With my blog still running on Mura 5.5, I figured it was about time that I upgraded to 5.6. I logged into the admin and ran the update, only to find that Hostek caps the execution time on scripts. This is usually a good thing, but in this case my upgrade got cut off midway through. I was no longer able to access the admin and reloading Mura via the URL didn't help. I spoke to Hostek support, who increased the execution limit for the upgrade script, but I was still at a loss as to how I was going to run it! Anyway, if you find yourself in a similar situation, you can hit the upgrade script directly by accessing it at /admin/index.cfm?fuseaction=cSettings.list&action=updateCore (duh). Hopefully this will help some poor, lost soul with a broken Mura upgrade.

Over the past month or so, I have really been digging in to ColdFusion’s ORM. It’s a fantastic tool - no longer do I have to write a bunch of boilerplate queries for every object in my codebase, nor do I have to mess around with generating complicated SQL queries by hand. That being said, it has been a relatively steep learning curve for me and I’ve been asking loads of questions every step of the way. Through the answers to those questions, I’ve managed to put together a few quick tips.

I got a new laptop at work. Awesome, right? This thing is blazing fast and a huge upgrade. Unfortunately, I needed to set up my entire local development environment all over again. I managed it with some quick and dirty batch scripts, but I was still left with the tedious task of creating datasources for each of the 40ish MySQL databases that I had imported. Each datasource entry is identical except for the database name, so I figured there must be a better way of doing it than manually creating each entry. Sure enough, there is...

With the New Year upon us and resolutions already breaking left and right, I thought I'd post about my goal for 2012 - to learn.

Many of us would love to dump our legacy apps and procedural code and inline styles this year, but most of us don't have the luxury to do that. If we want to keep making money, we can't afford to do a wholesale rewrite of everything we've done wrong previously. So much for "Out with the old!"

But we shouldn't let that keep us from bringing in the new...

The majority of my day today was spent evaluating SendGrid and fiddling around with the API. For those of you unfamiliar with SendGrid, it's a hosted e-mail delivery service. At the very (very!) basic level, they provide a mailserver that you can use for your application. Of course, it's much more than that - the reason I was looking into it today is because we need a solid e-mail provider for e-mail newsletters for our clients. Currently, we are using an incredibly outdated version of Lyris List Manager and it's right about time that we replace it. Now, SendGrid doesn't provide any list management, that will have to be done in the application. What I'm about to show you is how to interface with SendGrid to send (potentially) copious amounts of e-mail very, very easily.