I was reading my friend Kyle Hayes post from earlier today. In it, he discusses a service called fpoimage.com that he created based upon the concept of dummyimage.com. The concept is simple: create a way to fill placement images in your layouts during the design and mock-up phase. He improved upon the concept by adding the ability to have some descriptive text in the generated image. Using a little jQuery magic, I made the API even easier than it already was.

Two new projects and two updates this week in ColdFusion open source. This was a relatively quiet week for some reason. My guess is that most open source developers were distracted by either the Conan/Leno mess or trying to get the skinny on the breakup of Brangelina. I really can't see any other logical reason. Thankfully, those topics seem to have quieted down and open source developers can get back to the business of new releases.

So, I have been horribly lax in blogging this year so far. Besides my weekly open source update, I really haven't added much - at least on this blog. Outside of the blog though, I have been keeping insanely busy with side projects (including my ADC article which launched yesterday) all within the community - some I can talk about right now some I'll talk more about later. Here's a summary of some items I have neglected to post about but really should have.

Editor of Fusion Authority Online
I think having an 3rd party site that publishes "peer reviewed"/edited content is important for our community. Blogs are great but sometimes the best articles and ideas need the refining that can come from having your ideas reviewed and your message cleaned up. This is one of the reasons I agreed to be the online editor for Fusion Authority Online (see the announcement here) and why I am encouraging people to write for us. I also have contributed a couple articles of my own including:

• An Interview with John Wilker of 360Conferences
• Elad Elrom Talks Flash...and the City

Track Chair/Speaker for CFUnited
Last year's CFUnited was awesome and, in particular, the Flex track was an enormous improvement in large part thanks to Andrew Powell's work on that. This year, Andy cannot serve as track chair and I have agreed to take over this track. You can still submit topics, so please do!

In addition to being track chair, I am speaking on ColdFusion Builder extensions in my sessions currently titled "Building Self-Updating ColdFusion Builder Extensions" (see the announcement here).

Presentation to the Online ColdFusion Meetup Group
Charlie Arehart was kind enough to host me for the first time as a speaker for his Online Coldfusion Meetup Group. I presented my "Introduction to ColdSpring" session and you can find the recording on the group's site.

More...
There is so much stuff I can hardly keep track to be honest and some of it is still in the planning stages. I am tech editing a couple of books that I am excited about. I have another article coming for the Adobe Edge. I am working on the side with Shannon Hicks on Pintley. I am helping out on some other events I can't speak of yet. If anything, 2010 is shaping up to be a year of some great stuff but I am certainly going to have to bust my butt to get it all done.

My first article for the Adobe Developer Connection was released late today. It covers how to use a little library I created that is intended to make it easy to create extensions for ColdFusion Builder that auto-update (similar to how Mango auto-updates). At this point, it integrates with a URL you provide with the ide_config.xml and the zip or with a n extension hosted on RIAForge. The article covers the details of how to actual get this to work and, so far, I am pretty satisfied with how simple it is. There are some limitations to the implementation which I cover there mostly having to do with the fact that I just haven't had the time to add all the features I wanted yet.

However, I have actually given the project a name and project URL at RIAForge. I've decided to call the project Acme Boomerang for ColdFusion Builder to continue on my Looney Tunes theme and you can find it on RIAForge at acmeboomerang.riaforge.org. The zip is there (as well as on the article) and the code should be in SVN later this week. Please feel free to share your thoughts on the project as I plan to continue to expand the features.

Two new projects and three updates in ColdFusion open source this week. Yesterday, Liz Frederick announced all the new and renewed Adobe Community Professionals (formerly Adobe Community Experts) of which I am grateful to continue to be a part. Its especially great to see that this list contains a significant number of open source project creators and contributors for the ColdFusion community. Congratulations to all!