Hi, everyone. i've been tagged to keep us up to date on all things Dreamweaver. i expect i'll include in my brief other Adobe products that are related primarily to web design--products like Contribute and Fireworks--as well as web-related technologies like CSS. My first entry will be an introduction to myself and also an introduction to my favorite online resource for web-related technologies.

i've been using Dreamweaver since version 2, which was when i joined Macromedia back in the last millenium (1998, that was). i was lead developer in the Education Marketing group there until early 2006 (shortly after the Adobe acquisition*). That gave me an opportunity to be involved in a lot of web-based learning projects, using Flash, Dreamweaver, and ColdFusion, and i wrote quite a bit of curriculum. Still doing some of that these days, since i now have my own consulting business in instructional design and Adobe is one of my clients.

i sat next door to the Fireworks team here in Richardson for a number of years, which means i'm still learning Photoshop and some of the other Adobe graphic design tools. Fireworks is not a habit i intend to break.

Enough about me. Let me offer you something useful: my favorite web-based technology resource: Community MX. As a freelancer and web developer, this is the most useful site in my bookmarks. i have to stay up-to-date on a lot of technologies (and quite frankly, i don't), and Community MX always seems to have very practical articles and tutorials at a variety of levels. Although it is a subscription-based site, they offer a number of articles for free (for instance, here's a useful one on Feed Tools in Dreamweaver 8 and CS3: RSS and XSL that is available to non-members). It started out as a site dedicated to Macromedia products, but for the last couple of years, the weekly articles and tutorials have widened their focus to include all Adobe products, other technologies (like PHP), and helpful tips for running your own business.

i really started paying attention to the site several years ago when i needed to get up to speed on CSS. One of the perennials at Community MX is their CSS JumpStarts. These are CSS layouts and stylesheets that you can use and modify freely for your own purposes. They come not only with the stylesheets but the original art files and instructions for making a variety of updates. Using these JumpStarts not only gave a couple of my projects a quick leg up, but they also taught me a lot about CSS best practices along the way.

The annual subscription rate of $200 may seem a bit steep when it comes to actually getting out my wallet (because i'm such a cheapskate), but not so much when i compare it to other training sites, and definitely not when i take into account costs of the development time i've saved.

*Macromedians always referred to it as the "Merger."