twtpoll Plugin for Mango Blog

read more...

The Launching of Hawkeye Tweets

There is no mistaking the fact that I am a HUGE Iowa Hawkeye Nerd. If you hadn't noticed, two of the last three sites launched by Brice Cheddarn Development have been Hawkeye related. Hawkapalooza was a pro-bono website put together to help a student organization at the University of Iowa. NILE was put together for a client to help him promote his novel.

Hawkeye Tweets is personal project to support my favorite team. It was inspired by the work of colleagues, who put together Suns Tweets and Cards Tweets as a way to use Twitter in support of their teams. I took the same concept and applied it to the Iowa Hawkeyes.

With the help of justSignal, the same technology used on Suns Tweets and Cards Tweets, I was able to put this site together in one massive all night, Monster-fueled hacking session. Hawkeye Tweets uses the justSignal Twitter Widget to pull in the streaming tweets and ColdFusion to power the backend and other ancillary components. ColdFusion will be used more heavily as the site expands.

read more...

ColdFusion is the Sparta of Programming Languages

Now I know what the Spartan Warriors in the movie 300 felt like fighting a seemingly unwinnable battle. This feeling comes after responding to yet another forum question on LinkedIn this morning where 10 PHP and Ruby developers decided to pile on and declare ColdFusion dead. And they did so to such an innocent and harmless question that it begs to wonder: what the hell is wrong with people?

I wasn't going to write another post on this. When I last wrote a post on this topic, a few ColdFusion people sent in or posted comments about not paying this type of nonsense any mind. But it is getting harder and harder to ignore the mindless banality. This one being particularly hard, as one of the commenters to this LinkedIn question was a person that was present at my Developer Ignite speech, in which I came to the defense of ColdFusion and declared my ColdFusiontology crusade. (Don't worry, I sent my colleague an email calling him my new arch nemsis for his answer)

This one was also hard due to the question being asked. The question came from a dad asking if it is ok to encourage his son, as his son wants to start learning ColdFusion.

read more...

New Mango Blog Theme: Company Blue

Yes, we coded another Mango Blog theme.  This is the 2nd of what will soon be many themes to be made from the almost forgotten folder of designs we stumbled upon.  This design is called Company Blue and is available for anyone to download and use/change freely under the Creative Commons.

The Company Blue theme has a little bit more style to it than the last theme.  This validated XHTML theme is very professional looking site and is great for any small business.  It is fairly search engine optimized and easy to work on.  It has space for a big promo image on the front page.  It also has a site search tied into every page, making it easier for people to find things on your Mango site.

read more...

New Mango Blog Theme: Business Mango

In an attempt to get an inventory organized, we stumbled across a design that was never utilized for a project. The instant thought was that this design would be perfect to use for a first-attempt at a from-scratch Mango Blog theme. While we have worked with Mango on several sites, we mostly adapted existing designs/templates to the look we needed. This rediscovered design was a good idea for our first, very own, Mango Blog theme.

We came across the open source ColdFusion blog application Mango Blog over a year ago and fell in love with it instantly. The potential is huge and the ideas are near limitless. It is very much the "WordPress of ColdFusion", with one important difference: Mango is alot easier to skin!

To promote the continued use of Mango Blog, the nerds at Brice Cheddarn have decided to embark on a Mango Crusade to spread the word. Call us the Tom Cruise of Mangotology.

As a part of that, we will begin to code a series of plugins and themes released under the Creative Commons so that anyone can download and use freely, or change as they see fit.

The Business Mango Theme is the first of many free theme ideas we have in mind. This theme is very simple and rather plain but, it is good for throwing a site up in a hurry and is very professional looking, making it a good choice for any number of business oriented websites or personal blogs. It is validated XHTML and CSS as an added bonus. As time allows, updates and enhancements will be made.

read more...