I have been messing around with web development for 10 years. In this time I have learned a lot about the web. I have moved through HTML to XHTML, added CSS, learned to program and since have programmed in several languages. In that same 10 years websites have changed immensely. They have gone form simple online pages to complete applications. They have gone from simple catalogs of information to interactive social communities.

One thing the web development industry has always offered is a strong online community. If it wasn’t for the documentation other programmers offered, online forums, and help of other programmer friends there is no way I could have learned what I now know. You can’t be an expert in everything, but thanks to a strong online web development community you can always find someone who knows more about a particular function or topic than you do. The help and goodwill of strangers has helped me to complete many difficult projects.

If you’re just starting out in web development I strongly suggest you hop on the juice now. Join some forums, subscribe to some blogs, share, and learn. I started this blog as a way to give back. Cataloging what I learn in a single place in turn helps other programmers who come after me. I encourage each of you to live open source and find ways to use and give back to the web development community. Without such a strong community our jobs would be much more difficult. Don’t fear, you can use web development steroids as much as you’d like without fear of testicular shrinkage.

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Yesterday, I saw a press release from Network Solutions announcing a new web developer community called LinkTogether. I am of course leery of any community developed by a corporation, especially one that is so closely tied to their target audience. That being said, I am a sucker for anything that is targeted at web developers and designers so I had to check it out.

After an hour of investigation I have to say I am intrigued. The majority of LinkTogether is made up of already common tools like forums, tutorials, and a developer community. What makes it different is it has some other fantastic resources for web developers like a list of pre-developed legal documents, white papers, and downloadable tools and applications. In addition, they have LinkTogether Challenges where developers can win money for their applications. I didn’t have much time to explore the challenges section but it seemed like an interesting concept.

Overall, I thought this was an interesting community that offers some great free tools for small web development firms. From a usability standpoint there are some changes I would make, particularly the way they force your password format. It will be interesting to see how this community develops, and what caliber of web professionals you will be able to find here. At this stage, it is still a little weak from a content standpoint but I think it is worth monitoring for awhile to see how it grows. If you sign-up and try it out leave me a comment to let me know what you think.

Check it out: http://www.linktogether.com

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The new project is a promotional video for the University of Northern Colorado which combines video, personalization, and interaction to provide a unique promotional experience for prospective students. The video offers several types of personalization including, personalized audio, name personalization of posters, iPhone, and whiteboard. This system, like the one we developed for the InspriedSeason.com project also makes an outgoing voice call to the phone number the users provides helping to engage them in the experience of the video.

I apologize to my loyal fans. I have been busy trying to complete this project and a couple others before Christmas and I have slacked on posting the last few days. Hopefully after Christmas I will be able to get back on my regular posting schedule.

In the meantime, check out the new project and let me know what you think: http://findyourplace.unco.edu. Also, if you haven’t seen the InspiredSeason.com promotion for Gonzaga Women’s Basketball check that out too.

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Over the years I have tried a number of different Flash Embed scripts. Most do roughly the same thing, most are fairly large in scope for what they achieve. At Zipline we have developed two separate scripts for internal use and both are available for free download. We have a very lightweight version of our Flash embed code that we use often for small Flash elements. This code has very little overhead and can be downloaded at: http://www.gozipline.com/downloads/simpleFlash.zip. Our more advanced Flash embed script is designed to be a little more search engine friendly as it allows you to specify alternative content for users and browsers that cannot view Flash. The script works by allowing you to specify a holder element like a div with an ID. Then you fill that item with content for users that do not have Flash enabled. If the users has Flash enabled they will see the Flash no the alternative content. More information and a download of this script is available at: http://www.gozipline.com/25,jsseoflashembedscript.

While both those are handy lightweight scripts there are other great scripts out there that offer many more features. If you planning to insert incoming variables or use other advanced Flash embedding techniques I would suggest looking at SWFObject. SWFObject offers all of the features of our Flash embed scripts and a lot more. It is not as nearly as lightweight but it comes with many great features and is now available as part of the Google code project. If you are unfamiliar with the Google Code project, it is basically a Google sponsored repository of prominent libraries like jQuery so that developers can share a single codebase. Centralizing these scripts allows users to cache them at one location and quickly access them at each site they visit. It also means that developers don’t have to store a copy on their server for each site they develop. Check out SWFObject at: http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/ and the Google code project at: http://code.google.com/.

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Unfortunately, using this text box was the only way to achieve the result I was looking for so I had to find a work around. I searched around the net and found a couple of possible solutions but everything I found was geared towards Actionscript 2.0 and nothing I found worked in my Flash movie.

Finally, after searching around with no luck I decided to develop my own solution. How I solved this problem was I created an externally imported package that stored a set of global variables. (I did this because Actionscript 3.0 doesn’t have a built in global variable method) I then set the value of these global variables in my main movie. After they were set I went into my nested movie clip and added a quick bit of Actionscript to set the value of the text box within that movie clip from the global variable. When the movie runs the dynamic text box in the movie clip is updated with content from my main Actionscript file.

Note: One thing I will mention is that I did not try this with a movie clip that was added to the stage prior to setting the global variable. In my particular example I am setting the global variable in Actionscript and then adding the movie clip to the stage also using Actionscript. I don’t know if it will work if the value is updated after the movie clip has been added to the stage but it is worth a try.

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FOWA London – http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/content

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It was pretty easy…. here is the code we used:

//SET THE MAILTO ADDRESS
var emailLink:String = "mailto:email@address.com";
 
//ADD EVENT LISTENER FOR EMAIL LINK
mailtoLink.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN,function():void {
     navigateToURL(new URLRequest(emailLink), "_blank");}
);

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