It's taken me a few days to decompress and restore to the organized chaos of my life. Okay, that's a sham - it's all chaos.

I live for this type of interaction with ideas and people within the industry, even if I do utterly suck at interacting with groups of people where I don't know anyone.... See, living in a small town in rural Pennsylvania - I'm bitter. So I have to stick with God, Guns, and Booze..... Oh wait. I can't drink.... uhmmm never mind. But living in a small town is very isolating from what is happening in the real world and it is very easy to completely lose touch with trends within my chosen field of Web and Flash design. So let's count the things I now want to work on:

• Multi-touch display
• Adobe AIR applications
• Getting better with AS 3
• Experimenting with AS 3 programming (like particle and 3d effects)
• Figure out ways to create interesting artwork in Flash (look at Erik Natzke's work and wonder no more)
• Build myself a new website
• Redevelop my blog and have run in Flash using AS 3
• Build RIAs with Flex 3
• I still would like to build better games
• Get into building components
• Be able to truly reuse my code
• Get more into OOP

Now, all I have to do is wait for cloning technology to get to the point to where I will actually be able to do all of these things before I ascend.

I had every intention of living, eating and breathing Flash while I was there too. I took all of me dev files for my new Flash site, and never even touched them. I ended being too absorbed in Toronto and other things to even sit at the computer while I was there in the evening. Many nights, after unwinding a bit and eating dinner, I just sat and watched TV while scrawling pages of ideas down in one of the notebooks I bought for doing just that - I think after all was said-and-done I had 20 plus pages of ideas and thoughts of what I could do both for work and personally with many of the things I was introduced to and learned more about.

On the way back on Wednesday I stopped outside of Lincoln Ontario at this marina where this is an old beached boat, and shot a few images which I have been meaning to do the past 4 times I have passed it on the way back. It's pretty cool, and there were some immense geese hanging out being loud too. On a creepier note, I noticed afterwards that there were these little wafts of smoke coming up from trees all over the place along the freeway - at least I thought it was smoke. I finally got a closer look at one, and they were ginormous swarms of bugs. Billions of bugs milling about in tall strands above some trees - but it only spanned a 5 to 7 miles stretch along the freeway. Weird as heck. I have never seen anything like it, and the road was too busy for me to be able to risk trying to fumble around to get my camera out. I liked it better when I thought it was twilight zone wisps of smoke.

I don't know what lies in store for me in 2009, but I could easily do worse than head back up north for FITC 2009.

As a side note: Thanks for another stellar FITC Shawn! 

I think maybe I had too many neurons firing over the day 1 activities because I woke up with a headache yesterday, and it really put a damper on things until about lunchtime. That's not to say I didn't have some good sessions though.

Day Two
Session 1 was led by Seb Lee-Delisle from Plug-in Media in Brighton, and it was top-notch for being early in the morning for everyone. The talk was on Flash pyrotechnics or particle effects and it was cool. Again I left there wondering how I could do something with my new found knowledge and source code. I still have no real idea about how I could use this stuff except in games and to start working on some AS3 experiments of my own, but this is one of those things that I love to get in on. Maybe I will get to build some more games this year....

The next session only added to my headache. The one I wanted to go to was canceled, so I chose a runner-up because it sounded interesting and turned out to be... well... ignorant. I'm not going to go off and slag it, because I am sure the gal who was on stage is a decent developer, but I didn't drive 3 hours and pay the admission to listen to someone piss and moan about their job. Boo hoo.... It might have gotten better, because I heard some dude just ranting about how he loved it, but within the time I was in there - about 10 +/- people left; and I wasn't in the mood to sit through the full hour on the off chance it became more interesting.

The rest of the day was an interesting mix of work from various places around the US mostly - and there was some wonderful work showcased. Day 2 left me wanting a bit though. The previous day was so mentally charging for me that I was hoping for day 2 to be the same way; but I am sure my headache got in the way a bit. It was great to see new works from GMUNK, Joshua Davis though - they are very talented, and it's always good to see what other folks are up to.

The last session I went to for the day was by Buck. This was an excellent sesion too - these guys build some really cool videos. I don't really do a lot of video, nor do I do any 3D (or get the opportunity too) - but as I said above, it's always good to check what other folks are up to. I can get ideas, and quite often do, from other styles or genre of work other than just Flash and Web Design.

After the day was over, I walked around Toronto a bit since I wanted to go up the CN Tower. Holy smokes this thing is big! I was up all the way to the top, and it is pretty freaking cool. I will post some more pics on flickr either tonight or when I get home.

I have yet to totally plan what is in store for me today, so maybe I should shut up and get to it. 

Tomorrow after lunch I am heading up to Toronto for the 2008 Flash in the Can. It's been 2 years since I went last, so it's overdue. I am excited beyond all recogmnition, in fact it will be a wonder how much sleep I will get tonight - kinda like Christmas Eve in fact.

Toronto is a great city too, the 3 or 4 times I have been there have all been awesome.

I have no idea what my schedule is going to be yet, I can't decide so I am just going to figure it out as I go. The best part about these conferences is all of the massively creative people that you get to interact with. I have always feel reenergized every time I come back from one of these. I went to the 2006 FITC, and FlashForward in 2004 - and I am hoping to go to Adobe MAX next year.... Although it is in November, so maybe I will get lucky and be able to do both? Probably not.....

Maybe I will see you there. 

My latest project to go into production is a retail targeted newsletter site designed to deliver content both on the site itself and, naturally, through a newsletter to the subscribed members. As a little background, the site has a custom-built CMS managing 90% of all of the content, including every issue of the newsletter and all of the contained articles. One of the obstacles that I needed to overcome was a way to easy way to get the dynamic content from the database into a seperate mass email application fo delivery. This sounded pretty simple, so I saved it until last.

After a bit of searching, I found information about Firefox and Opera having security measures preventing this from working right out of the gate. Okay, but I know sites like Google, Amazon, and countless others have pulled this off - so I know it's possible. My criteria was pretty simple:

copy the source code of a <div> that wrapped the essential content to the clipboard by clicking a button.

That's it; nothing too fancy. The next thing I found was an example of pulling text from a textfield on Jeffothy's Keyings blog. I didn't have content in a textbox though, it was in a <div> - so I altered the code to pull the data using innerHTML.

document.getElementById('sourceDiv').innerHTML;

That resulted in undefined being copied to the clipboard (I'm still not sure why). So back to Google to find some .net examples, but they turned out to be far more complex than what I wanted to use. I knew I could do it with JavaScript though; so I went back the first example. First, I simply set up a function to grab the code and fire an alert.

<script language="javascript">
    function getSource() {
        var sourceData= document.getElementById('sourceDiv').innerHTML;
        alert(sourceData);

    }
</script>

 This worked fine. So the next part was to get it to the clipboard, but I kept running into not being able to pass it to the clipboard function I downloaded from Jeffothy's site - so I added a textarea, and set style display:none. Then copied the code out of the textarea onto the clipboard and viola!

But not quite. IE doesn't like the textarea set to not visible and wouldn't recognize it being there at all (throwing a JavaScript error), so I had to change the style to width:1px and height:1px to get it work cross browsers. 

<script type="text/javascript">
    function copySource(inElement) {
        if (inElement.createTextRange) {
            var range = inElement.createTextRange();
            if (range)
                range.execCommand('Copy');
        } else {
            var flashcopier = 'flashcopier';
            if(!document.getElementById(flashcopier)) {
                var divholder = document.createElement('div');
                divholder.id = flashcopier;
                document.body.appendChild(divholder);
            }
            document.getElementById(flashcopier).innerHTML = '';
            var divinfo = '<embed src="/media/_clipboard.swf" FlashVars="clipboard='+escape(inElement.value)+'" width="0" height="0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>';
            document.getElementById(flashcopier).innerHTML = divinfo;
        }
    }                                  

    function getSource() {
        var sourceData = document.getElementById('sourceDiv').innerHTML;
        document.getElementById("sourceField").value = sourceData;
        copySource(document.getElementById("sourceField"));
    }
</script>

Now the interesting part about this is the swf file. It is the key to getting this whole deal to work. By using the _clipboard.swf file (originally built by Mark O’Sullivan of http://lussumo.com/), you are able to get the copied code out of the browser and onto the clipboard by passing it to Flash's System class using the setClipboard method. Pretty ingenious really.

All you have to do now is just drop a form in the page around everything you want to copy, and a button and textarea.

<center>
    <input type="button" value=":: Copy to the clipboard  ::" onclick="getSource()" />
</center>
<br />
<textarea name="sourceField" id="sourceField" cols="85" rows="10" readonly="readonly" style="width:1px;height:1px;"></textarea>

 I wrapped it all up in a zip file for those who want to download it.

I know this post is about a day late and a dollar short, but I have been struggling with finding time and projects to get into ActionScript 3 for about a year now - and I have finally gotten into the swing of cramming it into my head. The hardest part is not the differences, it's not the various paradigms for programming - it's just getting past my hang-ups with not being an Object oriented Programmer. I excel at Procedural Programming, and I need to make peace with that before my head esplodes.

With what I have been able to work with so far I love it. In fact I wish I had forced myself to make the time a year ago, but the fact is the time wasn't right. I now have several projects looming that will all but require me to be at least familiar with AS 3 before I can even begin them; so I have to now. A lot of the changes in ActionScript 3 are welcome changes to the various quirks that drive me crazy about Flash and AS 2. I have always been in love with Flash and what it can do, but it's been a love hate relationship. The quirks and inconsistencies I would regularly run into would drive me completely off my nutt. I know that will most likely not go entirely away - but it promises to be diminished with this new (ish) version.

I working through Learning ActionScript 3.0: A Beginner's Guide by Rich Shupe & Zevan Rosser and I have to say this is an excellent book. I had no doubt when I bought as I have always had success with Adobe books. There are quite a few concepts that I have been skimming as I am already very familiar with them, but the point was to get a basic, ground up understanding of AS 3. I have other books too, like Essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock - but this is more what I need to get my head wrapped around it as a whole; which is not a reflection of Colin's book in any way - he's brilliant.

Anyway.... I am working on a new website which will eventually be ported to AS 3 as well as some universal files that I will share when they are done. I am hoping to make some components too, but we'll see how the files go. I want to make a new universal loader to load external swf files using AS 3 and SWFObject 2. As well as a couple others.

 I still have a ways to go yet, but despite that brain-pain, I am enjoying the challenge of starting something new again.

I've talked about this before, and there is plenty of information out there meandering along the Super Highway - but a lot of people still seem to really miss the boat on this. Maybe it's as simple as they feel they don't have time, or that it won't really matter anyway; either case though, that's the wrong attitude to have. If you have a website or maybe more importantly if you are building a website for a company - then that website needs to be able to be indexed by the spiders that index for all of the major search engines. For my purposes today, I'm not going to focus on any; rather just touch on what you should do to get your hard work noticed by these hard working agents of search.

With more than 100 million websites called the web their home, you don't want to get hit by your competitors' truck pulling out of the driveway - so you have to do it right from the start. One way to get more information about your Flash site is to place some text within the first frame specifically for this. Google and Yahoo(I think this is the case with Yahoo as well) are able to scan SWF files, and back when Macromedia still existed - they created a tool specifically for checking the results of this, the Flash Search Engine SDK. Take a look at a previous post here for more info.

Getting Started

Let's get right into it and start off with getting the Flash content into the page. You have to start with placement of the SWF into the page, I use SWFObject exclusively. Adobe has some code they use to do this as well, but SWFObject is much cleaner, and I have used for a few years now and there is no real reason to switch. So now a simple starting page could look like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
        <title>most awesome site on the planet</title>
        <meta name="description" content="" />
        <meta name="keywords" content="" />
        <meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
          <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/includes/css/screen.css"  _fcksavedurl=""/includes/css/screen.css" " _fcksavedurl=""/includes/css/screen.css" " />
        <link rel="Shortcut Icon" type="image/x-icon" href="favicon.ico" />
        <script language="JavaScript" src="/includes/javaScript/swfobject.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <center>
            <div id="mainFlashUI"></div>
        </center>
        <script type="text/javascript">
            // <![CDATA[
               
                var so = new SWFObject("/media/UI/mainLoader.swf", "microSite", "750", "625", "8", "#FFFFFF");
                so.addParam("quality", "high");
                so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
                so.addParam("scale", "noscale");
                so.write("mainFlashUI");
                   
            // ]]>
        </script>
        <!-- Google Analytics Code -->
        <script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript"> _uacct = "UA-664899-42"; urchinTracker();</script>
    </body>
</html>

What you want to focus on right now is the mainFlashUI div. This is where you will place all of the information you would like to have indexed in regards to the entry point of your site. The other thing to consider here, is this isn't a place to put just a note about the user needing Flash, this is where you place your alternate content so folks who don't have Flash, or choose to turn it off or have a disability can get the same or similar information that is conveyed within the Flash. This is really the big issue; this should be designed with all of those things in mind, and not just SEO. The text and links within the mainFlashUI div will get crawled before any Flash is loaded over that div, and that is what will get attached to the results, this way you don't wind up with something like this:

LOADING PAGE Contact Contact Contact Contact COMPANY NAME Your nice company slogan

When creating this content, be standards oriented and keep the overall code to content very low, and validate your work. This will help with the indexing as well since the crawlers will be able to get to the content easier.

There are some other things to consider here too in regards to SEO; keep the description and keywords precise and relevant to the content being displayed. If you are so inclined, work through some JavaScript to get these values to change as the various parts of the site is loaded, even changing the page title to reflect the current section the user is navigating through.

More Options

When creating the Flash site, it is always a good idea to create multiple sections then load those sections into the main UI of the site. This will keep the initial bandwidth load more tolerable, as well as possibly getting more information to the crawler parsing your Flash site. I don't know if Google or Yahoo actually follow a loadMovie, but it wouldn't surprise if they can.

If the site you are creating is large, you might want to consider using SWFAddress to allow for deep linking to the various sections within your Flash site. These links could then be added directly to the initial page content (or site map) allowing for more links to be crawled and indexed. Also adding some custom JavaScript to your file loading to change the Meta tag information, page title and alternate content could also greatly increase how well your site is indexed. Flash is pretty efficient with JavaScript and you could use the External API built into the last two versions (8 and CS3) and do some pretty fancy AFLAX interactions.....

The Work

The bulk of the work will really reside in how well you design and develop your alternate content, and I know a lot of folks are really opposed to creating an alternate site once your Flash masterpiece has been completed. But it's not really about you is it? I try and say this with the least amount of sarcasm as possible, since you're most likely not putting up a website so you can be the only one to look at it. Take the time to layout out the page as semantically as possible, separating content from markup and creating a nice space that will allow the maximum number of folks to view your site. There are lots of references available for CSS and Standards Oriented Design: use them wisely.

In the end, you will have a site that is quite friendly to being indexed, and your results will reflect your hard work, and the effort put into making the site easy for crawlers to access.