Archive for August, 2007

Video Tutorial: Online CSS Formatter and Optimizer

This is a video tutorial I created to showcase an online css formatter and optimizer. I’ll apologize in advance for the poor audio quality towards the end of the video (I’m still learning how to do this), but I don’t think it detracts from the overall message of the video. I’ll see if I can’t spend more time with camstudio to get it set up right. Can’t wait for the next version to come out.

Anyway, if you are creating large CSS files it is a good idea to compress them once a site goes into production mode. In fact, using the compression tool can save you space even if you don’t want to compress it down to one line, so it is always a good idea to do the minimal compression since it will save you some space. The tool I used is located at http://floele.flyspray.org/csstidy/css_optimiser.php, but doing a quick google search yields many results (the code for this must be open source since the same form is on many sites). Enjoy…

video removed…use the new css formatter on DEVTRENCH!

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Category: Design | 861 views | Posted: August 7th 2007 01:18 am

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How to Make a Resizeable Full Screen Flash Animation

I recently had to create resizeable Flash animation that would play full screen. Here are the steps to creating a full screen flash animation:

  • First of all, the most important aspect of this is to create a flash animation with vectors only. If you create one with bitmap images, when you resize the animation your bitmaps will look bad.
  • Make sure your flash movie doesn’t have a Stage.scaleMode set to “noScale”. This property would be set in your actionscript somewhere and has been a problem for me in the past. Once I used flash code that I didn’t write, and this piece of code was hidden pretty deep in it. It made me want to put my head through the screen when I found it.
  • Set the Stage.scaleMode to “showAll”, “exactFit”, or “noBorders”. You can do this in the action script, or in the embed parameters. Here is an explanation of what each of those properties does. Since I normally link straight to the swf file when doing this, I set the scaleMode in the flash file itself. Example code:

    Stage.scaleMode="showAll";

  • Use javascript to call the full screen window. Use this code:
    <a href="example.swf" onclick="window.open('example.swf', 'flashwindow', 'width='+ (screen.width) +',height='+ (screen.height) +',resizable=yes,left='+ (screen.availWidth/2-0) +',top='+ (screen.availHeight/2-0) +'');return false;">Open Flash Window...</a>


Here is a full screen flash example of what the above code can do:

Open Full Screen Resizable Flash

That’s about all there is to it. If you have specific implementation questions, just contact me.

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Category: Design | 1,055 views | Posted: August 5th 2007 02:00 am

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July 2007 Website Traffic

Hey, it’s already August :) Seems like things fly by so fast for me, probably because I do way to much stuff. Anyway, the traffic to the blog has more than tripled over the last month so that is really exciting. I hope to see continued traffic growth like this in the future. Here are my Google Analytics stats for this month:

July 2007 Analytics Report (166)

Analytics is so great for a lot of reasons

  • you can compare previous months in these reports (check the box to compare previous months when you schedule an email)
  • these reports are automatically emailed to me
  • they are easy to read and digest

However, you have to take into account that not everyone is counted in Google Analytics (those who have javascript shut off), and different stats software counts things differently. Basically I use stats to see basic traffic trends, and to see who is coming, where they are coming from, what search terms are getting people to my site, and how long they are staying.

How have I gotten such an increase in traffic? Well its from writing great content of course! Well, that and really trying hard to market the site through social networks and blogs. Read about the last two months effort to market this blog. I’ve spent as much or more time marketing the blog than writing. That is something that I wish I didn’t have to do, but I want readers. For the next month I’m going to try to focus on creating more content over marketing, but I know I’ll still have to get the word out.

Some of the highlights from June are:

  • I took my top banner and side banner Adsense banners down. They weren’t doing very well and I felt that they made the site look too ad heavy.
  • Got accepted to text link ads - no ads yet, but they’ll come eventually
  • My Alexa rank dropped from over 2,500,000 to just over 1,800,000, so that is good ;).

That’s all! I’ll just keep on posting (I still need to start doing video posts), and I hope everyone keeps coming. The End

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Category: Announcements | 760 views | Posted: August 2nd 2007 01:40 pm

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