Thursday 26 September 2013

I... aaaah... see

G'day:
That heading works better if one is aware of how non-rhotic the Kiwi accent is.

Anyway, I was wittering away "helping" someone (Kyle Macey) with a CFML problem last night, when someone suugested taking the conversation to a different venue as the list of people being referenced in the conversation was taking up most of the Twitter message space.

And someone suggested using IRC.

Knock me over with a feather... people still use IRC?

So, anyway, not wanting to miss out, I decided to try to work out how the hell IRC works. It's one of those things I have been aware of for decades (OK, that's only two decades), but never used. So I googled "freenode" which is where people said they were going, and was confronted with this:


And having filled in those details (#coldfusion is the channel for CF stuff), I'm in:



It's all a bit text-based and raw, but I think it's better than Twitter for a few reasons:
  • that channel is dedicated to ColdFusion (well: let's say "CFML");
  • there are no photos of people's lunch;
  • or people advising via four-square that they have arrived at a public convenience, or any other shit that makes me roll my eyes in despair of humanity (overstated slightly)
  • one can type more than 140 characters!
That's enough to sell it to me.

One thing that came up in conversation there last night is that it was "busy" there, because about half a dozen people were talking (the description "busy" was applied with due irony). I'm currently speaking to Dan Skaggs on Google, and he has observed that it's fairly under utilised. I don't want to be like the "new guy" who just discovered something everyone else knows about,  but I suspect an awful lot of CFers who use Twitter (or don't use Twitter) to communicate possibly don't know about this option, so I suggested to Dan I could write this article to see if I can get it onto more people's radar. Thinking more CF-oriented chatter must be a good thing.

Anyway, job done... I've mentioned it. And my lunchbreak is pretty much over, so I'll press send. Maybe see you on the IRC channel...?

--
Adam