What's My Title Today?

Very cool and very simple PHP/Javascript photo viewer script. http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/php-photoalbum.htm Perfect for handing off to a client that doesn't know how to code html but that is computer savvy enough to drop images in a ftp directory.

So I never really truly appreciated Dreamweaver until recently. I had never really used the ftp function of Dreamweaver (insane I know). I'd use it to write html and css code, then I'd just put the updated files on the server using a generic ftp client. Now that I am maintaining several sites that got tiring, so I looked into and started using the built in Dreamweaver ftp functionality. What a difference! Just a right click away from putting changes up on the server. It's quite wonderful actually. I always knew it existed, I just never bothered to use it. Just goes to show... just because you do things a certain way and it works fine, doesn't mean it's not worth learning a new way.

So I am kind of digging this whole move toward more simplistic, minimalistic web (and other app) design. I like the feel of space. I like that there isn't lots of distracting chrome and boarders. It's all about the content, it's all about getting what you were trying to get done, and that's the whole point isn't it? Now don't get me wrong, I love color and added interest. - I am a bit of a color nut to be honest. Whenever I check out http://colorschemedesigner.com/ (aka my most favorite place to get a new color scheme) I always pick the tetrad first. - I just think there are better ways of adding those things than a lot of what we have been doing. Clean and simple. That's the new way to go. http://sixrevisions.com/design-showcase-inspiration/40-beautiful-examples-of-minimalism-in-web-design/

So I am working on a new portfolio site and I wanted this blog to be featured on that site. I didn't want to show a link or just a feed digest, I wanted the entries in FULL shown on the website. Well... little did I know it was so easy. I spent hours looking for a solution that was built right into something I already subscribed to! Feedburner that is. I found the info I was looking for here: http://www.tipandtrick.net/2008/display-and-show-feed-on-html-website-with-feedburner-buzzboost/ You can subscribe to Feedburner very easily if you already have a Google account. Then you can burn the feed by just putting in your feed address. Then click the Publicize tab. Click BuzzBoost. Fill out the form and choose FULL HTML. Once you're done it will give you a script to put into your website. So easy and so very awesome. You can also style it to look however you like using CSS. Perfect.

So I made my own component, and I wanted the default move cursor that Flex has built in to appear on the mouse over of my component. I thought this would be an easy task - oh how wrong I was. An hour of researching later I was no further ahead, besides discovering that mx.skins.cursor.moveCursor was in fact a style and the image was in Assets.css (from this helpful webpage here: http://www.loscavio.com/downloads/blog/flex3_css_list/flex3_css_list.htm ). It occurred to me that I know how to get a value out of a CSS file , and therein lied the solution. [Bindable] public var myCursor:Class; //Called on creation complete public function complete():void { myCursor = mx.styles.StyleManager.getStyleDeclaration('DragManager').getStyle('moveCursor'); } //Called on mouseover of the component protected function mouseOverWindow(evt:MouseEvent):void { CursorManager.setCursor(myCursor); } //Called on mouseout of the component protected function mouseOutWindow(evt:MouseEvent):...

I keep forgetting how to do this: mx.styles.StyleManager.getStyleDeclaration('.styleclassname').getStyle('style') This gets a value out of the CSS. So for example if you had a .lineStroke style with a style property of color and you wanted to use that for a stroke declared in MXML you could do this: <mx:Stroke id="myStroke" weight="1" color="{mx.styles.StyleManager.getStyleDeclaration('.lineStroke').getStyle('color')}"/>

Excellent article: 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/24/10-useful-usability-findings-and-guidelines/ Thanks @jeswinlopez