Community MX has grown over the years to the point where we will hit 1500 pieces of content tomorrow -- articles, tutorials, and extensions. The following is a list of various ways to keep track of new content and find existing content at Community MX:

Main list of CMX categories:
http://www.communitymx.com/categories.cfm

Main RSS feed
http://www.communitymx.com/services/cmxrss.cfm

Add CMX feed to Google feed reader:
http://www.google.com/ig/add?feedurl=http://www.communitymx.com/services/cmxrss.cfm

Full list of RSS feeds by author, category, most popular searched:
http://www.communitymx.com/services/cmx_opml.cfm

CMXTraneous blog RSS feed:
http://www.communitymx.com/blog/rss.cfm

CMXTraneous full post RSS feed:
http://www.communitymx.com/blog/fullrss.cfm

All CMXTraneous RSS feeds:
http://www.communitymx.com/blog/cmx_opml.cfm

Add CMXTraneous to Google feed reader:
http://www.google.com/ig/add?feedurl=http://www.communitymx.com/blog/rss.cfm

Free Community MXtra Central application:
http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=EE860

Free Community MX sidebar for Firefox:
http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=E0069

Free Context Help extension for Dreamweaver, including CMX search:
http://www.tom-muck.com/extensions/help/contexthelptoolbar/

Update: The calendar is a good way to see daily content (thanks Laurie):
http://www.communitymx.com/calendar.cfm

Yes, it's finally happened. Someone thought I was worthy enough to be interviewed. That person is Dan Smith. Dan and I got to know each other from being members in Webweavers - a Google Group e-mail list for everything related to web designing (and ruled with an iron maiden thumb by our very own Stef! LOL!).

Anyway, Dan hosts and creates audio interviews on his blog. He thought it would be interesting to let people know what I sound like and had the crazy notion others might be interested in hearing what my thoughts were on the wide variety of topics we discussed. It took a while to get all the logistics worked out, but you can finally hear our interview today.

The interview consists of a wide range of topics such as how I got into web design, information about the two books I helped write with Tom Green, the 'Bots autistic benefit book I participated in (and wrote a blog about not too long ago) as well as some of my thoughts about web comic strips - including CMX Suite! - and a whole bunch of other stuff!

So if you're interested in hearing what I sound like, now your curiosity can be appeased. :-)

- Chris

After much arm twisting, this past weekend I updated my Context Help extension for Dreamweaver for ColdFusion 7. I am a big fan of the Homesite-style help system -- put your cursor on a tag or function in code view and pull up the help file for that particular keyword. Dreamweaver has similar funtionality, however the help file comes up in the tiny little miniscule useless Reference Panel. Of all the development tools on the market, Dreamweaver and Flash have the worst reference/help systems. This extension attempts to rectify that. You have to be online to use the help system, but it will pull up Livedocs to the appropriate page. There are also buttons on the toolbar for a Google search, Google group search of the Macromedia forums, and a search of Community MX. I've also updated the version at the Exchange. I think this is the most useful extension I've ever done, which is why it is my most frequently updated extension. It also has PHP, ASP, and ASP.NET help, as well as HTML help.

Cross posted at my site.

Due to all the "me too" posts on my original blog post about my Mac's terrible case of narcolepsy, I wanted to see if we could compare some things here (and not lose this in the comments of the previous post). I think I've ruled out anything to do with my power cord (or lack of it).

Question One:

Whether you have a 15" or 17" Powerbook, is your processor a 1.67GHz?

Question Two:

Did you buy your PB closer to the April or August release date?

Question Three:

What Boot ROM Version are you running?

Question Four:

What system version are you at -- and is this an upgrade from what came installed on your computer? Did you notice this problem at a particular upgrade?

Question Five:

If you tap the space bar to wake the computer every time it goes to sleep, will it eventually stay on for an hour or two?

Question Six:

Do you stay on longer after rebooting? And if so, what's an approximate time?

My answers are the following:
17" PB with 1.67GHz processor
April Purchase date
Boot ROM Version: 4.9.1f3
Running System Version: Mac OS X 10.4.3 (8F46) (though based on Eric's report, I'm going to upgrade today). This is an upgrade over what I originally had installed.
Most times I can hit the space bar 8-20 times and it will finally stay on.
If I do not reboot, I definitely get progressively worse over time. The episodes of narcolepsy get closer and closer together. If I start the day with a fresh boot, I can usually get 2-3 hours.

Thanks guys!

This is another one of those David and Goliath stories that always aggravate me. Another case of the big giant shoving around the little guy who has a smaller sword and shield in the hopes he'll just give up.

For those that aren't familiar, this story is about Paul Dell who lives in Spain. He's a web designer who, in 2001 purchased the domain name www.dellwebsites.com. Novel idea naming your business after yourself and what you do -- I doubt anyone's ever done it before. About a year later, Dell came knocking. "Hey, give us your domain name. It might confuse people." Huh? If I'm looking for a new computer, I'm sure not looking for a website -- nor the other way around. Paul said no. Dell went away -- for a while.

Then, about a year ago, they came back. "You're still using the same name." Ummm, yes, I sure am. It's my name. It's what I do. "Give it to us." Ummmm -- no? (You can read the story from Jan 2005 at The Register.) And again he didn't hear for a while.

Now Dell is back in a BIG way. Not only asking for the domain name but suing Paul for hundreds of thousands of Euro for all this loss they've incurred by him continuing to run his web design business using the name Dell WebSites. And we, his friends and fellow business owners are encouraging Paul to fight.

Why do large corporations have more of a right to every "possibly related" URL that exists? I own www.violetsky.net -- why do I not own www.violetsky.com? Because someone else does. Now that I'm "famous" do I go to him and say, "Hey, I should have that domain because it might cause people confusion." And in fact, it does cause people confusion. I've had clients forget and email me at that address. However, the gentleman that owns it has been kind enough to set me up with forwarding so that if they make a mistake, I don't miss any email. Dell shouldn't have any more right to Paul's domain than I have to the dot com of my domain. It was available when they were "famous." They should have purchased all the available related domain names that might confuse people -- just to be sure. But if they didn't and it's gone now, just like me, they don't get it. It's a free society of domain names and the heavy hitters shouldn't have any more weight than the little guy. And if they're nice, maybe Paul will set up email forwarding for their clients that get confused. Something like buyacheapcomputer@dellwebsites.com -- he's a nice guy -- I know he'd do it.

So what's the problem with Paul fighting? Cash baby. Plain and simple. He lives in Spain, the suit is in France. Paul's Spanish lawyers want him to use a specialist in Paris. A great lawyer -- but a very expensive one. The down payment to get this lawyer to read the case and advise would buy Paul a new car. And though it was tough for him, we've finally convinced him to take donations so that he can actually fight it hard. I've set up a blog for his defense. Paul's even willing to give anyone that wants to help out -- however big or small -- a copy of his Sunflowers Web Template as a token of his appreciation. A link will be included in his thanks to you.

So Goliath is yelling and strutting his stuff -- but hey, we're sending you rocks, Paul. Put one in your sling and give it a whirl.

You can keep up with the story on the Paul Dell blog some friends have created. Please donate to the Paul Dell Defense fund. Let's keep the internet accessible to the little guys. Maybe next time, it will be you the corporations come after.

If you love Fireworks for web design as much as I do, you've probably been watching for the slightest clue as to the life, or death, of it since the acquisition of Macromedia. In the past week, I've seen two extremely positive signs -- I'll share in case you missed them.

The first came in the form of a pdf announcement Adobe made about which products were going to be initially ported to the new Intel-based Mac platform. You guessed it, Fireworks was on the list. The second was even more direct. It was a message on the Fireworks Forum by Danielle Beaumont, the new Product Manager for Fireworks. In part, Danielle said:

"Fireworks continues to be an important product to the combined Macromedia/Adobe portfolio and is actively under product development for a yet-to-be announced product release. I'm incredibly excited to lead that front as the Product Manager.

We know that for many years Fireworks has been an integral part of your workflow with Dreamweaver and Flash. It will be our goal in the Product Development team to preserve all of the features you value in Fireworks 8 while developing a more cohesive solution with the Adobe Creative product line.

We will be relying on you in the Fireworks Design and Development community to help us shape the direction of those product enhancements by way of end user customer visits and pre-release testing."

Is that exciting or what? Confirmation that Fireworks is actually being included in the current development cycle. And that they're going to integrate it with the Adobe Creative product line. That news definitely gave me the butterflies of elation. I was really dreading the possibility of losing it since I can't even describe to you how much easier it is for me to slice and dice a Fireworks Comp compared to a Photoshop one. Happy days!

There was a question on the forum today about finding bounced emails in a mailing campaign after retrieving the results with CFPOP. The problem with email bounces is that you can't determine who the mail bounced from by looking at any of the headers: typically the mail server will respond with a message something like this:

----- Transcript of session follows -----
<jack@SOMEDOMAIN.COM>... Deferred: Connection timed out with mail.somedomain.com.
Message could not be delivered for 5 days
Message will be deleted from queue

The message is also frequently loaded with other email addresses, like MAILERDAEMON, or some random characters that seem like an email address (message IDs frequently resemble email addresses). The only way I've found to reliably extract bounced email addresses is to examine each message, extract ALL email addresses, then compare them to the original list. The following function will extract all email addresses from a string:

<cffunction name="getEmailAddresses">
  <cfargument name="stringToParse" type="string" />
  <cfargument name="emailArray" type="array" default="#ArrayNew(1)#" />
  <cfif REFind("([a-zA-Z0-9_\.=-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9_\.-]+\.[[:alpha:]]{2,6})",stringToParse)>
    <cfset sLenPos=REFind("([a-zA-Z0-9_\.=-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9_\.-]+\.[[:alpha:]]{2,6})",stringToParse,1,true) />
    <cfset emailAddress = mid(stringToParse, sLenPos.pos[1], sLenPos.len[1]) />
    <cfset arrayAppend(emailArray, emailAddress)>
    <cfset stringToParse = Mid(stringToParse, sLenPos.pos[1] + sLenPos.len[1], len(stringToParse))>
    <cfif REFind("([a-zA-Z0-9_\.=-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9_\.-]+\.[[:alpha:]]{2,6})",stringToParse)>
      <cfset emailArray = getEmailAddresses(stringToParse, emailArray)>
    </cfif>
  </cfif>
  <cfreturn emailArray />
</cffunction>

call it like this:

<cfset someString = "blah blah email@somedomain.com blah blah blah
morestuff<tom@somedomain.com> more blah blah blah 'test@test.com'">
<cfset emails = getEmailAddresses(someString)>

test it like this:

<cfdump var=#emails#>

What I would probably do is cycle through the emails, grabbing email addresses for each bounced email, then adding all addresses to a database. At the end of the session, compare the list to the original table to find the correct bounced addresses.

I have never used ColdFusion for this because I wrote a VB program that does it in bulk with thousands of emails daily as a scheduled task, but it was a good exercise to do something in CF.

I finally broke down and bought a Mac, after many years of saying "I need a Mac." I got it mostly for testing web sites and extensions, but I think I'll be using it for a lot more than that. Microcenter had a deal where you buy a Mac Mini and get a keyboard, mouse, LCD monitor, scanner/printer for free. You can't beat that -- a whole Mac system for $499. I got the upgraded version with the faster processor and 80gig HD for $599.

I started my career using a Mac, but gave it up shortly thereafter to work exclusively on Windows machines (around the time of OS 7.5). I'm pretty amazed by the whole experience. . .I like it. I even downloaded a remote desktop connection so I can access my Windows server from the Mac. Very cool. I like the fact that everything is included in the box, and everything seems to work right out of the box -- wireless network, Bluetooth, etc. If you need a cheap Mac, head to Microcenter before they are all gone.