Fun Times with Cold Fusion
Most people don’t program their websites with Cold Fusion. I’m one of a few who does, and I’ve been doing it since 2003. I had previously been an ASP and PHP developer for sites while I was working my way through college, and while I was trying to make extra money the first several years that I was in the film industry. It came about quite by accident. I got a job at a place called Direct Alliance, which was a subsidiary of Insight.com, and they were doing all of their development work in Cold Fusion. I was a little concerned about jumping into a job for a programming language that I didn’t know, but they told me that since I was an ASP programmer, I should have no problem picking it up.
They were right. I instantly fell in love with how beautifully Cold Fusion handles databases and programmatically works in-line with the rest of my HTML code, and so I went right home and reconfigured my website from an ASP site to a Cold Fusion site. I never looked back.
These days, I don’t do a lot of web programming. And no, I don’t really want to help you build your website, although I can – I’m just not going to. I do it only to keep my own sites up and running, and nothing more. I have no real love for web development. That being said, I do love having a super robust site that can handle a lot of bells and whistles and do some cool tricks.
For years, I built my sites from head to toe with no outside help or templates, but back in (I want to say) 2018, I realized that my web development skills were way out of date, and I didn’t have enough passion for it to try and upgrade them too much. So, that year I decided to look into utilizing more modern templates with better CSS, cooler bells and whistles and all sorts of other goodies. And I found some. The only problem is, they were kind of dumb. Everything had to be hard coded in. So, if I wanted to add something new to my site, add a new image, or a new job, a new portfolio piece – anything – I had to force it into the code. My sites have been dynamic for so long, there was no way I was about to do that. So, I have had the arduous task of converting someone else’s confusing array of html, CSS and JavaScript into a more elegant, database driven Cold Fusion website.
I went through that hurdle the first time back in 2018/2019 and finally got my “Four Horsemen” site (I call it that because my design was based around the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that I did for “The Mist” some years back), and there it has set for the last 6 years. About 3 years ago, I put on my dry erase board “Update Website” and only now have I gotten around to it. This time around the design was the key. I needed something that felt more branded like me, and something that showcased my work, not just as a visual effects artist, but also as a musician & composer, a writer, and as a programmer – among other things. Once I had the design in place it was just a matter of hammering out the details to get this thing rebuilt, starting from a fresh copy of my downloaded template system. Once again, I’ve had to strip it apart and rebuild it all both for my own design purposes and to get it to work with my database and all the information I’ve collected over the years.
Even now I haven’t completely finished building this thing, but the progress is significant enough that I’m proud to start telling the world about it. Now, it’s mostly about getting all the content updated – which is its own arduous task. There’s a few more pages that I need to build out, but for the most part I now have an updated site that I think speaks for itself.
Check it out at https://www.AdamDBenson.com!
