Life and Geekdom by Nancy

For a long time now, I have been perusing the Adobe MXNA Aggregator to read various blog news within the industry. The MXNA Aggregator is good .. but has started to annoy me in a couple of areas. Annoyance #1 is going to a page and finding the same announcement 10-15 times. I realize there is probably no way to filter out duplicates of the same story, but it happens a lot .. and a lot of times. Annoyance #2 is that I have to go through a lot of stuff I don’t really care about to find the things that I want to read.

Enter FRESH, a wonderful little AIR application that allows me to put the feeds I want into a desktop application and read the gurus and industry feeds that interest me .. and only those I want to read. It’s downloadable and free from Adobe Labs at this link: AIR Samples. You’ll need the Adobe AIR Runtime if you don’t have it, also downloadable and free from Adobe Labs. Install the Runtime and then the Fresh AIR application and start loading it with the feeds (you can make categories too) that you want to read and bingo! One click updating of all feeds once a day and you’re good to go with only those places you care about. Give it a try!

If you have wanted to give Backbase a try for AJAX development and have felt somewhat intimidated by the cost .. feel intimidated no longer! Backbase has released a free community version that is full functioning with only a per CPU (2) restriction so you can give it a try. I downloaded it this morning to see what it will do. If you want to give it a try, go here.

After approximately 3 weeks offline, the Adobe AirBus starts the second leg of the summer tour with a day-long seminar in Atlanta, Georgia. Last I heard, today was very close to sold out. But who doesn’t want to hear about Adobe AIR? Awesome!

Go here for details.

While most of this blog will be about web development, to know me is to know that I’m giddy because it’s football season! NFL, college, high school as long as my son’s school is winning .. I love ‘em all. So there WILL be the occasional football conversation through Superbowl Sunday, when of course, Peyton Manning and the Colts WILL repeat!

You have been warned!

Way back in 2002, I became one of the first bloggers that I knew. Back then, my blog was usually assistance for the Dreamweaver community and sometimes cool finds on the net. Little did I know then that some five years later, everyone in the biz (except me) would now be blogging! Hey .. wait for me! I wanna do this too!

Coming into the new age, I am dumping Blogger and doing my own with Wordpress. Here we go!  First a little about me.  I have been a Team Macromedia/Adobe Community Expert since 2002, usually in the dynamic areas of Dreamweaver, but my blog will definitely not be all about that.  I have an intense interest in Flex and AIR and many other things out there.  I’m a musician so I have to integrate that in here somehow and I have three children so look for some “mom” stuff along the way.