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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Twitter recently launched a new Follow Button, enabling users to subscribe to the Twitter feeds of companies and individuals directly from their websites.  Users are still be able to preview Twitter profiles before opting to follow them by clicking the username next to the button.  

Before this new button, bloggers and developers had to redirect users to their accounts on Twitter before they could opt to follow.  Now users can subscribe with a single click

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A few months ago, I was contacted about developing a plugin for Simon Hine of HineSight Development in Australia. Simon wanted something that would allow him to play podcast files within a blog post. It seemed like a fun little project, so we developed a rough plan for a simple plugin that would play an MP3 file using a basic audio player from Google.

A simple plugin solution was developed.  The plugin was developed to play an MP3 file within a blog post using a few tags within a post or a page.   The plugin replaces the tags to display a Google audio player that will play an MP3 file within the post content.

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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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During the past few years, web enthusiasts have seen the rise in popularity of infographics.  

Infographics are representations of information, data or knowledge blended together with unique design to create awareness.  They are an artistic rendering of facts gathered from a poll or survey and conveyed by graphic elements, including charts, graphs and a wide variety of other methods. 

They illustrate information that normally hides in text form, and channel that info in a visually pleasing, instantly understandable manner, making it not only powerful but visually stimulating.  Infographics are universally understandable and provide content for people to easily share and link back to.

The infographic acts as a way to visually spread awareness through social networking sites, and will hardly need any pushing to get tweeted about or linked to if it is fun, interactive and not confusing.

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