I finally got to the point where I had seen just about as much spam that I could handle and being somewhat of a ColdFusion developer, I decided to take some action ...

My first shot at stopping the pesky spammers was by implementing a Lyla CAPTCHA. However, I had some problems getting the CFC working correctly, and after several failed attempts, I tried to use Rob Gonda's AjaxCFC with Lyla too ... Yet, I still wasn't able to get the CAPTCHA working ...

So, after talking with a friend, that is quite familiar with ColdFusion ... he asked me why I didn't just use CF8's native support for CAPTCHA's with the CF Image tag ...

I really hadn't even thought of it ... I found the answer ...

I learned quite a bit more CF code in order to get the image going along with some JS validation ... For starters, I got the base idea from Camden's example of using CF CAPTCHA ... but I didn't want to break the layout of my form page by expanding the form during validation error messages ... I had to find a way to convert Ray's form validation in to JavaScript validation ...

Well, I searched through hundreds of pages in order to find a solution to my problem ... How to turn ColdFusion variables ... in to JavaScript variables ... I didn't have a clue ... until I found another non-related tutorial example by ... (guess who ...) yep, it's Ray again ... that alluded to the toScript method ... almost everywhere else I had searched, returned answers which expresses that there was no way in converting a ColdFusion object in to a JavaScript object ...

So, I was one step closer to my goal ... then, I hit another obstacle ... the error strings all ended with a "<br />" in order to separate the error strings when returned to the page ... that would not convert in to a JavaScript variable ... New Problem ... how could I insert a line break » Carriage Return in to a ColdFusion variable ... and return it in JavaScript without throwing errors?

Thanks to the friendly Ben Nadel ... for his contributions to the CF community again ... where I found a post of his on converting CF characters to JS ...

So, with a bit of my own efforts some where in there ... I finally have a CF CAPTCHA on my site ... and can say good bye to the spammers ... bye spammers ... 

Okay, I recently got a little creative and decided to build a WordPress theme for my fledgling SEO Fort Lauderdale Blog ... I'm calling it Neo Hacked.

I got the initial idea to take a shot a customizing my own theme after I was researching an SEO article on the Google PageRank Algorithm by Ian Rogers.

Besides having a brain that will probably all the rage for the medial community once he dies ... Ian has a pretty good taste in design too ... I however, do not have the greatest taste in design ... and I'd be lucky to pass on the four and a half bucks worth of my dead minerals to the benefit of my family.

So, I attempted to develop a Hack out of the original theme that Ian used ... connections 1.0 ...  However, all I managed to do is log about 30 hours of coding practice only to realize that the theme was way too outdated to use as a base for the WordPress platform has sophisticated quite a bit since the initial release of the connections theme ... Take One = Scraped.

Except for the green, I really liked the look and feel of connections, but I needed a more powerful template to work with ... so, I tried to use a couple of Pearson's chops ... The second shot went up with the Cutline theme ... but that didn't work out too well either ... Then I tried to build out the theme with the SandBox ... But, that didn't work out either ... It could have but I honestly didn't want to invest the time that it would take to build an entirely original theme ... I'm a lazy programmer.

End Result? I used the Neo Classical theme as the base template ... and ripped out the CSS and layout styles that were native to connections ... The whole process took me about a week to get right ... but I am happy with it.