Adobe's Creative Cloud Disaster

It's almost as if I can hear the nails pounding the coffin shut. Every complaint on the web is another whack on the hammer. Adobe just killed itself with the Creative Cloud annoucement on Monday.

What an incredibly short sighted announcement! In essence, they announced that they are no longer "selling" software, just renting it. If you want upgrades, you have to start subscribing.

I am outraged! They announce this the first day of MAX and expect all of us to mindlessly jump on the cloud. 

Here are my problems with it:

1. Cost. Not everyone can shell out $50 a month for your software. Think of all the small business owners and educators and hobbyists out there who you have just priced out of the market. In the past they would buy the software when they could afford it and then use it for years until they had enough money to upgrade. You have lost all those customers.
2.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely. If we all get on the cloud, we are all at your mercy and you no longer have any compelling reasons to upgrade your software OR keep the cost affordable.
3. Shortsightedness. After years and years of paying your subscription prices, what happens if I need to take a quick look at an old .psd file and my subscription has run out? You are so greedy that I would have to re-subscribe to be able to open my own files.
4. I can't buy into bad management. If you will do something this brainless with your customers, you are going to ruin the software anyway and run this company into the ground.

I hate saying this, because I have always had nothing but love for Adobe. I have been using their software for 13 years. I currently own and frequently use the CS5.5 Master Collection.

My first action was to go to the Adobe Forums and complain on the Creative Cloud forum. I quickly noticed that Adobe was shuffling the complaints to the bottom of the stack.

Then I thought it might make a difference if I signed the petition that has been started on change.org.
I'm not normally an activist, but this has outraged me, and as Aaron Tippin would say "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."
http://www.change.org/petitions/adobe-systems-incorporated-eliminate-the-mandatory-creative-cloud-subscription-model

I still have the slightest glimmer of hope that someone in upper management at Adobe will realize this is a huge mistake and change it.

They can still have the cloud, I just want the choice to buy the software.

So I challenge those of you at MAX to go buy a poster board and a sharpie and TELL ADOBE HOW YOU FEEL. Carry them proudly in the lobby as MAX winds down! Don't be an ant in the Adobe colony, be a leader. Be an innovator. Stand up for what is right, and call them on this decision, because it's wrong.

The Importance of URL Rewriting

I am terrible about explaining things sometimes, and lately I've been working with a client on URL rewriting. I've done a lot of techno-speak but I'm not sure that I have really explained in laymans terms what URL rewriting is, and why it's important.

What is it?

When you go to your About us page on your web site right now, if you typed in the whole address into your browser, it might look something like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/index.cfm/sitepages/show/2

That URL doesn't tell us anything about the page, and it's very hard to remember.

Wouldn't it be better to have that URL be this?

http://www.yoursite.com/About-Us  

That is URL rewriting. It's the process of making your page names descriptive, instead of cryptic.

When we start rewriting those URL's, a great thing happens... you can now anticipate what a page will be.

Want to find out about services? My guess would be the URL would be:

http://www.yoursite.com/services

Want to go to the contact us page? My guess would be: 

http://www.yoursite.com/Contact-Us

Best of all, those guesses would be right! So by rewriting the URL's, the first thing we've done is make those pages easy to remember. If I'm on my smart phone and don't want to have to go to the home page of your site, to get to your contact page, I can now easily remember how to get there. With so many people using the browsers on their phones, making those pages easy to get to is going to increase your traffic.

But URL rewriting isn't just for people, it's for search engines too.

Google and other search engines give your pages a "rank."  When you do a search, the pages with the highest rankings show up first.

By making the name of the page descriptive of the content, your rank will improve, and therefore your pages will show up higher in searches.

So hopefully that is a simple explanation of what URL rewriting is, and why it's so important. If you are serious about SEO, URL rewriting is a smart thing to do.

Implementing URL rewriting in CFWheels
This is just how I do it in CFWheels. I'd really like to hear how others are accomplishing it to see if I can improve on the method.

Let's create a hypothetical table called "sitepages."
In that table, I create a field for the title of the page and a unique field for the "slug."

In the sitepages model, I add a beforeSave callback.
<!---Add this to the models init method--->
<cfset beforeSave("checktheslug")>

Then, I create the "checktheslug" function:

If the user doesn't specify a slug, then the slug takes the title of the page, replaces spaces with hyphens, and then strips out any extraneous characters like quotation marks, exclamation points, etc.

Then all I have to do is set up a route, and I'm in business:
<!---Add this to the routes --->
addRoute(name="sitepages", pattern="pages/[slug]", controller="sitepages", action="show");