Robert Diamond

If you're at all like me (in which case, let me say "good luck to you!"), you spend a decent amount of your developer week traipsing around Macromedia's Web site. They've got an enormous wealth of information on there for those of us using CF, Flash, Dreamweaver, and the rest of the Macromedia product line as well.

They aren't of course providing us with all of these wonderful resources *just* because they're lovely people with very kind hearts. It's part of a focus on customer retention (they want us forever...FOREVER) and on cross-selling Macromedia's other products and services. ("That product works with that one? Who knew?!?") However, all joking aside, with the unmatched volume of information combined with the blogs, forums, custom tag directories, and everything else I've neglected to list, it should be at the top of most CFers' bookmarks.

Macromedia's site is highly trafficked of course - more so than a lot of people realize. They report site traffic - per day! - as being 1 million customers, 250,000 software downloads, 4 million downloads of the Flash player, and just to make things more complicated for their Web team, they publish it in 12 different languages hitting all the major points of Macromedia's global presence.

They've changed a lot of things on the site, as you'll probably notice right off the bat. Initial feedback on the various discussion groups seem to be mixed. Most of the changes are for the better, but nearly all of them will require some getting used to - and definitely some updates to a lot of the deeper link bookmarks that you might have. I know that we're definitely having some fun here at CFDJ with editors checking through all of our links on the CFDJ Web site to Macromedia content. (That's 550+ articles for those of you keeping track.)

Speaking of the CFDJ site, we're working on a serious upgrade to it here as well, adding in lots of new features and usability enhancements, and would welcome as much feedback as possible throughout the process. So, if there are features you'd like to see, that would make your life easier - suggest away! My e-mail address is here as always. . .

Also, by the time this issue is in your hands, voting will have begun in the 2003 CFDJ Readers' Choice Awards, so make sure to hop on over to our Web site to cast your vote for the best products and services of the year. We've got some new public and behind-the-scenes procedures in place as part of our constant goal to reduce voter fraud (and you nasty voters out there know who you are!). As always we're striving to make this year's awards even better than those that have come before. I think you'll be pleased with the results.

On a conference note, I'll see those of you attending CFUN 03, June 21 and 22 in Rockville, MD, as we present another CFDJ keynote panel discussing the latest issues of the day. For topics you'd like to see covered there, and subsequently in the magazine as well - shoot me on over an e-mail. For more information on the conference, visit www.cfconf.org/cfun-03.

Change and progress are usually for the better, as I think an ex-girlfriend told me (on her way out the door of course), and to stay competitive in today's world of Web sites, we developers must constantly strive to improve. That's a big personal theme of mine, and it's one that I hope you can see reflected in the content of the magazine and Web site. CFDJ is here to help.