Greg Nilsen

You may have noticed that some of my postings have dwindled in the past year.  There have been several reasons for that, with the greatest being the additional time that fatherhood demands.

However, another big reason for the downturn has been my satisfaction with my previous blogging platform.  It was a ColdFusion-based solution (which I have a bias towards being a ColdFusion developer) which was very solid.  However, I had made a number of customizations to it to meet my needs, which make keeping up with new revisions nearly impossible.  So, I have not been able to take advantage of new fixes and functionality, and have not had the time to redo the adjustments I had put together for previous versions.

So, I made the pretty radical decision to completely change platforms for my blog, to a more widely used application that I allows me to make customizations, but still keep up with version changes going forward.

However, the one big drawback to this is that I lost all comments on my posts (my new platform did not support importing them from my old platform), which is kind of a downer.  I do still have them all in backups, but have no easy way to tie them into the new setup.

Yet, I think the transition will be worth it.  I’ll have the time to focus more on writing and less on trying to maintain my old hack-and-slash solution, which is what I’d like to do anyway.

Ok, so I was getting a little tired of the plain, minimalist look, and decided to go with something more modern and vibrant.  I think it turned out quite OK.

And, yes, that is a picture of me up at the top!

Has it been evident that I haven't been exactly sure how I want my site to present itself?  Well, I've been trying to do a balance of my web design skills and my personality, with some less than stellar results in the past.

Well, after much searching and work, I think I've found a design that suits both just fine.  So, welcome to the new GregNilsen.com!

Let me know what you think.

I've made a slight change to the FeedBurner feed I've been using, so please update your feed readers to point at:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/GregNilsen

Thanks!

An update for the Last.Played pod for blogCFC has been released. 

Nothing too major, but if your site gets moderate traffic, then this should reduce the number of error messages you get due to XML contention.  So instead of having the XML file with the song information get hit up on every call of the pod, the values are instead stored in the Application scope of your site.

Head on over to the main Last.Played page to get your updated copy.

Are you a Last.FM and BlogCFC user who doesn't want to bog your site down with  bulky flash applications, but still display the music that you love?  Well, then Last.Played is the BlogCFC Pod for you.  Easily display the song information and album art for the music you have most recently listened to, and even generate income by linking to Amazon product pages!

Last.Played Homepage

Mostly, this was just a fun little project to create something I wanted, and I hope others can make use of it as well!

Just as a reference for anyone who comes by, but I've added a new projects page to the site to show off some of the work I've done and am doing.

Well…once again I've been bad about posting on this blog.  While the holiday season has kept me busy, I've spent most of my posting efforts doing daily posts for my Advent Project over on If Jesus Had A Website.  It's been an interesting project, and I don't think I've ever posted so much.  Some days, I've gone for more informative posts, and others I've been more reflective.  All in all, it's been a great way for me to ponder all the different parts of the Christmas season and what exactly they mean.

I've also been working on the first version of my Last.Played pod for BlogCFC, which allows you to display the information and artwork for the most recently scrobbled song on Last.fm, and its nearly complete.  I had been using the now playing plugin and display through iTunes, but since I found out about WinAmp 5.5, I've gotten away from iTunes.  Since I'm a Last.fm user anyway, I thought this would be the best solution.  I might not get it done until after Christmas, but I'd rather be spending that time with family anyway.

Anyway, as the title of this post implies, today is my birthday.  Yep, another year older already, but at least I'm still the spring chicken at work.

Feel free to drop me a line with your birthday wishes, and let me know if you'd like to send me any gifts.

Just kidding!  I mean, unless you really want to!  That'd be awesome!

Well, after several months of just having the time to make the changes to my homebrew blogging solution, I've decided to make the move to Ray Camden's BlogCFC.  Part of this was because I wanted to have more time to work on other projects, and part of it was to make writing to my blogs easier on myself.  So, I've made the move with both this blog and my one over at IfJesusHadAWebsite.net. 

I'm sure I'll be making a number of tweaks to the look and functionality of the site.  I've already made a few changes to have both blogs run on the same instance under different URLs, maintain separate pods (or the blocks over on the right), and work smoothly with Gmail for Domains available through Google Apps (thank you CF8 and useTLS).  Oh, and while the old URL's won't work any more for posts and such, they will dump you out on the main page.  However, the feedburner feeds have been updated, so you won't miss anything if you've subscribed.

Hopefully, this will be a relatively smooth transition though.

I just thought I'd point out a few projects that have been keeping me busy in the last few months which are now rolling full force on the web.

First, the Ballan Real Estate website which I worked on with my friend Wade. A pretty simple site here using just HTML and CSS. I would have liked to do a little ColdFusion work to allow the company to update their lot profiles and other details, but they only wanted simple, and that's what we gave them.

Second, the Red Sox Faithful site was finally launched during the MLB All-Star game last Tuesday. It's basically a ColdFusion version of the forums we had in PHP over at RedSox2000 the last few years. Basically, the old site had gotten bogged down in spam and difficult interface, so I tried my hand at rewriting the forums from scratch. I'm happy with how they came out, but I'm still tweaking a few things here and there.

I'm sure the Red Sox Faithful site will keep me busy in the coming months as I add features and work out bugs, but I'll also be planning on re-engineering my blogging platform in CF8 into something that is a little more full-featured (like with a real admin panel and can run multiple blogs at once). That will be my big intro to CF8 and all it's new features, and I'm looking forward to tackling the project.

Anyway, let me know what you think of my latest work when you get a chance!