Socialpoints

I use the free version of Aptana - an eclipse plugin. I use it mainly for CSS and Javascript editing. One day I will delve more into its support for various Javascript libraries - including JQuery (which is the only one I bother with these days....).

Anyway I had a large site to ftp to a remote host from home and my uplink speeds where rather slow. I left it running. When I came back the laptop had decided to hibernate at some point during the process!

It looked like most of the site had transfered, but how to be sure?

I used the Aptana Sync Manager. You can setup the two sides to sync one being over ftp, and it will merrily run through all the files and inform you of any mismatches. There are plenty of options to configure exactly how this works. I just wanted to know if any files had been missed and sure enough there were a handful missing.

One of the many extra Aptana goodies.

I decided to get back to some blogging and while I was at it change blog software.

I was using blogcfc and the main reason to move to different blog software was that anytime I wanted to make changes to blogcfc, I was a bit frustrated finding my way around the code and always wanted to restructure it. However blogcfc has served me well and I thank Ray Camden for providing such a great tool, but I began to look around for an alternative.

It had to be CF based and needed to be extendable if I need to tinker.

If you search for coldfusion blog engine, mangoblog is the top of the list, and I also found this endorsement from remote synthesis. I thought that the software has probably improved since this post and so far I have not encountered any big problems.

The installation was very easy with a wizard leading you through each step. I was expecting to have some pain with the migration of existing posts but found that the migration wizard did it all with no hitches!

I look forward to trying out the themes and plugin API to really customise this blog.

There is only one downside. This blog makes extensive use of objects and in some shared hosting enviroments it can be slow to load initailly - in fact this one often fails on the first attempt (I'm assuming if the application has timed out). For a busier site I guess this would not be a problem, but for humble bloggers such as myself may be a reality sometimes :-(

Others have mentioned this on the mango forums.

I'm planning to have a scheduled task that pings this blog say once an hour to get round the problem.

Mango Blog is available here