I especially enjoy the “top 10″ stats.

API Version 3 Improvements

The main feature of the recent version of the API is combining requests. Previously, data types were one per call, now that can be unlimited. This speeds up applications by not pummeling the Clicky servers for every bit of information. Now, more complete calls can be made less frequently. Also added is the “daily” data range, this allows people to more easily get the data types based on a date instead of an lump sum. The API comes in three flavors depending on you needs. Choose between JSON, XML, and PHP.

Browser and OS versioning

Recently, they added enhanced statistics regarding the visitor’s browser and operating system. Previously, only an aggregate of both browser and OS versions were listed. Now, each brower is broken down into their respective versions. As expected, a majority of my traffic going to my popular post on Firefox 3 extensions are, in fact, Firefox 3 users. For operating systems, at least 60% of visitors are XP users, followed by 10% Vista, 10% Mac OS X, and then the rest.

New Charting for Statistics

Besides the blue bar charts, Clicky has also incorporated the very appealing Flash charts to represent data. The charts also reveal more information when you mouseover the data. For instance, I hover over the FeedBurner chart and the date and actual subscriber count displays depending on the data point. You can toggle between summaries or individual charts.

Clicky continues to improve their product and I am always glad to see when the announce a new feature and usually when they do it was from user requests. It goes to show that they still care about the users and their product.

This was my first attempt to combine regular expressions with cfhttp. It’s pretty handy once you get the hang to it, and it can be a very powerful combination. Here’s the script I use to scrape the total number of pages indexed in Google.

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<!---  We only need the domain name without the http://www. --->
<cfset siteurl = "jasonbartholme.com">
 
<!---  Regular expression which matches the pattern to determine count--->
<cfset googleregex = '<font size=-1>Results [\s\S]*? of about <b>([\s\S]*?)</b&gt; for'>
 
<!--- useragent is required because the page will not "get" properly otherwise --->
<cfhttp url="http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A#siteurl#"
		method="get"
		resolveurl="false"
		useragent="#cgi.http_user_agent#">
</cfhttp>
 
<!---  Trims the whitespace in the content, and check for our regex pattern --->
<cfset sdoc = trim(cfhttp.filecontent)>
<cfset result = refindnocase(googleregex,sdoc,1,"true")>
 
<!---  cftry/cfcatch to see if refindnocase() returned a result --->
&lt;cftry&gt;
	<cfset resultcount = replace(mid(sdoc,result.pos[2],result.len[2]),',','','ALL')>
<cfcatch type="any">
	<cfset resultcount = 0&gt;
</cfcatch>
</cftry>
 
<!---  display our result --->
Pages indexed: <cfoutput>#resultcount#</cfoutput>

I must give credit to the post “How to Scrape Pages With ColdFusion“. It gave me the basics of what I needed to get me up and running.

Do you scrape data with ColdFusion? If so, do you use a similar method and do you use anything to help you with the regular expression syntax? Let me know, it would make for a good follow-up post.

Social Traffic

The post racked up some impressive numbers for traffic for three of the most popular social media sites. Overall, Digg sent me 61,722 uniques, Reddit was next with 30,231 then del.icio.us brang up the rear with 2,210. Two other sites that sent a significant amount of visitors were StumbleUpon with 5,519 and PopURLs at 2,078. The remained miscellaneous traffic accounts for the over 125,000 unique visitors to the post in four days.

In regards to Digg, I recieved 2470 diggs to the post, which in itself, generated more traffic because it was listed in the “popular in last 24 hours” and “popular this week” sections of the Tech News category.

The post has 977 saves on Del.icio.us at the moment. That is the most I have ever received in one post. I am still receiving traffic on the “popular” pages of related tags.

Hosting

This was my first time to the front page of the social sites while being hosted on Media Temple’s Grid Server hosting. I was honestly impressed with the servers staying up almost 100% of time during the flood of traffic. The site did go down for about fifteen minutes. At that time, the MySQL tables were served from a “BurstContainer”, which allows the blog to scale during the surge. It seemed to work fine. Aside from the fifteen minutes I was able to access any part of the blog with a long wait time.

Analytics

I have abandoned Google Analytics over a year ago and have been exclusively using Clicky web analytics. The real-time statistics essential for monitoring traffic and visitor interaction. For as much traffic as the blog was receiving, I didn’t know if there would be a break in reporting for the analytics. Turns out there was not. I have full statistics and bunch of reports to dissect.

Backlinks

According to Yahoo’s Site Explorer, the post has 2,272 “inlinks” at the time of this publish. I am still sifting through those numbers to clear of the redundant and invalid entries, so I don’t have a solid number as of yet.

Disappointments

Even though, I “front paged” the big three social media sites, I was expecting a few others as well. The post was submitted to Fark.com, but it wasn’t good enough to be green lit even though 65 premium members clicked on the post. I have had posts go green with less than 20 visits. Propeller did not do that well at all. I got 10 total visitors from them. Lastly, Mixx.com sent me 3 only visitors.

Pleasant Surprises

I didn’t know that Reddit posts appeared on Wired.com’s home page. People were more impressed by that because they didn’t know about Digg, del.icio.us, etc.

The post seemed to get international attention also. It was linked to on German, Spanish, Polish, Israeli, and Croatian languages.

Two developers of the mentioned add-ons made comments. It was good opportunity to thank them for the great work they have done.

Firefox add-on developers have created some impressive applications that can replace larger, bloated programs. These add-ons can help if you have a small amount of precious hard drive space or you are on a tight budget and don’t have cash to fork out for applications. All, of which, can be accessed right from your Firefox browser window.

	ChatZilla Easy to use IRC client that runs outside of the browser. I prefer this application over mIRC and Trillian. developer home install add-on
	Codetch Get the feel of the Dreamweaver IDE in a Firefox extension. Edit your documents right next to your web pages as you surf. I still use the full edition of Dreamweaver, but this is a great way for clients to change their own content without dropping the bucks for a full version of Dreamweaver. developer home install add-on
	FireFTP I have been using this as my FTP client of choice. It’s a FTP client in a browser window. This a great for moving a files to and from servers without firing up any applications. I’ve been running it for over a year and have not had any problems. developer home install add-on
	Graphing Calculator Toolbar Graphing Calculator toolbar. Enter up to 5 equations into this toolbar, then view the graphs using Firefox native SVG support. The toolbar allows rescaling the x and y coordinates and redefining the domain of x. Can be used as an alternative to your TI-85. developer home install add-on
	The Pencil Project I just found this GUI prototyping and diagramming add-on and totally love it. I have begun to do mock-ups for a large project I am working on from inside of Firefox. It saves me loads of time and I don’t have to fire up Fireworks or Illustrator. It has tons of features I still haven’t played with yet. developer home install add-on
	PicLens Full-Screen, 3D — PicLens transforms your browser into a visually stunning experience for finding and viewing online photos and videos. Our “3D Wall” lets you effortlessly search and zoom your way around thousands of images, videos, news feeds, sports feeds, and more. An absolutely stunning GUI experience. developer home install add-on
	Regular Expressions Tester Regular Expressions Tester offers developers functions for testing their regular expressions. The Tool includes options like case sensitive, global and multiline search, color highlighting for found expressions, a replacement function incl. backreferences, auto-closing of brackets, testing while writing and saving and managing of expressions. A free alternative to RegEx Buddy. developer home install add-on (correct link)
	Sage Nice and compact RSS / XML feed reader which resides in your sidebar. I was one of the first add-ons I installed when I first got Firefox. Can be a replacement to FeedDemon. developer home install add-on
	Simple Mail An email client for Firefox that handles POP3, IMAP, and SMTP. Not as powerful and all-encompassing as Outlook, but very impressive. Very nice to have a lightweight client in a broswer tab. developer home install add-on
	ScribeFire Blog Editor Microsoft Word is suppose to be able to post to Wordpress blogs, but I have never have it work to my liking. However, there is ScribeFire. It is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. developer home install add-on
	SQLite Manager I’ve been working with Adobe AIR lately and have needed to do data management in SQLite. This add-on gives me all the necessary tools and wizards to view and alter my SQL databases whether they are local or remote. developer home install add-on

Know of any Firefox add-ons that can replace larger applications? Let me know in the comments.