Viewing by month: November 2005
Basecamp on KISS
Business Week has a great interview with one of the owners of 37Signals on their design philosophy and why it's a good idea to keep things simple.
RDS: Server name or address could not be resolved...
This problem has plagued me for ages. After setting up a new site on my server, I could never reliably connect to any of the sites with RDS. Only a very few of the first sites that were set up on the server. I've been back and forth with Dreamweaver engineers and no one could ever seem to solve the problem. I spent an hour going through Google this evening, and no one had a sure fire fix for this ridiculously unhelpful error message...
Well I finally just decided to take a step back and take a better look at what was going on. I went back and looked at the installation log file that ColdFusion created when I installed it on my IIS box. I started following the same steps on my new site that I was having issues with. I had already added the CFIDE directory, but when I logged into my new site through /CFIDE/administrator, there was no RDS Password option available. When I logged in through one of my early sites on the box, sure enough, there was the RDS Password option. Both of these sites were using the same virtual CFIDE directory, so it wasn't a missing/corrupt file in the CFIDE directory.
Finally, it jumped right out and slapped me in the face. None of my new sites had the JRunScripts virtual directory... I mapped the JRunScripts virtual directory to C:\CFusionMX\runtime\lib\wsconfig\1 [with Execute Permissions set to Scripts and Executables (not Scripts Only my friends...)] and wallah! The RDS Password option popped up on my new site, and sure enough, I connected through RDS with absolutely no problem... I can't believe how long it's taken me to figure this one out, and it was something so silly. Hopefully this shows up high enough on Google so that someone else doesn't have to deal with it :).
New Stock Image Site Online
Fotolia is a new stock image site that just launched, and it looks like it offers quite a large number of high quality stock images right out of the gate. The prices seem reasonable, and none of the images are "rights-managed" which means they're royalty free, and if you buy a web only license, you can use it on the web how you please (at least that's how I read it). Looks like I have a new place to go to next time I need to make myself look good :).