W00t!

A very exciting day, yesterday; I received my shipment of books and I must say, I'm very happy with the overall production quality of the book. It's pretty cool to see all the illustrations in full color!

Sporting a bright banana-yellow cover (you almost need sunglasses!) the book definitely stands out. Kinda like some of my shirts . . .

In the next few weeks, I hope to release a few excerpts of the book here on CMX, so stay tuned.

It should be in bookstores soon, so if you're interested in learning FW from the ground up, make sure to check it out.

TODCon will be here very soon. Yep, I'm counting the days. OK that's not the secret.

It'll be great to hook up with some CMX friends and regular TODCon attendees and speakers. Well, that's no secret either.

I've written the last three CMXtraneous blog posts! That's more of a shock than a surprise, though. 

I'm pretty stoked about the Fireworks public beta. The Fireworks engineering team has done a phenominal job. It's to the point now where I don't like going back to CS3. Yeah, not really a secret there either, the way I've been blabbing all week long about it.

The secret is my second TODCon session. It will be a live demo of the new features in the Fireworks Public beta! We'll look at some of the cool features you've read about in my recent articles as well as Kim Cavanaugh's piece on the Path panel. Based on what you've read and heard this week, I hope you pull up a chair for my session.

Alan Musselman from Adobe will also be presenting a session on Fireworks. He'll no doubt have some very awesome and cool stuff to share as well.

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone. I'll be the guy with the loud shirt and - new this year - a limp (sprained my ankle and pulled a tendon a couple weeks ago YEOUCH). Feel free to have pity on me and buy me a martini or at least help me to the gift shop for a new fashion statement. ;-)

Happy Anniversary to CMX and my fellow CMX'ers!!

Thanks to everyone who has worked so hard to make this site the success it is. And of course a huge thank you to all of our loyal subscribers, we wouldn't be here without you. :-)

Wow...hard to believe it's been 5 years! I have to say it's been a hell of a ride, and one I've thouroughly enjoyed and been proud to be a part of.

If you have read my most recent article, Tools for Designers: del.icio.us and Flickr', I made mention of starting a CMX Blog piece for anyone interested in sharing their design and inspiration tools,resourceful solutions for their business, and for self-organizational purposes.

Please leave a comment on this post to share your thoughts. I look forward to seeing what you're up to and if I can get new ideas and be inspired by your ideas.

Happy blogging!

We get a lot of positive feedback about our JumpStarts. They are a great way to kick start the design and production process and can really speed up development time. They're so great, I use them myself!

Last month I was approached by a personal trainer who needed a web site. A friend had been promising for about 4 months to make one for her but at the time she contacted me, nothing had yet materialized. My client was serious about promoting her business and really wanted to get her name on the web. As a small business owner, her budget was not very large and while her site was going to be fairly simple, she really wanted someting clean, professional and contemporary.

Enter CMX JumpStarts. After my initial meeting with Caroline, I experimented with a few JS's, and decided that Traverse City woud be the perfect answer. Opening the PNG in Fireworks, I created my own custom banner and navigation icons. When I was happy, I exported out full size jpegs for my client to view. With some tweaking, the design got a green light and I jumped right into development.

The site took less than a month in real time before it went live (that was tonight - woo hoo) but in actual production hours, it took less than a week. Traverse City saved me a lot of time and as a result saved my client a fair chunk of change, too.

There's still work to be done - we're nailing down keywords and she has set up a photo shoot so we can get some current shots of her and what she does on the site. But that's the beauty of a web site; as long as the site appears whole and complete, you can continue to add to it as new content becomes available.

If you have a chance, check out GRIT Conditioning for some Great Results in Training! 

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!

A web buddy has just hipped me to This.

See that item down in the left corner? Safari now has a shiny new version number, and it works on the PC too. So old Stevie has entered the PC Browser Wars, eh? That should stir the pot a bit.

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.

It's coming! Our 2000th article.

What a milestone that is for us here at Community MX. And we couldn't have done it without you! Our loyal readership. To say "thanks" we're giving away something special tomorrow. Be sure to check out Community MX on Tuesday, February 20, to find out what the surprise is.

Members ... you rock! Thanks for supporting Community MX and helping to make us the resource for Adobe/Macromedia and web information.

Visitors ... check us out! Tomorrow's surprise is a sample of the quality information we publish each and every day. The trial subscription is free!

You may have noticed the release of the CMX mobile/handheld device CSS reference resource yesterday. With mobile access becoming an increasingly important area of our work. and information in general on CSS support for mobile browsers being scarce we thought it would be good to have an open source mobile reference point, a place where you can search for mobile device/browser information and also add devices to the resource.

When designing for the mobile internet you need to be aware that not all handheld devices' browsers support the handheld media type, many only see the screen media type which means your small screen design needs to be carefully planned out to ensure that you get the display you need. Further to this some handheld browsers read both the screen and handheld media style sheets so you need to be fully aware of the rules of specificity and how to implement them to deal with these browsers correctly.

Don't get caught in a trap where you think just declaring a handheld media type is good enough, it isn't.

You can access the desk top search interface here: http://www.communitymx.com/mobile/mobileD/ For info on handheld browser support you would be best searching for the browser name.

You can add your device to the database for others to reference by visiting here: http://www.communitymx.com/mobile/ this is only accessible by handheld devices though. If you do add your device please complete the CSS reference point checks.

An article on using and how the data collection works is available here: http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=AA8A9

Look forward to hearing any comments you may have.

Sometimes I get a bit behind on my Community MX reading and have to catch up in one fell swoop. This morning, I was having a look at the past few articles and found a most awesome resource that Sheri German put together. Though we're in the midst of a site redesign (yes, we know it's sometimes tough to find the exact article you want as CMX approaches 1950 articles!) it's not done yet. In the interim, Sheri has compiled the CSS section of the site into a great learning guide that you'll want to keep nearby. It's free, for those that aren't members, and groups articles by subject and gives you an idea of their levels and what to tackle first.

I had to share this one! Design Your Own Custom CMX CSS Course -- a learning resource guide.

Also, in case you missed it, over the holidays Adobe launched a CSS-related beta of their own - CSS Advisor. CSS Advisor is a resource where information on CSS bugs will be compiled by the community with links to their originators and other resources where possible. A kind of all-in-one-place starting point to pinpoint what your bugs might be and find solutions.

Design Resources

Finally, more related to design than CSS, Adobe has another beta you may have missed called Kuler. Kuler is a color blending tool and I must say, it's the best I've seen so far. Create a free account and then, starting with the base color you want, create palettes of analgous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound, shades and custom shades. It's very easy to use too since you can either move sliders or use a color wheel with these nice little "arms" you can move around. And, well -- just go play with it, save and share your own custom palettes!

Last year, I made a blog post here describing a certain holiday song/story that my brother and I used to listen to on a holiday album my mother used to have. The story was by Red Skelton and it was called "The Littlest Christmas Tree".

Since that post last year, I have received so many personal e-mails and responses to my blog from people telling me how they too had listened to that story on that same album and how they thought they'd never be able to find it ever again.

Needless to say, when I did my very thorough internet search last year for this Red Skelton story, I never thought I'd get the response that I have. Last year, I was just trying to find out if I could still purchase the story some where or if that old holiday album even existed any more. Apparently, the album has been re-recorded but the story has been left off. I found a lot of Red Skelton stuff - CDs and DVds but nothing that gave definitive proof whether this story was included on any of his collections. But I did find a web site that had a WAV file of the story. It was here: www.albertarose.org.

If you go to my original blog, you can get the direct link from there. But what I thought I'd do this year is save it to my own web site in a .MOV file... just in case there have been some web visitors out there that have been unable to listen to the Albertarose WAV file.

Here is the .MOV version of the Littlest Christmas Tree, by Red Skelton:
The Littlest Christmas Tree (.MOV)

Have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday Season this year!

Sincerely,
-Chris Flick

The last part of a 3-part series I wrote about building a multi-language site goes live today at Community MX. I've seen different ways of creating data-driven multi-language sites, but the method I used in the series uses an incredibly underused technique involving ColdFusion custom tags. Basically, the technique will turn any simple, well-formed HTML or XHTML page into a content management system with only one tag required on the page. Using <cfimport> you can create custom tags using any name you want -- including the names of HTML tags. What that essentially means is that your h1, h2, h3, p, a, td, th, and any other tag you want to use can become a custom tag with the full power of the ColdFusion language.

Maybe it's been done before, but I devised the system because I'm lazy -- I didn't want to have to rewrite pages and have to type content again. The system actually sucks the current content out of your site and puts it in the database -- and then from that moment on uses the content from the database instead. Also, the fact that you can use ColdFusion code in the custom tags allows you to insert things like administrative links to edit content.

The article series shows the construction of the base custom tag, the custom tags that take the place of the html tags, and the administrative page that allows you to edit and update content in 1 or more languages. The first part was a freebie, and part 2 and part 3 are free for subscribers and a small fee for non-subscribers.

Today our article Newly Supported CSS Selectors in IE7 appeared, and by pure serendipity we got a note all the way from Brazil on this very subject.

Mauricio Samy Silva has created a PHP page that allows you to type advanced compound CSS selectors into a field and see the results live on the same page. Cool! Just what we need to cram those new combinator combinations into our craniums.

Sorry. :-D

Now that I have your attention :-)

Santorini is the location for our latest JumpStart offering. Sun-drenched beaches, legends of Atlantis, strong coffee. What could be better? ... Something free, of course.

The Santorini JumpStart is free. Take the design and make it your own. It's got the goods with respect to valid XHTML and CSS and compliance to accessibility and 508 standards. And when you're done, submit your adaptation to our brilliant panel of CMX judges.You might just win a one-year subscription to Community MX!

Oh, and did I mention that Santorini is a 3-column fixed/fluid layout? The two outside columns are fixed width but the center one is liquid, stretching to fill the remaining space. Plus, it's got a bunch of cool, Gordon-Mackay-quality icons.

As you may have noticed from my recent articles, I've been on a bit of an organizational kick. It all started (or became more focused) when I downloaded the LightRoom beta from Adobe. Pretty cool software which I am still playing with.

Ironically, playing with LightRoom got me thinking more and more about Adobe Bridge, and its functionality. While not near as sexy as LightRoom, Bridge is packed with functionality that can really help to streamline your workflow and business.

I've been using Bridge for quite some time to add Metadata to all my images before they are burned to CD and/or shipped to the client, or even uploaded to my flickr site. But lately I've been experimenting more with the search, keyword and rating features. This experimentation has resulted in a series of articles about Adobe Bridge. So far, Parts 1 and 2 are online. Parts 3 and 4 are completed and will be hitting cyberspace some time soon.

The Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge Series:

• Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 1: Batch Renaming
• Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 2: Working with Metadata
  

Coming Soon! 

• Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 3: Keywords and Searches and Collections - Oh My!
• Getting Organized with Adobe Bridge - Part 4: Rating and Labelling

I didn't begin writing about the Bridge with a series of articles in mind. However, the more I played (and found cool things) the more I thought about sharing those discoveries with you.

I'm not sure if I have any more Bridge articles up my sleeve, but as I continue to work with the application, the muse may slap me upside the head yet again. Part four was a bit of a surprise even to me. I hadn't even thought about going over these features until I realized how often I use the rating feature myself.

I'm also finding this information to be very useful to my current students. This semester, I am teaching photojournalism and photography to students in two different journalism programs at Centennial College.

One core component of the courses is Photoshop instruction, but it occurred to me recently how valuable the Bridge can be to these students and how important it is to instil good organizational habits early. This is of particular relevance to my photojournalism students, because Bridge works with XMP data and follows IPTC standards for data storage/input. The type of information you can include/embed with an image file will become part of their photography workflow when they enter the profession.

Adobe has also acknowledged and embraced this technology with the creation of their XMP toolkit and the extended capabilites of the File Info feature.

For those of you who are not photographers, Adobe Bridge works with multiple image formats, not just photographs. Whether you have a collection of PNG designs for a web site, or a bunch of animated GIFS, Bridge can help you get - and stay - organized with those files as well. So if you haven't had the chance yet, be sure to take a peek at these articles.

Anything you can do to make your life easier is a good thing, in my view.

As Adobe continues to develop its myriad product lines, I hope to see Bridge capability or integration with other programs, too.

We published my very first JumpStart today. When I'm not working like a fiend, I love to garden. So I combined my two passions into our latest JumpStart offering: Greenville.

Like all of our JumpStarts, this one is uses valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 markup and follows WAI and Section 508 accessibility guidelines

Be sure to check out Sheri's redesign. Besides being a lovely site, it does a great job of showcasing how easy it is to adapt our JumpStarts to your own projects.

I hope you have fun with Greenville!

Well, what can you say? Another heartbreaking loss for the senior league in last night's All-star game. Brought back memories of two years or so ago when the National League had their best closer on the mound at the time - Eric Gagne - and he ended up blowing a save opportunity. I know a lot of people probably enjoy a higher scoring all-star game but last night was an enjoyable game to watch.

At the same time though, it also proved to be exactly why I tend to dislike the American League so much. Last night proved exactly how meaningless the DH is - or, at least, how meaningless it SHOULD be. Big Pappi DH's because, apparently, he can't play defense yet he made a couple of outstanding fielding plays last night and, obviously, he played first base when the Red Sox beat the Cardinals in the World Series two years ago so why does he HAVE to be a DH? That's the thing I hate about the American League - and, with the American league winning the All-star game last night, the DH is going to again play a major advantage in the World Series this year since the American League will have, potentially, more games at home then the visiting National League team.

The nice thing is that the National League certainly has some exciting young players that made the game enjoyable to watch. Just sorry to see Nomar didn't get a chance to play... but that's the negative aspect about "making the game count". Garner had to make sure he had to have some reserves on the bench incase the national league tied the game in the ninth. I'm almost positive Nomar would have played in the 10 inning had the national League scored in their last at bat. I still say, in baseball, if 9 men play the field, those same 9 should bat. Ah well... maybe next year.

And now for a bit of a self-plug...

I've just started an Art Blog over at Blogger. The reason i did that is so I can share a wide variety of my art - not just stuff I've either done or am doing for Community MX. If you want to go check it out, the URL is: http://www.csf-graphics.blogspot.com. Come on over and say Hi or leave a comment on some of my stuff.

-Chris

You would have thought no one ever saw someone eat 3 lbs. of crabs before...

Hey folks... I've been back from TODCON almost a full day now (got back into Washington DC at 7:00pm last night). So I thought I'd give you a brief synopsis of my trip and what I did, what I thought and what I experienced the last couple of days at TODCON.

Thursday (leaving for Orlando):
My one big purchase for this trip was a Washington Nationals baseball jersey. I promised myself I wouldn't purchase any Nationals merchandise until Major League Baseball got their proverbial act together and named an owner and, since they did that two days before I had to leave, I was good to go with my capitalistic morals still intact.

Got to the hotel a few hours earlier then everyone else, so I got my room and walked around the lobby where I ran into Ray and Danielle Mickey. So, we helped Ray set up the registration table with all the books, t-shirts and name tags for all the TODCON attendees. For the t-shirts, I PROMISE I'll put the t-shirt design up on my web site today or tomorrow (I swear!). While Danielle and I were organizing the name tags, I grabbed Tom Green's name tag and re-inserted the generic name tag sample that comes with all the plastic holders. You've seen them before... they generally have a picture of man or woman with the office supply logo on them. So, in essence, Tom's tag has his name on the front and a picture of some generic secretary-looking lady on the back. I made a bet with Danielle to see how long it would take Tom to discover this. I won the bet with "half a day".

Later that night, many of us went to Roy's - a Hawaiian restaurant where Vicki Berry blinded us with her digital camera. The women is dangerous with a camera, folks! She's posted some of her TODCON pics here.

Friday:
After the sessions for the day, a group of us went out searching for a good ribs place. Unfortunately, after walking endlessly around the strip mall, we found out the place went out of business so we opted for a steakhouse instead. By that time though, I was too hungry to notice what the name of the place was but they had some gooooooood steak.

One of the TODCON attendees that came with our group was Hassan Ellis. Eating and talking with Hassan is an example of one of the nicest and coolest things about TODCON - it's a chance to meet your peers and "talk shop" in an intimate and pressure-free way that no other conference can. As Paul Davis is fond of saying: You sometimes learn MORE from the "after sessions" then you do DURING the actual sessions. TODCON gives you a chance to discuss and compare each other's working habits, techniques and general advice to one another.

By the end of the evening, we came to the conclusion that Hassan was "separated at birth" from the actor, Richard T. Jones ("Judging Amy) and we all had a good laugh about that as others at the conference told him the same thing (even though Hassan didn't know who Richard T. Jones was).

Saturday:
The morning session, we all got to talk with Scott Fegette and Paul Gubbay (formerly of Macromedia and now Adobe) about all of our "wishes" for all the tweaks, changes, improvements and other things related to the Adobe line of products. My "big wish" was that if we were all going to play "Taps" for Freehand, at least make Illustrator a lot more "Freehand-ish" so it's much more intuitive and easier to use. That and I wanted them to add "bendable triangles" in Fireworks so triangles can be manipulated the same way they currently are in Freehand.

That night, it was decided that seafood would be the place of eats that night. At first, I was reluctant to go since Ray said the place didn't have crabs - imagine that... a seafood restaurant that didn't serve crabs!!! Talk about the horror! But I decided to go any way.

Thankfully, the restaurant did, indeed, serve crabs. In fact, they had three main choices of snow crab legs to choose from: 1.5 pounds, 3 pounds or all-you-can-eat. To everyone's utter horror and shock, I chose the 3 pound selection and casually explained to all the dropped jaws at the table that I come from a long line of crab eaters and in the Flick family, we take our crab eating VERY seriously. Three pounds of crabs is nothing but I chose that instead of the all-you-can-eat selection because I would still be eating there if I did.

I'm telling you... it's like people never saw someone eat crabs before! Amateurs.

Later on, many of us decided to take the Trolley back to the hotel since it was about 5 miles away. Me? I decided to get off 4 miles away from the hotel. Mainly because I had to do some "tourist shopping" to bring back something for my wife and kids.

And... walking four miles wasn't a bad way to burn off three pounds of crab.

Later on that night, I went swimming at the hotel with the Interakt gang where two ducks decided a hotel pool was a nice place as any for a 1:00am dip as any!

Sunday:
Sunday was the debut of the Orlando Jumpstart. I designed the layout while Zoe, Sheri and Jim helped organize and put together. As in Las Vegas last year, we wanted to show a preview of the Orlando Jumpstart and give everyone there a taste of how it was put together and what some of the things you can do with it.

All in all, it was a great session and my first since speaking at MX North a few years ago. Quite a few people came up to me and told me how much they enjoyed my particular part in explaining the design process and commented that they would certainly be interested if I decided to ever do a full session on something at future TODCON. So if you were at this year's TODCON and attended our Orlando Session, what are some things you might like to see from a guy who mainly uses Photoshop, Fireworks, Freehand and Dreamweaver? TODCON 9 is, sadly, a full year away but like I always say, you can never start preparing too soon!

Anyway, that was some of my memorable moments at this year's TODCON. What were yours?

For Immediate Release

Yahoo! a global Internet communications, commerce and media company, today announced it has acquired Community MX, the world's leading online journal for web development information, tutorials, and news revolving around the Adobe Engagement Platform. The merger was announced at the winter meeting of the Community MX partners in St. Tropez, France.

"We're extremely excited about the partnership between Yahoo! and  Community MX", stated Mr. Ron Feeblebrewster, Vice President for Shoveling Cash at Internet 2.0 Companies. "We feel this will be a dynamic opportunity for Community MX to become part of the wider global audience and expand their offerings outside the English-speaking world."

Ray West, titular head of Community MX, provided additional information on the merger. "Well, this wasn't an easy decision by any stretch. We're doing pretty well at Community MX, but the opportunity to take the cash and run ultimately overcame our initial reluctance. So, basically, we did it for the money."

Details on the exact price that Yahoo! paid to acquire Community MX were not immediately available, but a company spokesperson described it as "obscene".

Yahoo! announced several important changes that will take place immediately at Community MX:

• Community MX will now simulataneously publish in the English, Farsi, Portugese, Russian, French, and Flemish languages.  
• All Community MX assets will be consolidated into a new high-speed data center: The Ernest T. Bass Chicken Ranch and Internet Hub in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
• Community MX operations will be consolidated into a new building to be constructed near the Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. "Something close, but not too close, if you know what I mean." was the direction provided by Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel when asked exactly where the sprawling enterprise might be located.
• Laurie Casolino, Operations Manager for Community MX was appointed to a new position at Yahoo!: Chief of Kicking Butts and Taking Names. Casolino's first action was to fire the manager of the corporate cafeteria for negligence when she found that decaffeinated coffee was being served.
  

Yahoo stock (YHOO), which had been trading at an average of $32.00 per share, immediately plunged to a historical low and was de-listed on the New York Stock Exchange.