Valentine Erb's Blog

I really love working with ColdFusion and have been using it most every day since 2000. However, like anything as complicated as an enterprise-level web application framework, it is not without its quirks. We encountered a couple issues with the ColdFusion Administrator recently that I thought were worth mentioning in hopes we’d save other CF-er’s some time.

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I graduated from the University of Rhode Island in 1999 with my B.S. in Business Administration. I’m still a young guy and that doesn’t sound like so long ago, but consider the following. Windows 98 was the newest OS for PC’s and Netscape was the dominant browser. Things we take for granted today like WiFi and iPods were years away and it was entirely normal not to have a cell phone. Google.com had just been registered the previous semester and Napster debuted that summer. There was no YouTube or Wikipedia or “blogging” for that matter (it was still called a weblog, but not a lot of people knew that then either). The web was no more than 10% of its current size, so becoming a developer didn’t exactly jump out at me as a career choice. Sure, I had been using computers most of my life and I was even installing corporate networks during summer “vacation”, but while I had a serious premonition that soon I’d be doing a lot with the web, it wasn’t at all clear to me how exactly that would come about; I was on the management track, not computer science.

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When I first got into web development, search engine optimization (SEO) seemed to be some sort of dark art. We worked for select clients with mysterious optimization specialists they had somehow hooked up with who performed what they’d have you believe was magic for websites. On the chance occasion that it was apparent how they were achieving their goals, it was often by methods one might consider sneaky. Some of the time it was definitely sneaky and not just at the expense of search engines and end users, but the website owners themselves. I had a really lousy experience with a group who was offering this type of “help” — I was only speaking with them because my client had asked me to and the sales guy was literally yelling at me because I wasn’t buying into his scheme. Whether it was for the intrigue of it all, the obvious business implications or that I became sure I didn’t want to work with these jokers this anymore, I decided to become an expert myself.

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