switch(case)

If you’ve been experiencing weird behavior with the site lately…

So I had my hosting provider switch me over to a much better .NET  server setup this weekend. So all of my sites went through a nameservers change. The hosting company will concurrently run both servers for two weeks just in case not ALL the nameservers are updated… or if I had forgot to grab something from the old servers. It should all be propagating and for the most part not cause any problems….

I also had fun times with WordPress earlier… I thought I’d get fresh and drop in the shortcut icon into the index.php file… lo and behold those changes get carried across into the rss feed… and cause it to not be well formed xml. Digging up through the wordpress docs it’s pretty nicely documented.

http://codex.wordpress.org/favicon.ico

Just finished adding my recent posts to my portfolio. Actually you could be reading this on my portfolio site right now….

Well not like it hasn’t been done before, but this time, i did it with Gaia. In the site.xml you have to add an asset

then in AS3:

var theXML : XML = IXml(Gaia.api.getPage("index").assets.blogRoll).xml;
			parseTheXML(theXML);

Not too shabby, then you dump everything into a TextArea and skin it appropriately. Unfortunately there are two very much needed work arounds I had to find in order to make the TextArea fit my taste. Actually they should both be implemented directly into the class. One was the sheer inability to work with StyleSheets whiles trying to use custom fonts within the textArea.

http://www.sharedknowhow.com/2008/07/fixed-flash-textarea-css-incompatibility/

Then the fact that in css if you declare the font family they have to be the name of the Font as it’s embedded, not as you set it in the export properties. It’s extremely frustrating but this function helps you figure out what that name should be:

import flash.text.Font;
var allFonts:Array = Font.enumerateFonts(true);
allFonts.sortOn("fontName", Array.CASEINSENSITIVE);
var embeddedFonts:Array = Font.enumerateFonts(false);
embeddedFonts.sortOn("fontName", Array.CASEINSENSITIVE);
for(var i:int=0;i++)
{
trace(embeddedFonts.fontName);
 
}

Then your css should read:

.desc
{
		 font-size:11px;
		 font-family:"(fontName here)";
		 color:#FFFFFF;
}

Then of course this always helps with cs3 components and skinning them:
http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2007/05/variable_scroll.html

juanbonfante.com

Once i had my schema for tagging my data it was easy sailing but all the descriptions got a little bit tedious. I’m not a copywriter so i may of had a little bit of help; still it does take quite alot not to just resort to a project i worked on simply by the acronyms involved (i.e. AS3, PV3d,PureMVC, Gaia, RPC,OOP…etc);

Anyhow since I’m still living, my portfolio will always be a work in progress. There are a few things I’m still working on, but they are all just for kicks. One will be connecting my FlickR image library, that is once I actually get my FlickR image library, either that or I’m just gonna feed straight from facebook. Still working out the kinks. I love mashups and API’s, they are all great for RAD. For now my portfolio is  more of a definite show of my core strengths. I want to show people what I have done with MY work, and not just how much I can piggy back off of all the open API’s out there. Now don’t get me wrong I’m all for the use of open source, I use ALOT of it in my own work, parts of my portfolio would not be possible if it wasn’t for open source!

Let’s see open source frameworks I used in building portfolio:

1. Papervision 3D 2.0
2. Gaia Framework for Flash
3. Flint Particles
4. Tweener
5. Coverflow from http://johndyer.name
6. Navigation Mod for Gaia
7. …and probably some other core libraries

I like to mold things. Thanks to the community for posting, I myself try to give back as much as I can. Well i hope you enjoy what you see, and that any of this you may find useful at some point. The amount of customization i’ve done is getting really FAR OUT, but I’m gonna post the secrets of the different parts of my site bit by bit. No use in showing you a bunch of cool stuff if I’m not gonna teach you how to do it yourself.

Getting to know the framework I really enjoy the 100% by 100% site layouts, but found that aligning something to

//example to align to the right of the stage
var i:DisplayObject = new DisplayObject();
i.x = stage.stageWidth - i.width;

Gives some very screwed up results. Instead you have use functions part of the Gaia.api package. So the previous example would be written as follows
var targ:DisplayObject = new DisaplayObject();
targ.x = stage.stageWidth + Gaia.api.getWidth() /2 - targ.width;

So I’ve finally started my own blog, didn’t know word press was such a breeze to set up. But instead of going into some long diatribe about how wonderful the advent of having all this, I’m gonna go dive head deep into it. I’ll put more abstract articles up in the future. As for the name, well you guessed it this blog will be dedicated to my explorations in code. Right now it’s actionscript, but maybe it will change.

So i will start by exploring a little bit about my own portfolio site. Although i love Flex, i like the control of PureAS3 just a little better. I like the ability to put sites together very quickly in Flex, and had been moving away from the IDE almost altogether… til I found Gaia. It definitely simplifies the process of deploying a site quickly with Flash, integrating asset management, custom preloaders, depth management, swfaddress. Etc. The API is fairly rich in features, and if like me you prefer code over fla’s, Gaia creates exports of the Document classes for every page. Enough of me rambling go download it, run a tutorial or two, then start building. My first impression of Gaia i was a little put off, but once i realized the customization you can actually do, i was sold.

Two other libraries you should check out, which i will post more on too: Papervision3D FlintParticles