The title speaks for itself, but why blog about this?  Especially to a group as tech savy as we are?  Well to share an experience I have been going though at work lately.  At the company I work for we have a pretty wide range of age groups, well actually we have a huge age gap to say it bluntly.  I have heard statements that the average employee at my company is 49, I have also heard higher numbers... (wow)  The company I work for has been hiring new employees in a effort to bring in new blood and to secure its future.  Afterall there is a ton of knowledge that the majority of the employees have that must be passed on to the new employee generation. 

So what does this have to do with Blogs and RSS you might ask?  Well its simple really....

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Last week while I was at WebManiacs I decided I wanted to go with a different theme for my blog.  The GlossyBlue one was nice, but a lot of people are using it and I wanted to be a bit more unique.  I searched around and found a couple free WordPress themes and decided to port one over.  I must say skinning Mango is not as easy as I would like, but it isnt rocket science either.  I created a new skin in about 3 days, working via the plane, hotel room at night and this morning. I am not a CSS wizard so it could probably be done a lot faster if I had some more skillz.  I plan on skinning a couple more themes, which I will share.  This one however "BlueMoon" wont be shared until I decide to switch to a different one (sorry).

Laura did a pretty good job with the MangoBlog engine, it really has a lot of potential.  My only fuss is the docs need some love, I learned a lot about the MangoBlog engine by skinning my own.  There is still a lot I don't fully understand, in time hopefully I will. The Mate Docs (Flex Framework by AsFusion) are put together really well, maybe Mango Docs will aspire to them ;)

Oh quick note,  Mark Aplet also skinned a really nice theme.  He has the CSS talent I lack :)  Nice job Mark, you can download his skin here.

Day 1:

Ben Forta kicked off the event with a couple charts on where CF is now, and where its going.  He emphasized more on LiveCycle integration, Flex Integration and BlazeDS.  There was some confusion as to what exactly the difference is between the LiveCycle DS ES & Blaze DS... Adobe really needs to fix that so it's not so confusing.  He also talked a little bit about the CF Open Process Initiative.  I wont get into the details, but he basically talked about a bug tracker, a improved enhancement request process and a custom advisory board.  Ben Forta also hinted at some future CF 9 improvements one that I thought was being hinted at was AIR integration in CF 9.  He also "hinted" at a CF IDE, basically he said improving the developer experience... so you can read into that how ever you want.  I basically read it to say "CF IDE".  Enough said.  Overall Day 1 for me was pretty good, I attended a couple classes later in the day that I really liked.  One was ColdSpring, I learned more about the AOP capabilities of Coldspring than I knew before the class thanks to Matt Woodward.  I also attended a couple sessions on the new cfdocument and cfpdf capabilities.  I already have a couple use cases for the cfpdf capability when combining multiple pdfs into one.  I hope to have a sample on this blog in a couple days.

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Here in DC for webmaniacs conference.  Looking forward to it.  I have been doing the whole site seeing thing for the past 3 days and am ready to get back to work :)  I am staying @ the Homewood Suites (Hilton) off of 15th/Mass.  If anyone is interested in getting a beer, email me through the contact page of this blog.  I found a couple good beer places, Logan Tavern is pretty good.  They dont have draft beer, but they have a nice selection of bottled micro brewery beer. 

I need to go up and check out the conference venue sometime today, so I know where I am going tomorrow morning.  Anyway, I will see all you maniacs tomorrow.

I fly out this Friday to prepare for the webmaniacs conference next week.  My wife and I are doing a little site seeing prior to the conference over the weekend.  Should be a lot of fun and I am looking forward to getting away from work for a little bit and spending some QT with my wife. 

I took some time and put my "current" agenda on my google calendar.  They have a useful print option that saves the calendar to a PDF.  I have uploaded my schedule if anyone is interested in seeing what type of sessions I signed up for (see below), I may modify it a little.  I am not thrilled on some of the topics I signed up for the first two days of the conference and may make some adjustments.

I plan on posting my notes daily next week on either the days summary or a particular session.  I haven't decided, it really depends on how much time I have and how much time I want to invest in blogging all the cool stuff I hear about in the sessions and talking with other developers.  So stay tuned.

Download my WebManiacs Session Agenda