TODCON 2007 RULED!

Ok, this was the best TODCon ever (exceptions listed below) and here are my top reasons:

• It was the largest so far!
• Great speaker line up with many new speakers
• Good deal of regulars attended and I always love seeing the regulars
• Adobe was there in force! (and they are a really great bunch of people, took time to speak to everyone they could and accepted everyone's suggestions and opinions to make the products better).
  • Ken - wow, managed to handle questions very diplomatically and with great patience (and yes, we want everything)
  • Randy - was sent to speak to the extension developers, which was me and Tom Muck - we had excellent conversations with some good dialog, really appreciated your time!
  • Christian - yes, Spry's code base is too big and, yes, I know you'll work on that :-) I enjoyed the conversations with you a lot and appreciate the time you spent talking with me (and the ideas you gave me for products I could make!)
  • Sharon - congrats on the promotion to manager! And thanks for the discussions on the product and helping us realize the daunting task of quality Adobe faces each cycle.
  • Greg - thanks for the dinner! And for bringing Steph in on time for her keynote session!
• I got to meet some wonderful small business people, some who'd been around for a little while (like the bike shop guys from Tallahassee - go Noles) and some who are just starting out (like Carrie Enders - CKA Creative who is transitioning from print work to web design work with a focus on small business).
• Met the crew from lucidus (or, found out they were the crew from lucidus, already having known them a little while) and that was cool!
• Found some new opportunities from several attenders via networking!
• Got to pick up the slack on giving Green a hard time.
• Several really good dinner conversations and good eats too!
• Found out that, in fact, I can survive drinking Pepsi instead of Coke products.

Some exceptions are:

• Chris Flick wasn't there, nor was Sheri and other regulars, they were really missed.
• Barbra had to leave early and I didn't get to spend any time chatting with her
• Vegas, in June, is still very very hot
• I didn't have an internet connection through the first half of my AJAX/server side presentation - but I was able to recover!
• Missed out on Chaz's BBQ dinner (heard he is a great griller!)
• Didn't get to meet with a lot of the new attenders this year.
• I have to wait another year to go to the next one (once Ray recovers from this one and wants to do the next one!)

As usual, the conference was better then the prior ones. Hopefully next year, everyone can attend and we will have a better conference then before! A special thanks to Judy for the ride to the airport!

It's coming. In two short days, TODCon will be here once again. And I can't wait.

Bright lights, big city, geeks . . . what more could someone ask for?

And the line up looks great. Some very cool topics will be covered. No doubt much fun will be had in the city that never sleeps.

If you're attending for the first time, you're in for a treat. If you're a veteran (like me and many others) it will be great to hook up with all of you again. If ya can't make it this year, save them nickels and book your spot for next year. It's a great networking and learning experience for everyone. Not to mention the most fun a geek ever had.

I'm holding two sessions this year, one about Fireworks integration with Bridge and Photoshop and the other on working with the new pages and sub layers features in FW.

It's been fantastic to see what Adobe has done as they bring all the products into the Adobe family. New life (and I believe new respect) has been breathed into Fireworks. As the sole true web graphics program in the Adobe line, I'm seeing lots of new users coing on board. Many are skeptical, but once they see how fast they can work in Fireworks without having to switch applications, I think they'll be sold.

Old friends, I'm looking forward to seeing you. I hope to make some new friends too.  I can't wait to see everyone.

You'd think that the perfect Web 2.0 recipe organizer would already exist online — after all, they have a tool for everything else! — but I have yet to find it.

Food blogs are really big now, and though I don't food blog myself, I have gotten hooked on reading them. In fact, I pretty much get all my recipes these days from food blogs and never look in my cookbooks. Why would I? They're not searchable, they don't have beautiful full color photos of every recipe, recipes aren't backed up by real people's comments of how they liked it or adapted it, etc. Online recipes really are the way to go.

I began bookmarking each individual recipe in del.icio.us, as do many other food bloggers and their readers, because you can tag each recipe bookmark with all of its main ingredients or other characteristics (like "low fat," "easy," "Indian") and then use those tags to search for recipes that contain the mixture of characteristics you are looking for. So, I could find all recipes tagged with the combination of "dinner," "low carb," "chicken," and "garlic" by using the plus signs by each tag listed as a "related tag" to further filter down. I could also just do a search within my bookmarks if I was looking for something very specific.

This system worked exactly as I wanted, with these exceptions:

• no photos of recipes from the pages
• no rating ability
• no ability to add items to my list that aren't online
  

The rating ability wasn't a big deal to me, and I could also do without the ability to add my own recipes (I was fine with maintaining both an online and offline paper recipe collection) but I really, really wanted the photos. I searched high and low for an online tool that had the abilities of del.icio.us but with the added ability to choose a picture from the page you're bookmarking to associate with the bookmark. I found a number of online recipe organizers that came nowhere close to what I needed, and a number of social bookmarking tools that let you have a thumbnail of the whole page associated with the bookmark but not an individual picture that you can choose from within the page itself.

Finally I found Kaboodle, which is billed mainly as a wish list and shopping site. I thought it did everything I wanted except the rating, so I was thrilled. But I was wrong — it actually lacks the essential search tool of combining multiple tags to search that is the strength of my current system in del.icio.us. You can view all your items with a specific tag, but then can only filter those by keywords within their titles, instead of by further tags.

So, I'm still without the perfect online recipe manager, and undecided whether to stick with del.icio.us or Kaboodle. If anyone has a suggestion for what to use, I'd love to hear it! In the meantime, I have no problem with someone stealing my idea for the perfect online recipe manager and becoming the next big Web 2.0 success story — just please let me be the first person in your beta.