We restored the darkness of labs and learned a lot about Chyrp themes in the process. Please add a comment if anyone sees anything visually screwy anywhere. We had a few mysterious issues with installing multiple Chyrp instances in different subdomains on the same server, mostly related to file permissions, but they were easily resolved. Anyone interested in the details can check Stephen’s post in the Chyrp forum.
March 18th, 2008 by Joshua / 5 CommentsI will be a part of Adobe’s Developer Week 2008. The topic of choice? Adobe AIR and Flash CS3 once again. The session is on Tuesday, March 25th from 1PM - 2PM PST (that’s 4PM - 5PM EST).
Building for Adobe AIR in Flash CS3
You don’t need to know Flex to build Adobe AIR applications. The Adobe AIR Plugin for Flash CS3 affords those comfortable working in Flash the opportunity to create compelling content for the desktop. In this seminar, we’ll go through installing and building a simple application, including demonstrating some of the new powers bestowed to developers.
Sign up! It’s free, doesn’t require airfare or hotel accommodations and you get to hear my pretty voice.
March 12th, 2008 by Jamie / 2 CommentsWe are in the process of updating all Big Spaceship blogs to the super slick blog engine Chyrp. I encourage anyone who needs a simple, yet extendable, blog engine to check it out.
While we are migrating, there will likely be some issues and bugs, so please bear with us, and we will post any Chyrp related tips or tricks we discover.
Happy New Year everyone! Apologies for the lack of code related posts recently, but we will get back on track soon. In the meantime, a couple of bits of news …
There is a feature article about Big Spaceship in the current issue of Communication Arts magazine. Lots of pretty full color spreads.
I will be speaking at FITC’s first foray overseas in Amsterdam at the end of February. I am expecting it will be a good time.
January 10th, 2008 by Stephen / 0 CommentsI hate SEO. Despise it. It’s such a struggle to even know *what* is more or less search engine friendly. SEO for RIAs is even more frustrating. While we know that spiders can crawl SWFs for static text, there’s nothing about how one could get a spider to even know to look for external content pulled in from an XML file.
Thankfully we have Ted. His implementation for Flex Directory is astoundingly brilliant.
1) Check out the source on the index.html of Flex Directory. All the companies are listed as they would be in any XML file.
2) Note the XSL embed on line 2, . Cracking open that XSL, we see the SWFObject call, embedding the SWF. That SWFObject embeds a FlashVar, “xmlurl” which points to document.location. He loads index.html into his application as an XML file. Viola.
Spiders will crawl the site and ignore the XSL, effectively disregarding the model/presentation layer/SWF/whatever you want to call it. They *WILL* be able to crawl the relevant company information though. And the site just points to its own index for it’s XML data. Simple, effective, amazing.
January 10th, 2008 by Stephen / 1 Comment
