Tom, don't doubt yourself. I've seen some of your work and I think you're off to a racing start in ColdFusion.
All of us who are working to improve our skills look back at work we did 12 months ago and think "i could do that much better now if i was doing it again". That's good. The time to worry is when you look at something you did a year ago and think "there's nothing I could improve if i did it again". You're learning, you're enquiring, you're recognising there are several ways to do things. Keep doing that and you're going to be great at this. I'm available any time you want to have a look at how I do stuff. I'll even give you a password to some of the sites I run if you like so you can see how I do thinks under the hood .. provided you promise not to break anything. My advice is to get a book and work through it. (Ben Forta's CFWACK is my favourite) Keep paying attention to this list. When someone shows a technique on this list, try to use it in your own code so you see how it works and understand it fully. Even if the site itself doesnt really justify the effort. That way you'll learn some pretty advanced stuff in a big hurry. Dreamweaver templates: Stay away from them, is my advice. There are far better ways to do what they promise in CF. My pages on small sites usually have a single include for a header, another for the menu bar, and another for the footer. Also other includes that might be called by those. Includes are far better ways to do it than Dreamweaver templates. Also I've found that dreamweaver doesn't like templates and cold fusion together. It munges (technical term) my code and makes me very angry and I send intemperate posts to this list. Application variables: I'm happy to show you one of my application.cfm files if you like, so you can see how I use it to configure a dev site, a staging site and a production site with the same code. Cheers Mike Kear Windsor, NSW, Australia AFP Webworks http://afpwebworks.com .com,.net,.org domains from AUD$20/Year On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 10:49:44 +1100, Tom MacKean <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I'm starting to doubt myself. After doing the basic FastTrack to CF > course I raced off and started building a new web site. Although I > eventually got all my apps working well enough, I've read so much lately > that I'm thinking about scrapping everything over Christmas and starting > again. Before I do, I wanted to get opinions from you guys about the > best ways to do things... > > Before I start, please bear in mind that I have no prior programming > experience before starting CF and have only be doing CF on and off for > about a year, so if my questions seem basic then I apologise... > > 1) Dreamweaver templates - Yes or No > > I'm working in Dreamweaver. I see lots of people talking about HomeSite > and others (Eclipse?) but I'm comfortable in DW. When I started I > automatically assumed that templates were the way to go. Then I > discovered cfinclude and thought that breaking my page into bits, then > including those bits was a better way. A page might then look like... > <cfinclude url="beforethehead.cfm"> > <head> > <cfinclude url="metas_and_stylesheets.cfm"> > <title> > <description> > </head> > <body> > <cfinclude url="navigation and stuff.cfm"> > <...all the page code that changes...> > <cfinclude url="footer.cfm"> > </body> > </html> > > Then I look at Peter's CFUG site and see that every page says > fuseaction=blahblah. Looks like you have one page and call content as > needed depending on the value of the fusebox variable. Yeah? This might > work well for my site as most pages will look identical just with > different content. Is this a common way to work? > > 2) Application variables > > Before I dicovered application variables, I had queries on each page. > Then I started putting queries into the Application.cfm file and doing > QoQ on them. Is this a good thing? When is it too much? I know that > Application.cfm "loads" on every page. If your Application.cfm is 20K > does that mean each page is 20K bigger and slower to load? How does this > work? > > 3) Security > > What are some specific things I can do to protect myself from hackers? > > ----- > If you can think of any other advice, I'm all ears. > > Thanks, > > Tom MacKean > > --- > You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Aussie Macromedia Developers: http://lists.daemon.com.au/ > -- --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Aussie Macromedia Developers: http://lists.daemon.com.au/
