Community MX is celebrating its 5 year anniversary this week. They said it would never last, but we have been putting out 2 pieces of fresh content every day for 5 years, for a total of 2557 articles, tutorials, extensions, Jumpstarts, and more. Congratulations to the partners at CMX for 5 good years.

I've finally decided to sell my old 100 watt Marshall head and 412 cabinet. It has been sitting around my house now for almost 10 years without any use, so it doesn't make sense to keep it any more. On top of that, the townhouse I live in is small and too close to neighbors to play guitar at any decent volume. The eBay link is here.. It can't hurt to try to drive some traffic to it. :-) It got a lot of good use back in the 80's and 90's, but it's time to find a new owner. If I ever get in a situation where I need volume, I'll have to pick up another one on eBay, I guess. . . .

There seems to be a new rash of scamming/phishing attempts, and eBay is partly to blame. It seems eBay itself has a redirection service in place on one of their pages. Scammers are using links that point to the real eBay site, but redirect to the scammer site. This is especially insidious, as the link you see and the link you hover over are actual eBay addresses, and eBay is actually forwarding you to the scammer site. Below is a the link used in one I received:

http://cgi6.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?RedirectEnter&partner=ShowItem&loc=http%3A%2F%2Fus.ebayobjects.com%2F2c%3B9739597%3B9123118%3Bz%3Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fcontactbay-ws-bayisapi.xm.com%2F

It's amazing that with all the phishing attempts out there, eBay is actually falling down on the job by allowing their own site to redirect unsuspecting users to the phishing web site.

Community MX is having an open house where visitors are able to view over 2400 articles and tutorials. Community MX is a subscription service, so this is a good opportunity to see what is available. The open house is from 12/24/2007 through 1/1/2008. For a full list of what I've written for Community MX, see this page: http://www.communitymx.com/author.cfm?cid=1003

Community MX is always looking for new writers to join as full-time partners, or to simply supply tutorials on a one-off basis. CMX pays it's authors, so if anyone is interested in writing one or more tutorials or extensions, contact me via my contact form and I'll put you in touch with the right people. I've been with CMX since the beginning in 2003, and it is a great place to get exposure, help out your fellow developers, and get your content out there.

CMX is focused on Adobe products, but also all web technologies -- html, asp, php, coldfusion, sql, css, javascript, and any other technology related to web development.

I created a new plugin for Cartweaver for building a digital download store that was released yesterday. The Cartweaver Downloadable Products Plug-In was created for Cartweaver 3 for both PHP and ColdFusion. Here is the announcement from Lawrence at cartweaver.com:

The Cartweaver development team is pleased to announce the release of the Downloadable Products Plug-in for Cartweaver 3 CF

Now you can deliver your digital products immediately! This Cartweaver plug in allows your customers to download documents, PDFs, music, photos, artwork, software, and other digital products right away!

- Easy to integrate with your Cartweaver 3 CF store
- Upload your digital products via the store admin
- Customers can log in and download immediately after purchase
- Customers can re-download as few or as many times as you allow
- Customers can update contact information
- View entire order history
- Print out previous history

Available now! Go to the Products - Plug-Ins page and log in for availability and pricing.

I'm in the middle of a server move for this site and a few others. I'm moving to a dedicated server on IIS 6 and ColdFusion 8 using SQL 2005. If anyone notices any problems, let me know at tommuck AT hotmail DOT com. Everything seems fine from here, but a few email problems still need to be worked out. The dark grey background is the new server...ugly green, old server.

I dug up an old PHP class that I wrote a few years back and thought I would post it for anyone who needs CSV functionality on their site. It will work with any PHP recordset, including Cartweaver recordsets, which use my custom DB abstraction class (only for MySQL, though). The CSVFile class is simple, and can be downloaded here.

The class is typically used on a page by itself, or on any page within conditional statements. You link to the page and the file download begins. The class constructor has 3 arguments:

$csvfile = new CSVFile(recordsetName, [quotes true or false], [filename]);

The first is the MySQL recordset. The second optional argument is true or false to put quotes around the fields. The third optional argument is the filename, which defaults to Download.csv by default.

To use it, follow these instructions:

1. If this is a Cartweaver recordset, make sure you include the application.php file at the top of the page:

require_once("application.php");

2. Include the class file:

require_once("yourclassdirectory/CSVFile.php");

3. Create your recordset. Below is a typical Dreamweaver recordset, using the Northwind database that you can download here for MySQL if you don't have it:

mysql_select_db($database_connNorthwind, $connNorthwind);
$query_rs = "SELECT p.ProductID, p.ProductName, p.UnitPrice FROM products p ORDER BY p.ProductID";
$rs = mysql_query($query_limit_rs, $connNorthwind) or die(mysql_error());

For Cartweaver, a typical recordset might look like this:

$query_rs = "SELECT * FROM tbl_orders ORDER BY order_Date";
$rs = $cartweaver->db->executeQuery($query_rs, "rs");

4. Add a line to invoke the CSVFile class:

$csvfile = new CSVFile($rs, true);

5. Link to the file.

Now, when the page is browsed, the file download will begin immediately.

I've been writing more articles for Community MX lately, but have been lax about linking to them. The most recent was on creating text masks for ColdFusion, utilizing a simple technique of replacement fields for things like email texts, letters, or invoices. Last week I had an article showing a simple error handler that I use in PHP applications. Prompted by a question on the Adobe forums, I wrote one on creating a master/detail pageset on one page using Dreamweaver and my own Ajax code. Before that, there was a short series on doing very simple database searches:

• Creating a Simple Database Web Search - Part 2: ColdFusion
• Creating a Simple Database Web Search - Part 2: PHP
• Create a Simple Database Web Search - Part 1

This was in response to users who like my Dynamic Search extension, but don't need the keyword functionality. The first part shows how to do a simple search using "filters" in Dreamweaver. The second part (separated for PHP and ColdFusion) shows how to hand-code a few modifications to allow for multiple parameters.

There were also 3 articles on building Horizontal Loopers manually using Dreamweaver tools -- only using CSS instead of tables. Those articles are broken down for ASP, PHP, and ColdFusion as well. The ASP article came out a few weeks ago, at the request of one of my customers:

• Creating a Table-less Horizontal Looper in ColdFusion
• Creating a Table-less Horizontal Looper in PHP
• Creating a Table-less Horizontal Looper in ASP

As always, articles at Community MX are free for members, and a very small fee for non-members. I'm always looking for ideas for new articles, so if there is something you want to see use the contact form to make suggestions. Thanks!

I'm late to the party, but not too late to pile on: Sys-con has announced the end of ColdFusion Developer's Journal. Others blogging on the subject:

• Official Sys-Con Announcement
• Ben Forta's blog
• Brian Rinaldi's Blog
• Michael Dinowitz's Blog of Fusion
• Sean Corfield
• Ray Camden
• TJ Downes
• Simon Horwith
• Matt Woodward - Post 1
• Matt Woodward - Post 2
• Oliver Merk
• Brian Meloche

The funniest part of this is the almost universal distaste for Sys-con. Their web site has always been horrible, and they consistently "borrow" content from other places to make up for their own lack of content. They have always treated authors badly, saying that authors are a dime-a-dozen and there is no need to pay them. The web site is the most hideous creation on the Internet. Remember that book "Web Pages that Suck"? The Sys-con site could have filled the entire book. No need to look elsewhere. Brian Meloche said it best: "Sys-con.com looks like it was developed by a crystal meth addict." I would add that the addict was probably drunk at the time.

I've been to one of their conferences (AJAX World), and while well-run, it was a complete commercial. There were 10 sessions, and only one of them had any type of technical content. I got in for free, but feel ripped off for having taken the time to attend.

I think the decision was probably made a long time ago. The URL cfdj.com has already fallen to a link whore...that doesn't happen overnight. If that is true, it's a shame that they didn't feel obligated to tell the editorial staff (see Simon's post).

This is funny too...I took a screenshot in case it gets removed, but on many of the sys-con home pages, two of their "borrowed" blogs are blasting sys-con:

That's poetic justice.

There are still plenty of other places to get CF content. Community MX is still alive and well and delivering some good quality CF content in addition to content relating to all of Adobe's products and other web technologies.