There is a new ColdFusion-related blog that joined our CfBlogs community. Evagois is a software consultant, specializing in Web and Mobile applications.

The Evagoras Charalambous blog site contains a lot of ColdFusion posts concerning integrations using Command Box and ColdBox, provides insight on ColdFusion, Lucee and Java, and provides some general ACF and Lucee tips and tricks. Additionally, Evagogar covers JavaScript, .Net and classic asp. His site can be found at https://www.evagoras.com/ and new CF related posts will be posted to the ColdFusion Blogs aggregater site at CfBlogs.org.

The new version of CFBlogs ColdFusion Blog Aggregator has been released.

This version displays all of the blog posts in an attractive three-column card layout and displays the open graph image or a site image at the top of the post. The card images should allow the user to quickly convey the author of the post. Users can sort the grids by author by clicking on the card image.

This page also has several data grids in order to analyze ColdFusion blogging trends. I have put extra data available to the grids, such as including the generating blog software. Data from the grids and calendar widget on the bottom of the sidebar (opened by clicking on the hamburger) suggests that the current state of the ColdFusion blogging community is stronger than ever.

Advanced search capabilities are also present. Users can search from one or more active blog sites. There are nearly 150 ColdFusion-related blogs and all of the blogs have several years of data from which to search.  This should prove to be useful for ColdFusion developers wanting to research a particular ColdFusion-related topic.

This site should improve the SEO score of each blog covered as it provides a backlink to the blog postings. Google, and other search engines, consider backlinks 'votes' for a particular post and hopefully, this will improve the search scores for all the blogs covered. Additionally, there is also a ColdFusion community menu at the top of the page allowing users to quickly find other ColdFusion-related resources. 

CFBlogs also displays the posts from CFOverflow, and aggregates all of the posts to the CFBlogsFeed on Twitter, and the RSS feed can be used to show the ColdFusion blog posts on your own websites, instructions are found below.

The CFBlogs website can be found at https://www.cfblogs.org/

If you have any suggestions or want to add your own blog to the CfBlogs aggregator, please contact me.

How to put the CFBlogs feed on your own website

If you want to place the CFBlogs Feed on your own website, copy and paste the following code on your own site. An example of the following code can be found by clicking on the hamburger on this site.

<table align="center" class="k-content fixedPodTableWithWrap" width="100%" cellpadding="7" cellspacing="0">
	<cftry>
		<cfsilent>
		<cfset theURL = "https://gregoryalexander.com/cfblogs/rss.cfm">
		<cfhttp url="#theURL#" timeout="5">
		<cfset xml = xmlParse(cfhttp.filecontent)>
		<cfset items = xmlSearch(xml, "//*[local-name() = 'item']")>
		<!--- Set a loop counter to keep track of the current row for display purposes. --->
		<cfset feedLoopCount = 1>
		</cfsilent>
		<cfloop index="x" from="1" to="#min(arrayLen(items),5)#">
			<cfsilent>
			<cfset item = items[x]>
			<!-- Create alternating rows in the table. The Kendo classes which we will use are k-alt and k-content.
			We will create a border between the rows if the current row is not the first row. -->
			<cfif feedLoopCount mod 2>
				<cfset thisClass = 'k-content'>
			<cfelse>
				<cfset thisClass = 'k-alt'>
			</cfif>
			</cfsilent>
			<tr class="<cfoutput>#thisClass#</cfoutput>" height="35px;">
				<!--Create the nice borders after the first row.-->
				<cfif feedLoopCount eq 1>
				<td valign="top">
				<cfelse>
				<td align="left" valign="top" class="border">
				</cfif>
					<!--Display the content.-->
					<cfoutput>
					#item.comments.xmlText#<br/> 
					<a href="#item.link.xmlText#" <cfif darkTheme>style="color:whitesmoke"</cfif>>#item.title.xmlText#</a><br />
					</cfoutput>
				</td>
			</tr>
			<!---Increment the loop counter--->
			<cfset feedLoopCount = feedLoopCount + 1>
		</cfloop>
		<cfcatch>
			<tr>
				<td>
				<cfoutput>
				CFBloggers down
				</cfoutput>
				</td>
			</tr>
		</cfcatch>
	</cftry>
</table>
<br/>

www.cfblogs.org is meant to replace the popular 'ColdFusion Bloggers' blog aggregator that was so popular in the ColdFusion community in the last ten years. Unfortunately, the ColdFusion Bloggers platform is no longer active at this time due to the unfortunate demise of Wil Genovese, who maintained Cfbloggers after Raymond Camden provided Wil with the keys.

The new cfblogs.org aggregator can be found here: http://www.cfblogs.org

History

I have always wanted to get involved in this project. The aggregator that Raymond developed was an integral part of our ColdFusion community, and it is a core requirement for my continued efforts in developing Galaxy Blog.

When I noticed that the CfBloggers site went down, I immediately contacted Raymond Camden and asked him for the most recent code. Raymond entrusted me with his most recent ColdFusion codebase, but it was from 2013. In the last two weeks, I was able to rewrite and modernize Raymonds' original CfBloggers code, and I believe that I have all of the original functionality intact.

The following features are available in this version of the code:

• Updated server-side logic in ColdFusion using modern APIs and Twitter post sharing functionality
• Vastly improved mobile device handling
• A modern responsive HTML5 single page application with Kendo grids
• Full search capabilities
• All of the current feeds have been personally reviewed and are current
• Blog Posts are posted on the CfBlogs Twitter feed
• Twitter logic has been completely rewritten in ColdFusion 2018
• RSS options from google Feedburner
• CfBlogs RSS feed allows the user to extract a certain amount of posts
• Blog posts are aggregated every 20 minutes or so.

CfBlog RSS options

CfBlogs uses the CfBlogs FeedBurner for the main RSS feed. You can find it here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CfblogsFeed.

You may also use our local CfBlogs feed located at http://gregoryalexander.com/cfblogs/rss.cfm?max=50.

Our local CfBlogs feed allows for options:

By default, the local RSS feed will return the last 50 items. You can change this by adding ?max=N to the URL, where N is a number from 1 to 100. To show the last 5 entries, use:
http://gregoryalexander.com/cfblogs/rss.cfm?max=5

Filtering the local feed has not been implemented at this time. If requested, I will gladly implement it at a later time.

How to add your own site to this feed

If you wish to send me feedback about the site or get your blog added, please send me an email at gregory at gregoryalexander dot com. Include your blog's name, URL, and RSS URL if you want me to include your blog.

I can also work with other blog owners to see if we can archive all of their existing blog posts. Contact me if you're interested.

Please follow us on Twitter

CfBlogs tweets any new blog postings on the CfBlogs Twitter feed found at https://twitter.com/CfBlogsFeed. The Twitter functionality should mirror the original twitter functionality of the ColdFusion Bloggers site.

I hope to also develop similar functionality with Facebook soon.

CfBlogs Future

In the future, I hope to add Facebook social media sharing, make major improvements and fix some of the bugs that were found, and to contact Hostek, CfWebTools, and other potential partners to see if they will sponsor this site. I also hope to gather a few other folks and provide them the keys so that our ColdFusion community will be able to rely upon this site if one of us goes down.

I also hope to put the new full codebase into an upcoming Galaxie Blog version so that other blog owners can adopt this type of functionality.

The CfWebTools team may be able to resurrect the original ColdFusion Bloggers code (in node.js). If they are able to do so, I hope that the resurrected site can be complimentary. That said, I fully intend on making this code much more functional in the future.

Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any ideas or suggestions!

Special Thanks

Many thanks go out to Raymond Camden, who assisted me and provided me his updated code, Adam Euans who helped compile a new active feed list, and Charlie Arehart who is, as always, a trusted person to bounce ideas off of and to ask for advice.