Building The Dynamic Website with ColdFusion

What Is ColdFusion?

ColdFusion is one of the easiest programming environments to use, and enables you to create powerful server-side web applications very quickly, with much less code than other technologies such as ASP, PHP etc.

ColdFusion integrates many Internet technologies such as XML, Java, web services etc, and as such, your applications can be as small or complex as required.

ColdFusion consists of two main elements:

• A ColdFusion server (which runs on top of your web server),
• ColdFusion templates (or files), which you write using ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML).

That's probably a very simplistic way of putting it, as there are many elements that make up a ColdFusion environment, but these two are essential if you want to build a ColdFusion application/website.

What Can ColdFusion Do?

ColdFusion enables you to build large, complex, and dynamic websites. ColdFusion can also increase your productivity enormously, both in development time and maintenance time.

With ColdFusion, you can build websites that do things such as:

• Query a database
• Allow users to upload files
• Create/read files on the server (for example, the files that your users upload)
• Have a "member's area" (i.e. via a login page)
• Have a shopping cart
• Present a customized experience (for example, based on users' browsing history)
• Create a "member's area" (i.e. via a login page)
• Send emails (for example, newsletters to a mailing list)
• Schedule tasks to run automatically (for example, your email newsletters)
• FTP files to/from another server
• Publish web services
• Much, much more

OK, I'm Sold. How Do I Get Started?

To build ColdFusion applications, you first need to install the ColdFusion server. Don't worry if that sounds like too much work - it's very straight forward. Installing ColdFusion is just like installing any other piece of software - you simply click your way through the installation wizard, configuring it as you go. This tutorial will point you in the right direction.

Once you've installed ColdFusion server, you can write code using the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). CFML uses a syntax that closely resembles HTML and XML. This makes it easy to learn if you're familiar with HTML or XML. CFML however, is more powerful than HTML - it is basically a programming language. You can write conditional statements, loops, query a database, send bulk emails, publish web services and much more.

ColdFusion also provides an administration interface (the ColdFusion Administrator), which enables you to customize your ColdFusion environment.

This ColdFusion Tutorial is for beginners. It teaches you ColdFusion from the ground up - starting with the basics.

This tutorial assumes you are comfortable coding HTML. If you aren't comfortable with HTML, start with the HTML Tutorial first.

For further information details about ColdFusion installation, functions, syntax, variables, editors, datasource, etc.., please visit this website.

Read More

Start The Content With Delivery Network

The user's proximity to our web server has an impact on response times. Deploying our content across multiple, geographically dispersed servers will make our pages load faster from the user's perspective. But where should we start?

As a first step to implementing geographically dispersed content, don't attempt to redesign our web application to work in a distributed architecture. Depending on the application, changing the architecture could include daunting tasks such as synchronizing session state and replicating database transactions across server locations. Attempts to reduce the distance between users and our content could be delayed by, or never pass, this application architecture step.

Almost 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. This is the Performance Golden Rule. Rather than starting with the difficult task of redesigning your application architecture, it's better to first disperse our static content. This not only achieves a bigger reduction in response times, but it's easier thanks to content delivery networks.

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen.

Some large Internet companies own their own CDN, but it's cost-effective to use a CDN service provider, such as Akamai Technologies, EdgeCast, or level3. For start-up companies and private web sites, the cost of a CDN service can be prohibitive, but as our target audience grows larger and becomes more global, a CDN is necessary to achieve fast response times. Switching to a CDN is a relatively easy code change that will dramatically improve the speed of our web site.

A common mistake that gets made when selecting a CDN is choosing one based solely on bandwidth costs. This could lead to nasty problems during the event. Small CDN may perform well when there is limited traffic or the traffic is distributed over a long period of time. However, if the traffic exceeds the capacity of the CDN to meet that demand, users experience buffering, lost connections and other mayhem, all things that severely affect the webcast experience. Unfortunately, this problem won’t reveal itself until it’s too late, when there is the most demand for our website.

To counter this problem, you need a CDN large enough to handle our traffic. A good CDN has many servers distributed around the world. By having more locations, they can better distribute access to these points and ensure than no bottleneck occurs. This guarantees that the capacity is there to handle the demand precisely when our event is progressing the sport to the next level. And everyone logged on will have a quality stream the whole time.

Read More

Contain CSS and JavaScript in External Files

Many of these performance rules deal with how external components are managed. However, before these considerations arise we should ask a more basic question: Should JavaScript and CSS be contained in external files, or inlined in the page itself?

Using external files in the real world generally produces faster pages because the JavaScript and CSS files are cached by the browser. JavaScript and CSS that are inlined in HTML documents get downloaded every time the HTML document is requested. This reduces the number of HTTP requests that are needed, but increases the size of the HTML document. On the other hand, if the JavaScript and CSS are in external files cached by the browser, the size of the HTML document is reduced without increasing the number of HTTP requests.

The key factor, then, is the frequency with which external JavaScript and CSS components are cached relative to the number of HTML documents requested. This factor, although difficult to quantify, can be gauged using various metrics. If users on our site have multiple page views per session and many of our pages re-use the same scripts and stylesheets, there is a greater potential benefit from cached external files.

Many web sites fall in the middle of these metrics. For these sites, the best solution generally is to deploy the JavaScript and CSS as external files. The only exception where inlining is preferable is with home pages. Home pages that have few (perhaps only one) page view per session may find that inlining JavaScript and CSS results in faster end-user response times.

For front pages that are typically the first of many page views, there are techniques that leverage the reduction of HTTP requests that inlining provides, as well as the caching benefits achieved through using external files. One such technique is to inline JavaScript and CSS in the front page, but dynamically download the external files after the page has finished loading. Subsequent pages would reference the external files that should already be in the browser's cache.

Read More

Friendly with Web 2.0 Concepts

What is the Web 2.0 ?

Web 2.0 is a term that’s often misused. Some people use the term to refer to a particular style of graphics design, but that’s not what Web 2.0 is really about. Web 2.0 is all about user-generated content.

This means the visitors to your site generate the majority of the content on the site, as opposed to the site owner or writers creating the content. A perfect example of Web 2.0 is Squidoo. Squidoo is a social network, which is a type of Web 2.0 site.

Although the site does post some of its own content, such as the lensmaster tip blog, the vast majority of the site was built by individuals creating their own pages within the site. When a user signs up to the site, they’re allowed to position themselves as experts on anything from A-Z (they even have a separate section for R and X rated pages that are kept from the general G-rated public).

They create a unique page on the Squidoo domain, with all sorts of information about their niche topic. They can create or join groups and post in the Squidoo forum to communicate with others in the community.

One of the oldest types of Web 2.0 sites is the forum. Forums are almost as old as the Internet itself, and they were one of the first types of Web 2.0 concepts. Other very old Web 2.0 predecessors were guestbooks, free-for-all link sites, and classified ad sites.

These days, Web 2.0 sites are more complex. Rather than simply posting messages on a forum, users can typically generate their own profiles, create their own custom pages, and have more involvement in creating the site and its content.

There are many different types of Web 2.0 sites. MySpace and Facebook are two well-known social networking sites. Blogger is a very popular blog platform, which allows people to develop a type of online diary or journal.

Twitter is somewhat like a blog, only users post very small snippets of content in each post. Social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg allow users to post their favorite links, and allow other people to vote on those links.

Squidoo and HubPages are two sites that let people create pages of information about specific subjects, a bit like a one-page website about a particular topic, similar to Wikipedia. The basic function of Web 2.0 sites is to allow users to post their own content to the site.

Web 2.0 sites can be leveraged for marketing purposes if used correctly. The key is to immerse yourself in the community and become known as a real person rather than a nameless marketer hoping to cash in on their pooled traffic generation.

Read More

Claim Your Domain Name

What is a domain name? How to streamline a domain name?

A domain name is like a virtual identification card. It’s a way for people to verify your online presence. Many mistakenly believe having a bad domain name is better than not having one at all, which is incorrect.

Having a bad domain name can backfire and even cause you to lose customers. Having a bad domain name makes you look unprofessional while a good domain name leaves a positive impression and fosters a feeling of trust within your clients.

A well chosen domain name will also allow your website or your blog to rank higher in search engine results, which in turn allows your site to be seen by even more people. Since your domain name will be on your letterhead, business cards, and more if you choose to take the business offline as well, you’ll want to choose a name that is reflective of your business.

Now that you understand the importance of a domain name, it’s time to make a list of potential domain names for your website. You don’t just have to use your company name.

In fact, it might be better not to if your company name is long or difficult to spell. One company had a difficult name to remember so it launched a website for its most popular product and found that customers were able to remember that domain name. This resulted in better customer conversions and higher search engine rankings since more customers were searching for the product than the company.

If you’re the face of your brand, you might consider using your name as your domain name. For instance, Mc Donald and Donald Trump are two people that are the face of their business. If that’s the case for you, then you’ll want to use your name as the domain name. But it’s best to use a keyword in your niche.

Once you’ve come up with a list of potential domain names, go through and cross out anything that’s too long. Try to stay under twenty characters so your domain name is easy to remember.

Cross out anything that might have negative connotations. If you’re using several words write them without spaces to be sure that your domain name wouldn’t be potentially offensive.

After you’ve gone through your list and crossed some out, rank these domain names in order of your most favorite ones to your least favorite ones. Go online and research which domain names are available.

You can do this through a popular domain register like Hostgator, Godaddy or NameCheap. Once you find a domain name that’s available, be sure to Google it before buying it. Make sure that no one else is using a similar name for something dishonest, spammy or offensive. While this might seem like a menial task, you don’t want your business confused with a similar website that’s not ethical.

Read More

The Guide to Site Monitoring

Website owners view "website performance monitoring" from many different perspectives. These perspectives vary based on the monitoring technologies/services, requirements, and goals for a website.

So, when answering the question "What is website performance monitoring?" is asked is the answer "Whatever you want it to mean?"

No.

In fact, as a general rule, and for reasons of practicality, website “performance monitoring” is often categorized into different “levels” of monitoring – from a basic Ping test to increasingly detailed and dynamic monitoring services, such as “user experience” monitoring. Often, answering a question about a basic level of website performance (such as, “Is the webserver up or down?”) corresponds to the use of a basic monitoring service; while answering a more complex questions about website performance (such as, is the 5th step in the shopping cart loading <2 sec?”) corresponds to the use of a more complex monitoring service.

And yet, both basic and complex monitoring scenarios are often referred to as “website performance monitoring.” For example the following two examples demonstrate how perspectives on“website performance monitoring” can differ:

-  On the one hand, a network administrator sets up a simple Ping monitor once per 60-minutes to test the up/down performance of a web server. From her perspective the performance of the web server is whether the server is up, or down, therefore the “performance monitoring” is based on an up/down monitoring.

-  On the other hand, a website administrator sets up a browser-based monitoring script running every 3 minutes to test a shopping cart web application and associated Ajax page elements served by a third-party vendor to monitor “user experience.” From his perspective the key website performance of the web application is whether the webpages Ajax on the final “Submit Order” page of the shopping cart for visitors to his shopping cart loads on in a daily average < 2 sec.

So, is there a practical way to think about website performance monitoring and the services needed to monitor specific scenarios?

Yes.

The following website performance monitoring selection guide, while no means universal, provides basic guidance in understanding what performance monitoring service best fits certain scenarios and requirements.

A simple method of using the guide is to:

1. Start at the column “Webserver/website Performance Question,” with the most basic question in row #1 “Is the web server up or down?”

2. Then move down to the next question in the row below in the “Webserver/website Performance Question,” column

3. If the question in the next row below continues to be relevant to your performance requirements continue to move down each row,

4. Until you've matched the level of your monitoring Performance Question with the corresponding monitoring Service noted in the adjacent column “Monitoring Service that answers the Performance Question”

5. Then review the Monitoring Service by clicking on its link.

6. Review the additional “How is the Service used” column in that row to provide further guidance.

7. Review the “Additional Performance Questions” at the bottom to determine if there are other performance-related questions that apply .

image source : tomuse.com

Read More

Harmonize And Improve Site Performance

One of the very first things I did when I launched my site, even before writing my first post was to set out the goals and successes that I wanted to achieve with my site. Now if I asked you right now what’s the most important goal you’d like to achieve with your site, you’d have some answers ready to go, but the only problem is you can only have one most important goal.

It’s important to list out the goals for your blog starting with the most important and moving down toward the lesser goals. Once you have this list you can then take a look at your blog from an outsider’s perspective and see whether or not your blog is aligned to its full potential with those goals.

Here’s an example for a new blog starting out:

Priorities :

1. Generate Traffic

2. Build up opt in subscribers

3. Gather 2000 fans, followers etc. to social network

4. Will make enough money to cover the blogs costs

Notice that making money comes last? It’s important to build up a few other aspects of your blog before going after people’s hard earned money. As a blog grows, the goals will change and adapt. You may find that you excel at building up subscribers and are able to move it down the list while still maintaining a favourable growth in that area.

Now since in this case the number one goal is to generate traffic, you are going to want to have your awesome content above the fold on your homepage, and easily accessible to visitors. Perhaps you’ll have a listing of your most popular posts in the side bar. If something is going to drive more traffic, give it space and allow it to do its job.

Since building an opt in list is this particular blog’s goal you’ll want to have an attractive opt in form with some great and amazing giveaway that can only be found on your site. Not only that, but you’ll most likely want that opt in box to be site wide, and also have some additional help in the form of a light box hover (fade in subscriber box), and perhaps a subscription bar at the top like I’ve implemented recently. The more avenues that lead to a person subscribing, obviously the more subscribers you’ll enjoy.

Building your social network does several things for your blog at once. It gives you additional reach and allows you to find visitors that frequent those networking sites on a regular basis. Remember, just as you can email out to your subscriber list, you can also reach out to those people following you on social networks. If you have 5000 fans on your fan page, you can easily send them a special offer to purchase a copy of your new e-book or video course. The more people you are connected to, the larger the audience you can reach out to, and tap into for either traffic to your latest blog post, or your newest information product.

I’m going to assume you’ve chosen goals that are going to bring you closer to the success you seek, but the part that often gets missed is making sure that those goals are reflected in the message you are sending with your blog. If building a community is the number one goal for you at this time, then make sure you’ve invested in the commenting system that reflects that. Perhaps you’d like to integrate a forum where your readers can interact, and communicate directly with yourself, and each other.

Without looking at your current blog setup, write out what’s most important to you right now at this point in your current situation. Then go back and see if those goals are being reflected to the best of your blogs ability. A blog is a constantly evolving system that grows alongside the blogger!

Read More

Site Performance Strategies

There are 5 basic strategies (webmaster version) to improve our site performance. I am going to name them in this post and describe them more thoroughly in my future materials. Of course, you cannot boost your site performance if you do only one thing. But if you succeed in at least 3, your site’s visitors will definitely appreciate your effort!

Here are the strategies:

1. Objects size Minimization

Make sure your (X)HTML, CSS and JavaScript files occupy as little space as possible. Trim white spaces, remove line breaks and comments. Of course, you don’t need to do everything manually – there are a lot of free tools available on the Internet. Don’t also forget to minimize the filesize of your JPEG/GIF/PNG images. A part of this strategy is GZIP compression.

2. Objects Caching

This is a server-side technique. There are many ways to cache your files, we’ll discuss them later.

3. Objects Merging

Webmasters says that this is very easy. The HTTP requests you do, the less time it takes to load your page. Therefore, use CSS sprites, merge JavaScript and CSS files into one large files, this makes your pages really faster.

4. Simultaneous Objects Loading

As you probably know, your browser keep only 2 simultaneous connections to one host open. If you add an additional server to keep your images and other static files, you can win up to 30% boost.

5. CSS and JavaScript objects optimization

It can be a real pain to optimize JavaScript files written by someone else, but the result will be visible, especially if your site grows to 10.000 uniques per day and more.

Read More