The masses arrived in droves today totaling out at about 4,500 attendees. I tip my hat to the Adobe folks. They are great at crowd management and getting everyone where they need to be.

Today was part one of the keynote address. They said there was so much to cover, so they had to split it into two days. Kevin Lynch the big cheese at Adobe led the show. He covered current and emerging technologies ranging from ColdFusion, Flex, and the latest AIR. No real earth-shattering news, but they did showcase the work of some people and it looked really impressive.

I had the follow classes today:

Building a ColdFusion Multilingual Application

I really got a lot out of this first class. Apparently the UTF-8 encoding is key to displaying content in multiple languages. The same encoding is used to correctly save data to a database. We are looking into offering multiple language support on our major site, and I will base my templates on the techniques given. One technique was to set up a table which has an English term and the translations in each language in a relational table. Also, you can either set your sites language by a default, a cookie, or based on the locale from the users browser.

Search Engine Optimization

I wasnt too impressed with this class. It was basically, all about on-page optimization and building inbound links. There were a lot of people asking questions, because the track was basic. That chewed up a majority of the time of the class. I didnt learn anything I didnt already know.

Leveraging ColdFusion Components ColdFusion

This was a beginner level class, and I knew pretty much everything the guy was talking about. I spent most of the class checking my email and checking my web stats.

Image Manipulation in ColdFusion

This class was great. Nate Weiss, one of the authors of the ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit, walked us through all the different ways you can take a large image and generate dynamic thumbnails, resize, add watermarks, add text, and change resolution without altering the image on the server. This opens the doors for quickly manipulating images on the fly.

Tomorrow, I have the following classes:

• ColdFusion Powered AJAX
• Working With Data Feeds
• An Introduction to ColdFusion Powered Flex
• Online Ads That Attract