Brice Cheddarn Development

With Super Bowl XLVI (46) a week away, I'm still trying to determine which team I will root for.  Normally, I don't care enough about the teams to worry about who to root for.  As a fan of football, I usually just watch for the sake of watching.  This year, things are a bit different.

Niether the New York Giants nor the New England Patriots are what I would consider "my team."  However, both are fun teams to watch and both have an Iowa Hawkeye player on their squad (something that always makes an NFL game interesting to a die-hand Hawkeye fan).  The Giants have safety Tyler Sash and the Patriots have linebacker Jeff Tarpinian.  The Patriots also have tight end coach Brian Ferentz, who is the son of Iowa football's head coach Kirk Ferentz.

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While looking through some recent tweets in Tweet Deck, I noticed that Keith Olbermann mentioned that he would be on the Colbert Report television show soon.  He tweeted the announcement along with a link ColbertNation.com.  Since Colbert Nation was a site that I had never visited before, I thought I would check it out.  

As always with a new site, my hopes were that it would be a ColdFusion website (I'm not a self-labeled ColdFusion Nerd for nothing).  While the Colbert site itself wasn't a CF site, I did notice a link on the home page that contained .cfm.  So, like any good nerd on a mission, I clicked the link.

That link took me to the New York Philharmonic website.  It didn't take long to realize that the whole site was well-constructed with ColdFusion, and is actually pretty awesome.  It is chalked full of CF functionality, in addition to well done Flash animation.  

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May Fourth...the day Star Wars fan's around the world celebrate the greatest holiday of the year.  This day is considered an unofficial holiday by Star Wars fanatics as a way to honor and celebrate the entire culture and franchise that has developed over the years.   

The Star Wars saga is one of the most popular and celebrated science fiction franchises of all time.  The origin of this specific date is unclear, since the actual release of the original Star Wars movie came on May 25th, 1977.  It's been suggested that May 4th was selected because "May the Force be with you" is a famous quote spoken in the Star Wars films.  So, fans commonly say "May the fourth be with you" as a part of the celebration. 

ColdFusion's Jedi Master is definitely enjoying the holiday.

Being the nerd I am, it made sense to start my day off with seeing what Star Wars-related domains were available for acquisition.  Were there still any available Star Wars domain names worth registering or owning?  The quick answer was YES.

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In a quest to educate myself in as many areas of search engine optimization as possible, the term Digital Asset Optimization kept popping up.

The process of Digital Asset Optimization (DAO) isn’t exactly new, which means it isn't exactly the new form of search engine optimization.  DAO is the holistic approach to SEO.  It's a complete process of optimizing online content to make sure digital media is properly indexed.

As Gabriella Sannino at Level-343 adequately puts it, Digital Asset Optimization is really just "full-blown SEO with a fancy acronym."  But hey, what computer nerd doesn't like acronyms?

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Explaining to someone that I invest in domain names isn't always the easiest of conversations to carry on.  That's why a recent article about the domaining industry caught my attention. 

The article, titled "Why $10,000 For A Domain Name Is Still Cheap," was written by renouned entrepreneur and domain investor Alan Dunn.  In the post, he tries to explain the real importance of a domain name and why domains are more valuable than most assume.

Dunn compares the cost of traditional media like billboards, radio advertising and mobile advertising to the cost of acquiring a domain.  He points out that domains have other "intangible factors" like authority that traditional media can never compare to.  

Dunn does an awesome job at explaining why more marketing firms and advertising agencies should pay attention to domains.  He does a great job of shedding light on the industry, and in the process opens the doors to more potential buyers.  That's something I've been struggling with in my endeavors.  

Comparatively speaking, when it comes to the domaining industry I am a very small fish in the pond.  I have bought and sold several domains since 2000, but nothing horribly notable or substantial.

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Unless you've been visiting the planet Tralfamadore for an extended vacation, you've likely heard the buzzword HTML5 thrown around a time or two.  Now that the advertising and marketing hipsters have picked up on the trend, HTML5 is the code version of Justin Bieber.

HTML5 is the next evolution of the Hyper Text Markup Language that brings majority of the Internet to life in a browser.  It represents an improvement to the way the web performs, making it easier for designers and developers to create awesome websites. 

HTML5 also seeks to make the web more efficient for users regardless of the browser or platform.  To do that, it introduces several new elements and attributes that reflect today's web needs.  With it's highly touted media playback and offline storage features, HTML5 allows sites to directly embed media with just a few simple HTML tags, something that Apple hopes might help phase out Flash and Silverlight.  In addition, it adds new interactivity features like drag-and-drop, something familiar to anyone with a Gmail account.

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In my vision quest to find awesome websites that are constructed using the world's greatest programming language, it quickly became evident that ColdFusion is extremely popular on college campuses across the United States.  This fact might come as a shock to some web professionals, especially those who continue to persist that ColdFusion should be retired to a nursing home somewhere on the web.  

While this post proved to be fairly simple to research, is also turned out to be a major time consumer.  As the data began to pile up, the more I kept digging to see just how far the .CFM rabbit hole extended.  

By using a simple search method (.cfm site:arizona.edu), and swapping out the school domain for various institutions around the country, I was able to determine just how exhaustive the list would be.  The list I created is nowhere near complete, as that would have taken a few weeks to construct.  Despite being incomplete, it still contains some very interesting data. 

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Since the pseudo death of MySpace -- and likely well before that point -- ColdFusion developers around the world have been trying to find a replacement for their go-to answer when someone asks what big name sites are constructed in the web's oldest programming language.  MySpace was an impressive example to utilize for awhile in the mid 2000s, but the site has since turned into the Walmart of social media and has since changed directions away from CF as it's platform.

Have no fear, there are still plenty of big name ColdFusion websites to impress those inquisitve clients or friends who program in Ruby.  While this list barely scratches the surface of the awesome ColdFusion sites across the web, here are some big name brands using CF as the driving force of their web pressence:

POLITICO:  Politico is a political news organization based in Arlington, Virginia and covers political news with a focus on national politics, Congress, Capitol Hill and the presidential races.  Politico's website includes video features, regular blogs, photo galleries, cartoons and political forums, providing further proof that Washington, D.C. loves Adobe's greatest product.
Page Rank: 8 | Registered: 1998 | Back Links: 4,390

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Mobile web usage is growing at near the speed of light these days.   That leads many professionals in the search optimization industry to believe that 2011 will be the Year of Mobile SEO.

Yes, mobile search engine optimization is a different world all of its own, similar to other forms of search like organic, local and instant.  Mobile is treated like a different beast when compared to more standard SEO practices and content creation. 

With that in mind, here are a few optimization-related factors to consider when constructing mobile websites:

Page Weight: Page load time on a mobile device is vital to the success of a site for obvious reasons.  Search Engine Journal says that a mobile page should have at least half the load time of the normal version.  A page's latency is likely even more important for mobile search rankings than on a normal website, so it requires a bit simpler, cleaner and more direct design and construction approach.  With mobile sites, bad UI design could indirectly effect search rankings. 

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Allow me to re-introduce myself and my company.  

I'm Bret, the founder of Brice Cheddarn Development, a web development and consulting studio that focuses on ColdFusion development, search engine optimization, CMS implementation, and a whole lot of other web-related nerdness.  

I unofficially started the company in 2004 while in college pursuing my second degree, then in the summer of 2006 I officially incorporated the company.

Over the years, the company website has been redesigned a couple of times.  The first version of the site was launched in college, and consisted of a few basic HTML pages full of embedded tables that brought a simple design to life.  It was a way to demonstrate to professors and fellow students that I was an aspiring web nerd.  It wasn't a bad site, but still had a hint of late 1990's web design to it. 

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