With all this talk about my new web server, I have forgotten to pay homage to the key component of whole sha-bang, Macromedia's ColdFusion 5®. ColdFusion is the engine that sits on top of the web server and processes the web pages before they are returned to the user. ColdFusion interacts with databases to retrieve and store information, and can also be used to do simple tasks such as display the current date on a web page. It also allows web pages to include other web pages, so code templates can be written once, and reused over and over again.

I have used ColdFusion since 1997 now, and have has such success with it that I joined my long time friend and Price.com co-founder Michael Buffington as his technical editor in the book he authored, ColdFusion 5® Developers Guide. It's an advance level book explaining in some great detail how to take advantage of ColdFusion to speed-up your development time on small to large scale projects. I recommend it, especially if you are interested in developing your application using MS SQL Server as your database server since the book leans to totally take advantage to how ColdFusion interacts with SQL Server's stored procedures.

My greatest accomplishment (yes, even greater than Price.com in my eyes), eBoreds.com, will be returning soon. It's a community web site that at the time it was running was dedicated to punks as an open forum where they could speak freely, create profiles that were one-of-a-kind, post short stories they had written, create custom photo albums, and link to their favorite places on the net. eBoreds even had a cool motto: Be who you want. Say what you want. Oh yea! Private messaging was also a feature on the website. The site has almost been closed for 2 years now. I was forced to shut it down when I lost a hosting agreement. Running all these personal sites and not making a profit from them, I never paid for them to be hosted, so when I didn't have a connection for free hosting, I would just pull the sites. Sorry for all the people who I left in the dark when their haven on the web just one day instantly disappeared.

I have a lot on the backburner as well, like a completely different community web site I have in the works: Protagony.com. It will all get done in due time, I am more interested in watching my son grow up than in anything else in this world.

One more thing before I head out. I'd like to make note to anyone in the ColdFusion community that may think I am abandoning our beloved technology by dropping the default .cfm file extensions on my web pages for the more common and mundane .htm extension. My goal was not to mask the technology I favor, but to create a more common environment to the end user. I feel that more people understand that .htm and .html are web pages, just as .com is a website address. You may think that people don't pay attention, or don't care; You may be right. True story: My sister-in-law recently asked for my wife's e-mail address and I told her wifesname@personaldomain.com. And her sister's response was, "That's it? There's no @juno.com or @aol.com?" I said, "Yep. That's it." And she said, "Really!? I thought they all had to have that?" So that right there proves to me that people get into a mindset of what defines and e-mail address, and that would transfer over to what defines a page site address.

I wonder if crazy URL parameters ever made anyone go into a seizure?