It looks like my "one new Neptune program per month" goal got missed by a bit. I am going to blame a combination of cf.Objective, a recent vacation and associated upsurge in work.

In any event, here is the program for June (with only days to spare). RSS Reader is a simple program to get RSS feeds and display them on your site. While you could certainly use <CFFEED>, it is slow to get feeds on every page request and <CFFEED> sometimes has bugs (RSS Reader itself uses Ray Camden's rss.cfc under the hood).

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One thing that I run into frequently in my programming life is the desire to schedule events. I like CFSCHEDULE, but by iteself it has a few limitations that I don't like. It is a bit limited in the intervals available and I have to have an HTTP page set up for it.

What I want is the ability to schedule a CFC method to be run directly from that CFC. Fortunately, Scheduler.cfc allows me to do just that. Scheduler.cfc itself still requires a scheduled task to run it. Scheduler.cfc also has the ability to report data about the scheduled tasks that it has run, but (as it is just a CFC) it doesn't have a UI to report that data.

The Scheduler program solves both of those. It is essentially a wrapper for Scheduler.cfc. When the program is installed (copying it to a folder after installing Neptune), it automatically creates a "/schedule.cfm" and creates a ColdFusion scheduled task to execute it every 15 minutes (you can, of course change that). It also creates a page that reports all of the scheduled tasks running on the system as well as how long they execute (in seconds) on average, as well as the ability to see details of every time that they have run.

This information can be invaluable if you are trouble-shooting a scheduled task.

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I have tried a handful of ColdFusion shopping carts and I have never been happy with them. They tend to do more than I need, but not in the way that I need it. That they don't work quite as I need isn't a problem. That they are difficult to modify is.

After a few frustrating experiences, I finally decided to build a shopping cart the way I always wanted one to work. The real difference between this cart and others is that it assumes that you will have to modify it. Rather than give you 90% of what you need and making it hard to do the other 10%, it gives you closer to 60% of what you need, but makes it extremely easy to get the other 40%.

The result is a free, open source, shopping cart program that I call StarterCart. While it is very slim on features, it does provide some significant advantages over other shopping cart programs that I have seen.

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