Talking with someone from work today about my webhost had me investigating some of the many features that have gone unused on my account. They have great support — either through tickets or their wiki, subversion wherever and whenever you want, the ability to one click install loads of things, you can install trac, Ruby On Rails and just about anything you could ever want. To be honest, they support everything I want with one glaringly obvious exception — Coldfusion. I just noticed though they have a “Suggestions” section in their control panel (Home > Suggestions) where members can vote on features to implement. If you’re a Dreamhost customer, vote for it! Unfortunately it’s been on the suggestions list since 2004 so I’m not expecting much; but hey it won’t hurt to vote it up! I also added my votes for some other cool things like one click trac install and a handful of other interesting sounding features.

Dreamhost has been amazing so far, which makes me stay a loyal customer. There aren’t too many services online I can say that I pay for, which means they offer some great services. I am anxiously awaiting when MediaTemplate offers more than just a tease of their ColdFusion services, as the rest of their setup looks very impressive. I’m still looking for a ColdFusion host though, so if you have any suggestions please let me know. The only real requirements I have are CF 7 (hopefully upgrading to 8 when it comes out), apache and multiple domains.

Note: If you want to sign up with Dreamhost and want a full discount, you can use the promo code fortuna_waived which gives as much money off as possible ($97 if you order the 1yr plans). In other words I don’t make anything and you get full discount. Your second year will be full price I believe. Only thing you have to do if you sign up with this is vote for ColdFusion.

Sean Corfield mentioned it, but I thought I’d mention it at well – there’s no Coldfusion Weekly this week. I hadn’t realized it, but it’s quickly become a must-listen podcast for me, usually on Mondays. A few times I think I’ve grabbed it on Sunday night I believe too.

They mentioned in their last episode that they recently began using Del.icio.us to manage their links, with tags per episode. You can add these tags (or the entire user) to an RSS reader and instantly you have the initial link list to read over. I tend to find a lot of programming links either through CF Weekly, Del.icio.us or Digg, so having the delicious data for as specific a user as a Coldfusion Podcast is helpful.

I don’t know if they’re looking for this, but with Delicious you can also recommend links for a specific user. The way you do this is by tagging it with “for:cfweekly” all as one word. Next time that user logs in they’ll see bolded link up top that says “links for you (x)”, with X being the number of new links. This is an extremely useful method for sending links to people that I wish more people would use. My girlfriend and I use this daily to stay in touch. You can feel free to recommend any links for me using “for:dyogenez”, or view the growing collection over at http://del.icio.us/dyogenez.

As far as a single place to get all the latest news about Coldfusion, the Coldfusion Weekly podcast is doing a great job (keep going!), but there are a few other resources that can be used, but getting the entire CF Community to use something is like herding cats (ex: frameworks). The Coldfusion tag on Del.icio.us is going surprisingly strong though, and worth a look. OpenID isn’t doing bad lately either.

If you’re familiar with OpenID then ClaimID is a great place to start using it. I’ve mentioned ClaimID before, but if you’re not aware, it brands itself as the free, easy way to manage your online identity with OpenID. It’s a beutifully done interface complete with prototype Ajax magic, a well thought out interface and a very specific purpose (just managing links related to you). It’s one site that’s basically looking for new ways of using Microformats and open standards. For instance, they verify your webpages belong to you by checking for a MicroID meta tag in the header of your pages. Check the header of this page for an example — it’s a just a hash (sha1) of my email address and the URL. Basically the idea is that if you have a URL you can check if it’s owned by a given email address, but never get it from the hash. Very easy solution for a big web problem. They also have a little hcard, which they provide the little snippet to add wherever.

The new feature, which is pretty slick, involves OpenID based contacts. Which 37 Signals new Highrise application, and the insane population of LinkedIn, managing contacts seems to be of some importance. To be honest I don’t understand the LinkedIn ferver; having a place to manage my address book would be much more beneficial. ClaimID takes a slightly different approach to this. In the same way you might have a list of email addresses you regularly contact, you’d have a list of OpenID identities. I’m not sure I see any instant functionality in this aside from organizing contacts, but it could later be equivalent to an email list with all the additional information available on their OpenID URL. I see a lot of possibilities for it, and ClaimID is breaking new ground with this new service.