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 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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Since the pseudo death of MySpace -- and likely well before that point -- ColdFusion developers around the world have been trying to find a replacement for their go-to answer when someone asks what big name sites are constructed in the web's oldest programming language.  MySpace was an impressive example to utilize for awhile in the mid 2000s, but the site has since turned into the Walmart of social media and has since changed directions away from CF as it's platform.

Have no fear, there are still plenty of big name ColdFusion websites to impress those inquisitve clients or friends who program in Ruby.  While this list barely scratches the surface of the awesome ColdFusion sites across the web, here are some big name brands using CF as the driving force of their web pressence:

POLITICO:  Politico is a political news organization based in Arlington, Virginia and covers political news with a focus on national politics, Congress, Capitol Hill and the presidential races.  Politico's website includes video features, regular blogs, photo galleries, cartoons and political forums, providing further proof that Washington, D.C. loves Adobe's greatest product.
Page Rank: 8 | Registered: 1998 | Back Links: 4,390

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It's hard to believe that Twitter, one of the most popular social media sites thriving on the web, is already five years old.  Thinking of social media in dog years, Twitter would be around 35 years old which is actually close to the median age of the average tweeter.

The initital "tweet" was sent on March 21, 2006 by co-founder Jack Dorsey.  The company officially launched the website on July 15, 2006. 

Last month, people tweeted an average of 140 million tweets per day.  It took three years for Twitter to gain a billion tweets, but now almost 200 million users post that number every week.  As a result of it's increasing popularity, the company's valuation to approximately $3.7 billion.

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An article on msnbc.com recently declared, "The Soggies have finally won: Cap'n Crunch is quietly sailing into retirement."  The cause of this alleged retirement?  Apparently, its high sugar content.

With pressure from health activists affecting how PepsiCo and other food companies market their products, the thought was that Quaker Oats was forcing the esteemed Cap'n into retirement.

Not so fast, says the Cap'n himself via his new Facebook and Twitter (@realcapncrunch) accounts.

"Reports of Cap'n Crunch's demise are greatly exaggerated," Quaker said in a statement to Ad Age. "In fact, we just launched an official Facebook page for Cap'n Crunch. Now that our Cap'n Crunch brand is in the social-media space, our adult consumers can stay up to date on all things."

The message on the website reads, "I was out on the seas, but don't worry, I'm back and not going anywhere!"

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