For those of us in higher education, it's important to stay on top of what other institutions are doing. I usually attend two conferences a year and try to vary the target of those conferences. My last two have been Adobe- and ColdFusion-specific (MAX 2007 and CFUnited 2008), so this fall I'm swinging the pendulum back to a more general web development conference. The cool thing about this one is that I'll be rubbing shoulders with others who work in the higher education community rather than the business world. We can learn many things from those in general business, but there are specific things that the academic world does differently than business, so it is helpful to attend a conference of this sort on a regular basis.

I last attended the HighEdWeb Conference in 2004, so I'm looking forward to going again. Are any of you in Higher Education? Anyone else going to HighEdWeb? Early registration ends today, so if you are planning on going, register today to save $125!

As I mentioned in my previous post, Ben Forta is coming to Books & Co in Dayton, Ohio. While looking up the event on the Books & Co website, it is plainly obvious that they don't know about proofreading. Now I know it is easy to critique other sites and I know that I often do some of these things some of the time, but rarely do I string them altogether into a lump of coal. Here are some issues with the Books & Co site:

• Where is the contact information? - The only place they list contact information is on their location page. No e-mail. No online contact form. Nothing in the footer or header.
• Headline on homepage: "THIS WEEK IN DECEMBER" - The problem is that it is now January. So much for dynamic pages.
• Calendar of Events: "DECEMBER 2007 FEATURED AUTHOR EVENTS" - Which then lists all the events starting with January 5.
• And the biggie: BEN FORTNA is speaking about AJAZ - Must be a distant relative of Ben's speaking about some new Web 3.0 stuff.

Come on people--let's get relevant and read over your postings!

I read an interesting post from the ColdFusion Muse today about Creating CF Tags Out of HTML Tags. The basic point is that you can use the feature to have a regular HTML tag call a ColdFusion custom tag automagically, manipulate the tag data (including any attributes), and output modified HTML code. Interesting idea!