I just finished my CF Meetup presentation, thanks to all those that were able to attend. Here are my presentation and files.

I am giving a presentation to the Online CF User Group tomorrow. My topic is titled "Creatively Stop Form Spam".

If you saw my presentation last year called "Attack of the Spam Bots", tomorrow's presentation is similar to that one, but I have two new spam prevention ideas that I didn't cover last year. If you saw my presentation at CFUnited last month, I have one new spam prevention idea that I didn't cover. If you have never seen my presentation, come check it out tomorrow!

I have written a few times before about my belief that ColdFusion should have a few version. So I am not going to rehash my arguments again, you can find them here and here. Instead, I want to highlight a recent blog entry by Marc Cuban, who discusses the importance of offering a free version of your product. Marc Cuban is a multi-billionaire that got rich before the dot com boom, got even more rich during the dot com boom, and then kept most of his money during and after the dot com bubble burst. So it's hard to argue with his businsess sense. Not to mention, in addition to his software business successes, he owns a little team called the Dallas Mavericks. ;)

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My post title might make you believe I'm going to bash non-techies, or maybe I'm trying to be funny. But I'm dead serious. Thinking about people that don't use computers scares me. Literally. Let me explain.

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If you use Google tools for your websites, you may be interested in this free webinar that Google is offering. It will cover three of their tools for web heads:

1. Google Webmaster Tools
2. Google Analytics
3. Google Website Optimizer

The webinar is July 8th at 9 am Pacific time.

I just finished my CFUnited presentation, and I think it was a success. About twice the amount of people showed up than I expected, and my presentation took twice the amount of time I thought it would (I took the full hour). So I am a happy camper.

My demo code and videos are here.

My slides are here.

Enjoy!

I'm throwing my hat in the ring, even if I am late to the game. :) Liz Frederick asked questions of CFUnited Attendees, and asked us to blog our answers, so here I go:

What are you looking forward to most? Networking. This will be my 4th year attending CFUnited, but I have never spent much time getting to know the rest of the CF community while at CFUnited.

Which speaker will most likely end up on your camera? Me. Ha ha...but seriously, I don't take many pictures.

What do you plan to do outside conference time? I'm going to the big party at the crime museum, and I want to check out the White House and Capitol Hill. Other than that, networking and hanging out in my hotel room.

Fill in the blank: I will mainly be around the   [shrug]   booth. I don't really know. I hear they're playing some movies at the AboutWeb booth, so depending on the timing I might spend the most time there.

Do you have a new project you are working on and will reveal it at CFUnited? Nope.

For some reason I have never blogged about my speaking assignement for the upcoming CFUnited conference. My session title is Attack of the Spam Bots - Banish Spammers, Keep Customers. I will not mince words, I am talking about alternatives to CAPTCHA, which is a serious detriment to website usability and accessibility. So if you are a fan of CAPTCHA, you should come to my session (if you are going to CFUnited). I will only spend about 5-10 minutes talking about CAPTCHA's downfalls, and the rest of the time will be devoted to awesome technology coolness, tools that will keep spammers away from your sites, without angering your users. :)

Today marks the anniversary of my first blog post 6 years ago. I usually mark my anniversary by posting some stats, so here they are:

Total posts-361
Total comments-858
Avg. comments per entry-2.4

Visitor stats for the last year:

Page views-15,319
Unique visitors-13,186
Avg. Time on Page-2:48

My top five most popular entries:
JavaScript isNumeric function with 16210 views
JavaScript URL variables with 10,891 views
Obtaining Affected rows from SQL Query with 7,023 views
Top 10 Crazy Eclipse Plugins with 4,526 views
What does your name mean? with 3,785 views

I have created a new CFQuickDocs Firefox search plugin. If you were using the old one (that seems to be broken now), you should give the new one a try. For the record, I didn't make the old one. Anyway, head on over to CFQuickDocs and look for the installation link near the bottom of the page. Let me know if you run into any problems!

Update: When I made the search plugin, I kept reading about things that only worked in Firefox, and I avoided those things. So today I decided to try installing the search plugin with IE 7, and guess what? It works! I wonder if it works in any of the other browsers...