New Opportunities: Boston/Providence and Omaha
The Muse is on the lookout for any and all ColdFusion resources in the Boston/Providence area. One of our Tier 1 clients is looking to build a new team in that area and is asking for our assistance. So if you are a senior developer who thinks you can get through my grueling test and interview process and you want to work for a terrific consulting company that has doubled in size in the last year - send your resume to jobs@cfwebtools.com and let's have a chat.
On a related note I am looking for some local Omaha talent as well. Specifically I need a design resource that specializes in User Interface Design - creating user lexicons, visibility analysis, consistency, error and feedback standards, recognition vs. recall, minimalism etc. - and you live in or around the Omaha area (and by around I mean Sioux City, Lincoln, Council Bluffs and the Omaha Metro area), then feel free to contact me. We might have a great opportunity for you to make a significant contribution to an amazing suite of applications for a thriving business. Again - you would have to live in and around Omaha, or at least be willing to brook the subject of moving to Omaha within a reasonable time frame.
For those of you waiting for me to call you about the resume you already sent me in the last few weeks (there are about 15 or 20 of you) hang in there. We are in a 4 week cycle right now so you can bet I'll be contacting you very soon.
Fun and Games With Googlebot
When planning for scalability one of the things that is sometimes left out is the impact of indexing bots on your site. If you have a news or ecommerce site that is constantly changing, you definitely want bots to be indexing your site. How else are the latest and greatest products or stories going to show up in organic searches after all? But you also want bots to be well behaved. It would great if you could greet the bots at the door and say "Hey... it's 2:00am, not much going on so index to your heart's content." Or, "Whoa there fella - do you have a reservation? This is Cyber Monday and I'm afraid all our seats are full for paying customers. Can you come back in 12 hours?" But that sort of smart interaction is sadly not in the cards. Some bots have defined rules, some do not. Some honor things you put in the robots.txt file others do not. So here are some tips that might save you some time.
Read MoreFileZilla Vs. FileZilla - Battle of the Century
Here's a problem that comes under the heading of the right hand being unaware of what the left hand is doing. Seriously the right hand is like sitting back, relaxing, maybe pushing the remote and the left hand playing the drums, waving at passers-by and tap-dancing wearing a little tuxedo. The right hand says, "Hey.. what in the ham sandwich is going on over there?" And the left hand says... Eh... I'd say that is as far as I want to go with the whole left-hand-right-hand thing.
The Problem
From time to time I end up troubleshooting an FTP connection. Like most system admins I hate FTP with a capital ick. Insecure, clunky, fault intolerant... It's like arriving at the Oscars in a VW Bus. It gets you there but there has to be a better transport than this! Where we need to support FTP (and always through a VPN please - do the rest of us a favor!), we use a product called FileZilla FTP Server. It's a great product and you can be up and running in about 5 minutes on just about any windows platform. Simply add users, folders, IP restrictions etc. and you are off and running.
The only problem is that occasionally people will call and simply can't get connected. The server is able to recognize them and verify their credentials but when it issues its first server side command (list I think) it times out and drops the connection. After a while I realized that the folks who were experiencing this problem were people running the FileZilla client. That's right - the FileZilla client has trouble connecting to the FileZilla server. If I asked them to use a different client the problem went away.
The Solution
A few weeks ago I finally figured out the solution based on a comment by super-genius-guru Wil Genovese of Trunkful.com who (I'm thrilled to say) works for the Muse and does miraculous things almost every day for our company and staff. He mentioned the problem with FileZilla and UTF-8 encoding. Some experimentation helped me determine an actual fix. Apparently the FileZilla client is passing the string UTF-8 for encoding (which looks ok to me) and the FileZilla server is expecting "UTF8". Fortunately the site manager has a way of specifying a "custom encoding" string. Click on a site then click on the "charset" properties tab. One of the choices is "custom character set". Choose it and enter UTF8 (without the dash). You should be able to connect fine after that.
Note: this problem doesn't exist with every version of client and server combination.
Fun with SMTP Relay
This is a post about solving a particular problem with SMTP relay that involves mass emails. Whenever I write a post on this topic there are 2 things that my savvy readers always feel compelled to tell me:
- "Hey Muse, make sure you are not sending SPAM" - Thanks for the advice. The Muse takes a dim view of SPAM. Like everyone else I'm tired of being told I've won the lottery, have friends in Nigeria, and need to be more concerned about my size. The emails in this case are not spam - but if you are tempted to make that comment I appreciate that you have the Muse' back.
- "Hey Muse, you are crazy to do this yourself - Thanks for that as well. And please don't hesitate to tell me (again) about the various services that are out there - all of which are better equipped technically, mentally, physically, and ecumenically to handle my email so that I need not be an expert on the topic. I always appreciate that input. The only thing I like better than leaving money on the table is transferring it to another vendor. In fact it's an axiom of business to never do anything for money that you can pay someone else to do for you. Next week I'm writing about server troubleshooting and that will give you an additional opportunity to tell me (again) about how that no one needs to worry about that anymore either because the cloud fairies do it all magically.
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