During my initial searches on the internet, it seemed that the only way to do this would be to use a PHP script to regulate the information sent to AS3. The consensus on the internet was that it was not possible to detect the number of files present in a web directory. I did figure out a way to do this.

Here is the basic approach I took to solving this problem. Flash can not read what files are in a directory, but it can pull a file with a specific name. If the file doesn’t exist then it will throw an exception. So what I ended up doing was create a naming convention (eg: photo01.jpg, photo02.jpg, etc.) for the pictures that would be loaded in. Flash then goes through a loop archiving the valid file names and stops on the first null. I then make a pass starting backwards and eliminate any null entries in my array and preload the photo’s that are valid. To hide the time it takes to do this, I show the first valid file in the slideshow when it does the first scan. Then we start our slideshow loop in reverse, it takes about the same amount of time to load the photos as it did to swap photos, so this masks the loading well.

This approach was certainly not the fastest or most efficient, but on a time crunch it worked well. If I ever need to do it again for a client, I have a strong starting point and can optimize the code.

You can also subscribe or get spaces on the internet that supply loads of tools in addition to version control. These places are ideal multiple people to collaborate over the internet and still have access to the same files and communicate efficiently. Assembla (http://www.assembla.com/) is one I have used in the past and it works pretty well. The one drawback is it used to be free, not sure it still is for private spaces.

http://danidraws.com/

So first thing was first I transfered a copy of all the files on my ftp to the new location. I then did a mySQL backup and moved that to a new database for the backup. Lastly I used 3 mySQL statements to rewrite the base values for the URLs. I followed a guide at this link here on specifics (http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/10/01/how-to-move-wordpress-blog-to-new-domain-or-location/).

Pretty straight forward, WordPress breaks down where elements have their html generated into individual files. For example, the header of your pages is generated in header.php.

Styling is controlled in a CSS file called style.css and depending on your base theme, the id tags are pretty easy to figure out. This is even easier if you use FireBug as that will tell you what each element’s id tags and hierarchy are exactly.

So far I have just had time to change some font styles for the header and body and start work on a banner image. The banner image will be inserted this week.

Theme I am using is the ArcLite Theme by http://digitalnature.ro/

You can see the base theme at my site here http://eavab.com

• Search friendly links are in place for the content
• Page Titles are Search friendly so far and will be designed to be for future pages
• Site is registered with my Google Webmaster Tools Account

In the future, when I am writing/modifying my themes, I will be making a pass to ensure that all my headers and tag code are appropriate since I will be accessing a lot of that code anyways for styling.

Time to play the content catchup game on my site tonight. Once content has been uploaded, I will generate and post an XML sitemap for the site. The one issue with this is that it will become outdated every so often due to dynamic content in the blog portion. But, I might be able to find a WordPress plugin to keep it up to date.

So I figured I would share these tools with you guys. A few of them you probably have used in the past:

1. Google Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)
2. Google Website Content Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)
3. Google Wonder Wheel (http://www.google.com/)
1. To get to this one, do a search and then hit “show options” on the toolbar.
2. Third Group, Second Option
4. KeywordSpy (http://www.keywordspy.com/)
5. SEOBook’s FireFox Rank Checker (http://tools.seobook.com/)
6. XML Sitemap Generator (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/)
7. Google Web Master Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools)
8. Keyword Density (http://www.keyworddensity.com/)
9. Yahoo Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/)
10. Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/)

Also just a heads-up. I was doing some SEO stuff for the company I work for and noticed Bing has released the first of their webmaster tools. Worth checking out, nothing to fancy but they have the basics for the Bing search engine.

4 (when it works for your site), 1, 2, 7, 10 and 6 I use often.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/system/Security.html#allowDomain%28%29

This answers a LOT of questions about why some of my content was not loading properly from external sources.

Once I figure out more about how the player is stored in my swf file and what I can control about it I will post again. At that point my Flash class’s Mid Term project will be looking pretty snazzy.

Information regarding the new AS3 Chromeless YouTube Player:

http://apiblog.youtube.com/2009/10/actionscript-3-youtube-chromeless.html
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/flash_api_reference.html#setPlaybackQuality

http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/htaccess.html

Hope you enjoy

So according to that chart, we have 4 major sections and here they are in outline form:

1. Blog
2. Wiki
   1. Tutorials

1. i.      This will include any and all tutorials I have created over the years and in the future. I will be able to organize a wiki page to show links to each tutorial and then the tutorials themselves.
2. i.      Here I will be able to create a list of new technologies, a synopsis about them, useful resources I have found for them, and any experiences I have with them. This will be useful for obscure things that I don’t use all the time like RDFa or cryptographic things like SHA encoding etc.
3. i.      Going to use a Flickr module/plugin to showcase the artwork I have done over the years.
4. i.      Link list to demo sites and past web work.

1. 1. Technology

1. Portfolio
   1. Art

1. 1. Web Work

1. About Me
   1. Resume
   2. Background
   3. Contact

The Blog, which will be powered by the standard blog features of WordPress. This will incorporate a few different RSS and link log widgets that WordPress has available.

The Wiki, which will most likely be DotWiki or another external php module that I will integrate into the site. DotWiki is a new module I have heard on the grapevine, and if it doesn’t work then the whole standard mediawiki thing will probably be the direction I go. Integration will include one user login, so the tables/php code will need to be adjusted to work for that.

The Portfolio, this will be a Flickr style image gallery widget and a link list of some sort linking to demo sites/launched sites of web work I have done. There are a few of these advertised on the WordPress site and I will be testing out various ones till I get one that I like. Mainly I will be looking for easy ability to upload and a thumbnail/expansion feature that will let me show a preview of an image and then expand it to full quality/size. This will also be useful for the blogging functions of the site.

About Me, this will be just standard WordPress pages.

Finally, there will be a custom WordPress theme and themes for external modules I use to tie them all together. The goal will be to make it seem like even external modules are still on the same site as to not confuse users coming to my site.

All in all I think this will be a healthy amount of content for my site to begin with. I am sure as I am building it more things I will want to do will come up.

Time to find my hard hat and get to work….Up first, design layout ideas.