I downloaded and installed the trial version of DW 8. My 30-day trial ran out before I purchased the upgrade so I had to revert back to DW MX 2004. I ran into a DB connectivity snag while working on a site originally created in DW MX 04, then worked on with the new DW 8, and then further worked on back in the old version of DW.

The problem is that DW MX 04 no longer introspected the database. But when I tested the connection, it was just fine. What gives?

I traced the problem to the files in the _mmServerScripts folder. When I installed DW 8, new versions of the files were placed in this folder. When I reverted back to DW MX 04, the new versions of the files no longer did a part of their job. Namely, to introspect the database.

The fix is to delete the files in the _mmServerScripts folder, then retest your connection. The act of testing the connection discovers that the files are missing and replaces them. However, since the test is done in DW MX 04, the correct version of the files is placed in the folder.

So, if you find that DW no longer knows about the tables, stored procedures, and views in your database but testing the connection is successful, AND you've loaded DW 8 and reverted back to DW MX 04, there's your solution!

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to spend a week on a deserted tropical island? Well, I'm here to tell you it's wonderful. Do it if you ever get the chance. No phones, no internet or email. No husbands and no kids. Just 6 middle-aged women, hundreds of sand crabs, a couple of iguanas, and a varied assortment of sea creatures.

I've posted the pictures in two folders depending on your patience!

Check out a few of the better pictures. And if that whets your appetite, feel free to check out all 200 or so pics.

Awesome sunrises and sunsets. 

I just came back from a wonderful weekend in Algonquin Park. This time of year is a very special one for me, for many reasons. It was a restful and rejuvenating experience for me. Not to say that I sat on my can all weekend; I have a number of stiff muscles from various activities. :-)

I managed to hit the park when the leaves were just coming off their peak in color and captured - I think - some pretty good images. If you've followed a previous thread of mine, you'll know I recently acquired a new digital camera. Well, that camera made the trip with me and I must say, I continue to enjoy it. It has a lot of flexibility and it's very portable, due to the fact that the lens is a fixed lens instead of interchangeable.

But hey, rather than me going on about the trip, you can be the judge by checking out the "selects" from the weekend: http://www.nms123.ca/jim_babbage/algonquin_2005/algonquin.html

I quickly slapped together an image gallery using Picasa and also did a cover page image with one of Picasa's nifty features, called Picture Collage.

I hope you enjoy them. 

MarketWatch is reporting that the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe has won US Antitrust clearance. It appears if things continue as planned, Macromedia will no longer "be", as we know it, by the fall.

The article goes on to show Adobe in "a graphics light" and Macromedia in "a web light." Of course, this is fairly accurate -- but the fact that the DOJ didn't force either company to divest itself of their nearly matching graphics programs doesn't speak well (to me) about the future health of Fireworks and Freehand.

I've read articles giving us hope that Adobe, with all its money and muscle, will develop our favorite products even further. For me, of course, that's Dreamweaver (and Fireworks), and I'm not really fearful about DW's continued existence. What I'm most saddened by is losing "the spirit of Macromedia" ... or is it the Macromedia experience? I've heard the reports about how Adobe wants to keep the open communication MM has with their users. About how they value the community Macromedia has built. And I believe they mean it. It rocks! But what remains to be seen is whether a company of that size can actually do it.

Will they really value and foster the input of the community in the earliest alpha/beta stages. If the input is still sought after, will it actually hold the same kind of weight it has with Macromedia. Will they reopen closed issues because the community says it's important to them -- that they want their tool to have some particular ability or for some legacy bug to be fixed? Will they keep their wits about them when developers criticize something they've worked hard on -- and then try to make it right?

All these traits are strong in the people that are Macromedia. Macromedia listens and reacts. It's almost as if, by using their products, we are a part of Macromedia. In fact, some days, they almost feel like family. Adobe -- are you listening? You may be a giant, but you've got some big shoes to fill. I truly hope you're up to the task.

For now, I remain optimistic -- maybe we're just increasing the size of the family. But I can't help but get those twinges that feel like I'm "losing a friend." A company is its people and the people that comprise Macromedia are truly some of the best. Now before I choke myself up, I've got to go pack. I've got a whole lotta friends to see at MAX.

For those of you using Picasa, here's official notice that Google has released an upgrade. Make sure to drop by and download it.

There's a whack of new features in this free imaging utility:

• Multiple languages Support 
• BlogThis! button allows you to post one photo at a time directly to the Blogger.com web editor
• Print CD covers 
• Improved RAW file handling - support for more makes and RAW file types: Canon (.CRW, .CR2), Nikon (.NEF), Olympus (.ORF), Pentax (.PEF), Kodak (.DCR), Sony (.SRF), Minolta (.MRW), and Fuji (.RAF).
  I'm hoping that it wil read the RAW files from my new Fuji S9000 camera. Of course, reading RAW files and being able to properly edit them are two very different things.
  
• Import from additional cameras
  

I find Picasa really helpful for sorting and viewing images as well as quickly creating quick web photo galleries. It has a decent range of built-in tools for fixing up images, including some nifty special effects. All in all, not bad for a freebie.

Picasa helps you find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open the app, it automatically locates all your pictures on your hard drive and sorts them into albums organised by date with folder names you will recognize. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organised. 

It's a pretty cool image management tool and has one thing that FW has always been sorely lacking - an image browser. You can see thumbnails of your image files on screen, and either sort or edit them right within Picasa, or locate the file on the disc and open it within your favorite app - like Fireworks.

Unfortunately for the Macheads in the crowd, Picasa is only available for Windows users.

There are several upcoming events in the next week that those of you in the Los Angeles area should be aware of. On Saturday, October 15th is a day of events at the LA Flash Factory (Venice, CA) which includes:

• MiniMAX3 - 4p-6p, put on by the New Orleans User Group
  Speakers include: Adam Bell, R Blank, Tom Green, Jesse Rodgers, Kevin Schmidt and Stephanie Sullivan.
• LAFlashapaloozastock - 6p-8p, put on by the combined three LA-based Flash User Groups
  Speakers include: Grant Skinner and Jennifer Shiman.
• Pre-MAX Shindig - 8p-12a - music, networking, relaxation and refreshments

All events are free but registration IS required. Go to the appropriate sites above to register.

And of course, beginning the next day, Oct 16-19 is Macromedia's MAX Conference. Three days of learning and fun -- and a wave goodbye to Macromedia as we know it (that part chokes me up). It's not too late to register for MAX now. And if you come, stop by one of my sessions on Advanced CSS. I hope to meet you at one of the events.

He and I have at least two things in common:
1) We both are artists and
2) We both have a young son who has been diagnosed with autism.

Those two things, in and of themselves, probably doesn't seem all that remarkable. Given the statistics I now know about autism, there are probably far too many artists in the world today who have sons or daughters that have been diagnosed with autism. So you may be sitting at your computer right now asking yourself this question: If that's the case, what makes Nic Carcieri so unique that Chris would feel the need to write a blog about him?

Obviously, the fact that we both have very young sons who have austism connects us in a very unique way but that's not why I'm writing about Nic. As my title of this blog says, I've never met Nic before. I've never talked to him before. In fact, just a few short weeks ago, I didn't even know who Nic was - just as I'm sure he didn't know who I was either.

But, being the artist that I am, I happened to be crushing through one of my favorite comic book-related web sites, Digital Webbing when I came across a pencil sketch of this piece of artwork:

Nic posted an open call for any interested artists to submit artwork for a charity book he was creating in order to raise proceeds for the Autism Society of America. Sounds simple enough, right? It was just a small little post on a very popular comic book web site. But this little post demonstrates exactly how powerful, how useful and how incredibly beneficial the web can be - especially when that message is also combined with a personal blog.

Nic was extremely wise to create a blog detailing this very unique project in a blog because now, this project has started to pick up incredible amounts of steam. It's one thing for relatively unknown artists who are looking for any kind of showcase for their talents (and yes, that includes me too) to donate their time and energy, but it's another thing entirely when big names like Tim Sale who hear about this and decide it's such a worthy cause that THEY want to be a part of it too.

Now, for me, the difficult part comes. I already have a rough idea of what I'd like to draw. Being a child of the 70's, I grew up watching Ultraman and another show that was a favorite of my brother's... "Johnny Sokko and his flying robot". So I am thinking about doing a take-off on something like that - along with an illustration of my son in his super hero persona (Doctor Destructo). I'm thinking Doctor Destructo and his crime fighting flying robot... something along those lines. The trouble is, I'm not normally accustomed to drawing "technical things". My comfort level is in drawing human faces - that probably comes from drawing caricatures for so much of my life. Added to that, how do you draw a humorous looking robot and not have people think of the recent computer-animated movie, "Bots"?

And, even though illustrating a mechanical robot of some sort will be a challenge for me, it's nothing compared to the challenges of dealing with autism. Noticed that I haven't used the words "disease" or "suffer" yet? Well, that's because I don't believe autism is a "disease" or that my son Tyler - or any other person who has autism - "suffers" from it. Sometimes the people who care for an individual who has autism - a mom, a dad, a brother, a sister, an aunt or uncle perhaps - sometimes we go through hardships but it's not really that we "suffer" because of Tyler as much as we make very conscious sacrificial choices.

Autism though, can be very hard to deal with sometimes. The mood swings. The stubbornness. The refusal or inability to communicate to and with the outside world... that can be incredibly hard to deal with. Especially since we know so little about autism... where it comes from... why some family members have it and others don't. That's why research - and education - are so very, very important.

And that's exactly why Nic's project is so special too.

Chris

I wrote a simple ColdFusion custom tag last night that you might find useful. The tag will generate an RSS feed. You pass a recordset/query to the tag and it will spit out an RSS feed. It is based partly on the RSS feeds I built for this site and Tom-Muck.com, and also based on the custom tags I built for generating dynamic tables and csv files. Like the others, it is a rudimentary tag that you can build on.

Use the custom tag like this:

1. Put it in a directory where custom tags are stored. I usually just create a folder called tags and put all my tags inside. Save it as rss.cfm.

2. On the page that will become your RSS fed, add an import statement to the top of the file:

<cfimport prefix="mytag" taglib="tags">

3. Create your query:

<cfquery name="blah" datasource="#mydsn#">
SELECT NewsID, NewsDate, NewsTitle, NewsItem FROM MyTable
</cfquery>

4. Put the tag on the page, passing in the results of the query:

<mytag:rss rs=#blah#>

If you browse the page, the RSS should be visible.

There are several optional attributes, which are outlined below:

Attributes:

rs: Recordset/query to use for the RSS file (default: new query)

title: title tag in channel (default: RSS)
link: link tag in channel (default: http://#cgi.SERVER_NAME#)
description: description tag in channel (default: RSS feed for #attributes.link#)
webmaster: webmaster tag in channel (default: nobody@notavaliddomain.com)

items: Struct of item field names (default: structnew())
items.title: Field name for title of RSS item (default: title)
items.description: Field name for descriptionof RSS item (default: description)
items.link: Field name for link of RSS item (default: link)
items.pubdate: Field name for pubdate of RSS item (default: pubdate)

items.permalink: http address for link with ID from database (default: http://#cgi.SERVER_NAME#/?id=)
items.id: Primary key for picking record

striphtml: strip the html tags from the item (true/false, default: false)
wordcount: truncate item to number of words (default: empty string for no truncation)
maxrows: show x number of rows (default: empty string for all records)
debug: true/false value for debugging the feed (true turns of text/xml content type)
xslt: name of an XSL transformation file (default: empty string for no transformations)

If the query has the proper field names for an rss file (title, description, pubdate, link, and id for the primary key) you don't need to pass in field names. If your blog or news query uses completely different fieldnames, simply set them up in a struct before calling the tag, like this:

<cfsilent>
<!--- Create the query --->
<cfquery name="rsNews" datasource="#request.dsn#">
SELECT NewsID, NewsDate, NewsTitle, NewsItem FROM Blog
ORDER BY NewsDate DESC
</cfquery>

<!--- Set up the field name mapping --->
<cfset fieldmappings = StructNew()>
<cfset fieldmappings.pubdate = "NewsDate">
<cfset fieldmappings.id = "NewsID">
<cfset fieldmappings.title = "NewsTitle">
<cfset fieldmappings.description = "NewsItem">
</cfsilent>
<!--- Call the cf_rss tag --->
<mytag:rss rs=#rsNews# items=#fieldmappings#>

Alternatively, you can avoid the import statement and use old-style cf_ syntax:

<cf_rss rs=#blah#>

You can also pass in the name of an XSL transformation file. A sample file is included in the zip:

<mytag:rss rs=#rsNews# items=#fieldmappings# xslt="rss.xslt" >

I hope you find it useful. See it in action here. View the source here or download it here.

Cross posted at http://www.tom-muck.com/blog/

I found this to be rather odd. I have a realtor client that is finally, after I advised it over two years ago, ready to try using Google Adwords. My recommendation would have put him ahead of his competitors instead of playing catch up -- but better late than never -- I guess.

Strangely, the same day I was hooking him up with the company I recommended he use, Page Zero Media, he got a call from a sales rep at Google offering to, "Help him take his business to the next level." Huh?

Call me naive, but I had no idea Google was in the habit of contacting people directly. Thus, doubting the call, I asked my client to let me check it out more thoroughly. Of course you know what I did -- I googled the guy. ;) Sure enough, he was in the Google listings (in the Sponsored Links, no less) with a link to a page about him. He's an industry expert in real estate and local. OK, so he's real. There's even a picture.

But my goodness, does this bother anyone besides me? I mean, Google is a search engine (and of course lately, lots of other things) -- but I think of it as having more to do with algorithms and engineering than sales. Thus, we have a whole culture of consultants and agencies that create and manage campaigns as their business. The create, tweak and measure -- and many of them know their stuff. I've watched clients that didn't want to spend the money on a specialist use "a web person who can do adwords," and the campaign was a flop. All their click-through money was wasted since it didn't convert into sales.

So we now have Google doing cold calls. Are they going to create and tweak a campaign? Are they going to measure the results and advise on the copywriting and landing pages? Will they continue to optimize the account to make it more effective? Who do they favor when they're creating campaigns for several clients in the same industry competing for the top spots/click-throughs? For you as a client, is your effectiveness simply the luck of the draw based on which account rep you get? Does that decide who wins the top spot/best copy and click-throughs? Do you want to hand Google your conversion data on a silver platter? What happened to that neutral person with only your best interests and success in mind?

I'm concerned at some of the recent moves at Google. Are we creating a monster? Am I overreacting? What are your thoughts?

And to answer the question that may be going through your mind -- no, my client is not using the Google Adwords guy. We're going with Andrew Goodman's company. They rock. ;)