Diagram of the semantic web
Semaview has a great illustration that gives an overview of The Semantic Web. Hopefully this will make sense of some of the things I've been raving about lately and why there is a need to get better metadata into our pages today.

Semantic Searches
I've been taking time on the weekend to check on the state of the "semantic web". The difficulty in getting content authors to agree upon and then use a common taxonomy of terms is very real. But I'm encouraged to see that there is good progress is getting machines to make semantic relationships for us.

CFIMPORT & Custom Tags
I noticed recently in a mailing list response to the announcement of Daemon's open source CMS for ColdFusion MX, FarCry: http://farcry.daemon.com.au, that there may be some confusion over the use of the CFIMPORT tag. The post in question observed that if the CFIMPORT tag was being used it must be to import JSPs, a valid reason for CFIMPORT, what the poster didn't realize was that CFIMPORT also allows a developer to import all custom tags from a specified directory as a library with a single call.

The Joy of Not-So Rich Text Editors
Having worked on content management systems on and off for years, you find yourself always looking for a decent rich text editor. It's something that still gets gasps from clients -- regardless of how useless it is in practice.

The Last March of the ENTs
Have been exchanging ideas on blog categorisation with a number of people, and got me hunting again for what other folk are up to out there on the internet to combat the noise-to-signal ratio. Of course my interests lie in adding value to the Goog content I aggregate.

Macromedia Certification
In true Daemon maniac fashion I did the Flash MX Developer & ColdFusion MX Developer (Advanced) certifications back to back today. I had to upgrade my Macromedia Developer certifications so that I can maintain my status as a Certified Macromedia Instructor and to also be eligible to teach some new classes. Both exams do a fair job of testing your knowledge and I would encourage anyone who's considering to go ahead and do it!!

Blog Aggregators Classification Pipe Dream
Given the recent traffic in off topic posts from various blogs concerning the "Iraqi Conflict" we have received lots of complaints about the aggregated content. The overwhelming majority of people want to review MX technology related posts on the Goog and are happy to get their political content at the time of their choosing. This made me redouble my efforts to try and categorise inbound feeds at the level of the blog item, and give users that option.

Ideas for Documenting Webservices
Finally got round to documenting the Fullasagoog webservice -- luck I stumbled across a neat little set of methods for automating the process.

Calling CFCs using the TemplateProxy
It's possible to create a CFC instance using either a relative or absolute file path using the TemplateProxy object in CFMX.

CFCHART needs XFree86 to run
The CFCHART graphing engine in CFMX requires server side graphics and font libraries due to it's rendering behaviour. Lean installs of Linux will need XFree86 and it's libraries.

PodPop - Ezy Remoting?
"A development framework for simple construction of Rich Internet Applications" Sounds interesting? PodPop is components and add-ins for Flash and at a quick first glance looks interesting. If anything you should check out the site for the super-smooth demos...

FarCry Opensource: CFMX Based Content Management
FarCry is an open source CMS for CFMX, originally developed by Daemon. It's fully functional, and runs in a variety of Enterprise environments today. Released under the Common Public License 1.0 -- it's free to all.

PHPObject: Opensource Flash Remoting Alternative
Sunny Hong has recently released PHPObject, an alternative to Flash Remoting for PHP developers. Sunny says, "With PHPObject, you can call a method of a PHP class/library on your web server as if the class/library was defined in Flash itself. It takes care of your client-server connections, providing a convenient way to connect rich media clients with data and business logic residing on your server."

Speaking at SMUG
I'll be speaking at the Sydney Macromedia User Group (SMUG) on Tuesday 15 April, presenting the basics of ActionScript. This is the first of 5 meetings for the year and if you're in Sydney you should come along and say 'gidday'. The Sydney CFUG is also meeting on the same night, pity that the two couldn't come together.

Daemon Bazaar: Pet Market Poaching??
What started out as friendly banter with local Macromedians ended up as a funky software shop with a familiar pedigree :) The Daemon Bazaar is a repurposed Pet Market application that makes for a flashy MX Market.

Mozilla:Web development Juggernaut
Juggernauts can move slowly -- the power is in the momentum. Great article on "Using Mozilla in testing and debugging web sites".

Fullasagoog: the epicentre of Macromedia blogdom
A snapshot of Fullasagoog's relationships with the rest of the web -- this fascinating insight into the world of Macromedia blogging was taken on 03-March-2003 using the GoogleBrowser tool.

Getting the CFMX CronTab
ColdFusionMX runs it's own scheduling service -- just like a mini crontab. Although the schedule service is managed through the CF Administrator, you can still use the CFSCHEDULE tag to UPDATE, DELETE & RUN schedules. But it seems a bit of an oversight that you can't actually programatically list the currently active scheduled tasks using CFSCHEDULE. Here's a little snippet of code to list SCHEDULED tasks outside of the Administrator.

OpenOffice 1.1beta -- Flash Exporter
OpenOffice.org has released the beta for its next upcoming version. Something that stands out from a host of features is the ability to export presentation files -- from Impress -- direct to Flash.

Stuck for Something Nice to Say?
Continuing on the topic of blog spamming I've decided to put together a collection of the sorts of comments that we get from spammers on our blog, just in case you're ever short of imagination when you're trying to contribute a "nice" comment to someone else's posting.