In avoiding real work for as long as possible, I've been catching up on daily web reading, which is minimal on deadline-heavy Tuesdays. I came across the site for this year's Association of Alternative Newsweeklies annual convention in Portland and started geeking out over the programming. Lots of web stuff, which makes me excited and anxious.

I'm not clear on why our Chronicle blog is not yet functioning, but I'm on the verge of asking some staffers to start their own so we can at least RSS over to the site. We could, I suppose, consider that a type of soft launch. The superweb duo over at the Jackson Free Press, who kindly mentored me for a couple of hours back at the AAN East convention in February, will wonder what the hell we're doing out here if we're not blogging before Portland.

The national convention has been geared toward management training in the short few years that I've been attending. (The trade group is the same age as me. We turn 30 this year.) Web publishing, however, is given top billing this time around as well.

JFP Publisher Todd Stauffer is leading a program on Best Practices and Solutions for various aspects of web publishing, and Sarah Quinn from Poynter is scheduled to talk about Eyetrack07, which I need to spend some more time with. I've hardly skimmed the surface, but even that was useful.