Continuing the momentum I picked up in 2006 on speaking on ColdFusion, I already have two events scheduled in 2007.

First, I will be speaking at the Boise Code Camp again on Saturday February 10th. The Code Camp is a free, 1 day conference being put on by multiple developer groups in the Boise, Idaho area. ColdFusion, Ruby, Dot Net, Robotics, etc. So register now while there is room. I will be speaking on Generating PDF's using CFMX's built in capabilities, and using using the OpenSource iText project and ColdFusion's underlying Java engine to create PDF's.

Second, I will be doing a session on using ColdFusion to work with XML at CFUNITED this year in June in Bethesda, Maryland (outside of D.C.). Registration is open and the best rate discount expires in less than 10 days.

I will post more details on the sessions as they near.

Flickr becomes more and more awesome as you dive deeper and deeper. Literally seconds ago I discovered a feature unveiled last month called "Guest Pass" and I had to blog about it.

You can create Guest Passes to share sets that include private photos with persons that are not members of Flickr (and therefore can't normally be validated by Flickr to view your private photos).

This is brilliant of Flickr... it's such an easy way to get "in" to people's families and friends... especially since now to join Flickr you have to go through the steps of creating a Yahoo account (which may or may not be such a hard task, but one that some people might not be willing to do).

This past Monday night we had a Gingerbread House decorating party and invited some friends of ours and their families over, and I took photos of everyone decorating their houses. I wanted to share the photos with everyone that was at the party, so I created a Flickr Set of the photos, but I kept them all "private" because some people might be sensitive of posting photos of their kids on-line. I experimented with different ways of linking directly to the set trying to find a way to share the photos from Flickr but without making them public.

I couldn't.

I had two choices (that I knew of):

A) Tell our friends they needed to first, join Flickr, and then seconds, have me add them as a Friend, and then they could view the photos from the party.

- or -

B) I could spend the time and put together my own private web page gallery of the photos.

I opted to go with B (made much easier to do with Lightbox JS v2.0, but still a task).

If I had known that I could have created Guest Passes to my Flickr set, I could have been done in just a matter of minutes - and been much happier overall with the outcome.

I wish everyone I knew had Flickr accounts... it's an excellent way to keep tabs when you're a thousand miles away from your family.

I found out about the Guest Pass by being sent one myself from a friend who created a set to cover 2006 for her family. I think I might just do the same for my friends and family... and hopefully make some Flickr converts in the process.