I often heard disappointment and despair in regards to creating a website entirely based in Adobe Flash CS3.  One of the strongest opposition points to such a website were based on the inability to bookmark specific "locations" within such a Flash site. So i set out to figure out how to wipe away that stigma.

When it was all said and done, it was quite easy... it just took some intense pre-planning. The premise is simple:

• Import a sitemap
• Import any content relative to the pages
• Use Flash to DOM calls to control URL management
• Redirect incoming URLs to correct Flash content

As for the code and the specifics, I can't yet convince myself to pass it out to the masses. If you are nice and would like to ask for it, though, I may be willing to trade :)

For an example of Flash Bookmarking in action, visit the new Red Red Design studio website portfolio.

My friend Jason Barnhart was to preach on Sunday, but was also to be in Chicago on Sunday, so something just had to be done.  The following is the video we made to take the place of the sermon.  Actually, it's the second time we filmed it.  Shout out to Jason, Pete, Tony, and Scott.

One of my current projects is redesigning Parkstreet Brethren's website.  This will be an interesting project, because I am also becoming more involved in this church's ministry.  In an effort to make everyone's life easier, I will be attempting to integrate some handy technology into their site.

Cell phones are even used by church-goers during the service, so I am working on an idea to allow texting of prayer requests during the service.  Maybe this will make all their playing worth while, and it will also serve as a new way to continually keep people connected.  The prayer requests will be accessible as an XML news feed, which will be useful not only during the service, but also on the site and on any potential prayer screens we may have located around the church campus.

In addition to receiving text messages, I also hope to make information and announcements on the website more accessible through RSS news feeds of all updates and enhanced mass mailers/texters.

Also, I thought I would throw in "Fuel" in the title.  One of my coworkers and I are thinking about ways to take the 710 house off the electric grid and make it run on alternative energy.  For starters, we will be playing with pedal bikes that will run or monitors.  We hope to make them from old bikes and other junk that people have.  After that we hope to implement methods by which to actually power the whole house, including Veggie oil.  Yes, we both have been watching Invention Nation on the Science channel.

... so says a recent press release sent out by Ashland University...

"This year’s card featuring an interactive tour of ornaments adorning a Christmas tree was designed by Red Red Design’s Steve Knowlton, a 2007 AU graduate. “He’s a very bright, talented designer,” Box said."

Read the whole article here:
Ashland University Ecard Press Release

I was finishing a site today for a client, and questions arose regarding the impending year change.  I was asked how to update the copyright to have the current year.  It really wasn't too hard once I dug into it a little... I'm not sure why it isn't just included in the WEC typo3 install that I was using.  I also threw in some fun newsfeed stuff:

## This shows how to automatically update the copyright year
lib.copyright = TEXT
lib.copyright.data = date:U
lib.copyright.strftime = %Y
lib.copyright.wrap = © | {$constant.siteName}

####################################

### Put the Latest News in the left column on certain pages
[PIDinRootline = 100,102]
lib.latestNews < plugin.tt_news
lib.latestNews {        

code >        
code = LATEST        
pid_list >        
pid_list = 31 # the folder where news are stored        
catImageMode = 0        
catTextMode = 0 

}
lib.leftSide < lib.latestNews
[else] # Put something else in the lib.leftSide
temp.leftSide = TEXT
temp.leftSide.value = Hello
lib.leftSide < temp.leftSide

This year Christmas cards are huge for us.  After having to turn so many people away last year, we got on the ball this year and started making cards this summer.  Honestly, I am having a great time with all of this.  All of the cards are published out of Macromedia Flash CS3, but are published back a few versions so that the maximum amount of people are able to get ahold of these cards and view them.

We did two options this year, allowing people to purchase either the custom cards or the "personalizable" cards. The custom ones are built from the ground up, such as the 2007 Ashland University card, the 2007 EMI Music Publishing card, and the 2007 Student Loans Express card. Over previous years, we have also made the 2004 Ashland University card, which has over 7 MILLION VIEWS, and is getting about 500,000 hits a day right now.  Last year we sent out our 2006 Red Red Design card, and that is still going crazy on the hits.

The personalizable cards allow users to submit a message, greeting, logo and links that we incorporate into the card.  No, this is better than a Hallmark eCard, and we have put many hours in here to make them look very good.  Check them out here:

2007 - Bermuda Hospital

2007 - Allegany College

2007 - Nyack College of NYC

I find it rather foolish that with today's level of technology and automation, people are busier than ever.  So, in an effort to battle the burden of busyness, I have begun to look into ways to make things easier.

For example, I am soon going to be taking on a media position within Park Street Brethren Church, as I have concluded that my involvement in their website at work could compliment the slides and media within the church.  In an effort to make things much easier, I am scheming up methods by which church staff will only need update the events and notifications on the main website, and during the service we will simply feed that information onto the projector.

Stay tuned to see if I come up with any useful ways to make technology our friend instead of another burden.

First and foremost, I am not having issues with TYPO3 as my content management system.  I don't want to hurt it's feelings, because it works pretty well for me.  Lately, though, I have heard more and more talk of Joomla, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

I went ahead I installed it on my server.  It was only about 10MB unzipped to upload, which makes uploading easy and fast.  After that, I navigated to the site in my browser.  After inputing a little info about my MYSQL database, I had a site.

I will say that it seems quite different in concept from TYPO3.  First off, I am used to a easily editable sitemap.  It was not quite as intuitive in Joomla, but once I found the location to create new pages, they were easily generated.  Unfortunately, it looks as if the pages must be specified as a certain type of content upon creation, such as blog or news.

I will continue to look at Joomla, especially as they are coming out with a new version soon.  Check back soon to see my continuing experiments with Joomla.

I have heard stories, "tales" if you so choose, of people with clean desktops on their computer.  After years of experience on computers, I know this is a preposterous proposal.  But recently, after filling up the 200GB hard drive of my MacBook Pro with random documents and web clippings, I decided it was time to investigate the possibility of such a place.

I started at the beginning, a very good place to start.  It seemed logical to go through everything on my desktop and sort it into the correct folders within my system.  BUT, I was a little too busy to do that when I was thinking of it. So i just put everything into a "Desktop Crap" folder.  Surprisingly, within a week it was all full of files again.

I am currently trying out a little App called Hazel.  It is pretty sweet, as it looks at whatever lands on my desktop and, according to rules I configure, it will sort the files automatically.  It also dumps anything in my trash for more than a week, and sets a limit on the size of my trashcan.  Now if I could get it to do my dishes.

Captcha, the Image Generating Anti-Spam Powerhouse of the internet is now taking a beating from strippers.  Well, not actual strippers, but rather a new Windows virus that prompts users to aide the spammers by bypassing Captcha security to get entry into secured logins.  So lusty losers will be helping spammers fill your forums with bogus posts and choke your blogs with enhancement advertisements.

Here's how it works.  CAPTCHA generally makes a little image with scrambled letters an shows it on a login form or the like.  You have to type that in so the site knows you are not a robot :). But these guys are beating that by having some real human type that in for the online spam bots.

I think this is really smart, smart enough that they could get a real job that is not in their mother's basement.  But they are probably too ugly to be seen in the light of day.

Read More: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,307396,00.html

We are currently revamping our online buying here at work, and basic PayPal prompts one too many times for users to log in, even if they don't have to.

Seriously, try to Google Image Search for a snow covered bush and all you will get are pictures of President Bush and Tony Snow.  Apparently nobody says shrubbery on the internet, and hedges don't work either, so here is the string I had to search for to find what I was after:

"bushes snow -george -tony -sophia -brittany -john"

I personally think this is just stupid, and I'm going to go take the pictures my self.  I just hope it snows before the project is due.

Today I decided to break away from the standard form extension that comes with TYPO3.  It just wasn't cutting it, and the spam bots were going ape on it.  The new one is called "sp_bettercontact", and it looks like it may do just what i need it to.  It says it has some trickery that it uses to fool spam... we'll see.  I am still working on getting the Captcha set up, so you soon may need to be typing in those little scrambled letters so I know that you are not a computer in some guy's mother's basement where he lives in squalor.

Another nice feature of this mailer is that it has extensive error checking and will Auto-mail the sender.  This may be a nice way of annoying people.  Downside to this extension was that the Engrish not so great on the translation flies.  I may have to send in some corrections to this for them.

So I tried out the beta demo for the new Unreal this week, and I can say that I will be purchasing it when it comes out, as long as I buy flowers for my wife (and by flowers I mean clothes (and by clothes I mean jewelry)).  Granted, it was a little sluggish, but it may have been because I was running it in Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro.  Thankfully, they are not being idiots and only making it available on Windows Vista (cough "Crysis"), and I will be able to buy the Mac version when it comes out.  And yes, I have a Vista PC, so I can say that it's a P.O.S. (poop-operating-system)

There are some sweet new features, including a hoverboard.  Too bad this isn't Tony Hawk, so I don't think you can do any ollies as you flak the blue team.  It does beat waiting for your little man to run a mile across the board.

The graphics are ridiculously tweakable, even in the beta demo.  Some atmospheric settings look awesome, but are a little to distracting.  We'll see how those turn out in the final.  I thought one of the cool features was that carnage will actually stick to your view, so you can't just go barreling through hoards of players with your impact hammer for fear of blindness.

The only thing wrong with the game is that I will have to get everyone else here at work to drop UT2004 and get the new one, and seeing as we just started playing 2004 last year (2006), I'll have two years to get really good at this before they even play it.

Finally, after much whining, I got some pretty URLs on my site.  As you can see, if you go to other pages, the URLs actually can make some sense.  Instead of "/index.php?id=32&type=0", it may now say "/about". I think search engines are supposed to like it too!  It wasn't too bad to do either. 

TYPO3, the CMS that I use, includes a .htaccess file in it's root.  It it make to use mod_rewrite and an extension called RealURL, which takes the pretty URLs people type and turn them into relevant links for the server. Until now, though, I've never realized I actually had to go edit the darn thing to make it relevant to my installation.  All that meant was editing some paths in it.  The only problems I had were a result of having my install in some sub-folders on my GoDaddy server. I had to go in and change the line that reads " RewriteRule .* index.php [L] " to " RewriteRule .* /index.php [L] ".  I also had to comment out the " RewriteBase / " line.

So if anyone wonders how to make lovely little URLs, its not too hard to do once you figure out how it works.

Many would say the days of profit and innovation on the web are dead. The nineties brought product information and business communication to the home office. The turn of the century saw a rise in online purchases and a globalizing effect on product marketing. While both of these periods offered abundant success, it was more often met with uncertainty and inconsistency. As such, company websites have stagnated and online sales have fell into the control of several predominant vendors. These recent trends would lead one to believe that now is not the time to invest resources into a burnt out market, but in fact, now is a better time that ever to begin development for the coming wave of ecommerce.

Within a cooperative work environment, there exists a set of norms for communication and accountability. Whether members are working in a large team or in a pair, there are roles and tasks which different members will fulfill. More specifically, the communication and cooperation of a pair of peers directly influences the success of their production (Ellis & Taggar, 2007). While much is understood about the influence of collaboration and accountability in relation to the performance of individuals, the field of collaboration through technological communication devices and digital media is a rapidly growing field, and is yet not fully understood. Through examining traditional norms of peer accountability, one can examine the influence that newer methods of digital communication and simulated intelligence have on performance.

So after pounding my head against so many walls, embedding everything I could, and reading through the entire internet, I finally figured out why my Actionscript 3 components wouldn't work.  Turns out that little bugger of a wmode messed things up again. Apparently if the Flash is embedded in an HTML page with wmode set to transparent, it just decides to not show components.

Now before you scold me for using "wmode=transparent", I want to let you know that I was actually doing it for a real reason, which I may tell you either when I figure out how to do it otherwise or when you are on your deathbed.

I guess this means no radio buttons mysteriously overlapping HTML content.  Oh bother.

Ok, so I admit that some may find this entirely geeky, but my latest personal knowledge pursuit is endeavoring to merge typo3 and Flash.  Before I get too excited, let me fill you in on what that exactly means.

Typo3 is a content management system, and a rockin one at that.  A fellow in Europe, let's call King Kasper, sat down and wrote this unbelievable CMS.  Now I cannot claim that the coding he did was revolutionary, but the organization and structure of the system is really off the charts.  On, and Flash is what make those little games and banners on the internet.

SO a while ago, in the midst of my independent studies in university, I got bored and started mixing the two.  The real benefit to doing this is that flash looks sweet for interactive and motion websites, but it is not really very cool when it comes to updating content, especially if you are the customer.  Now I am in the midst of using Kasper's typo3 backend to organize content and generate XML feeds for site content.

THIS MEANS that I will soon be able to crank out sites that have very dynamic structure while still maintaining the super sweetness of flash interactivity.  TO see the start of the efforts, head on over to Red Red Design to see it in it's ever increasing Typo3+Flash greatness.

TTFN my BFF
Sir Knowlton