Month: April 2007

I’m still not sold.

For the most part, all of these entirely flash based sites do not impress me.With the exception of a very few they all look quite the same.The same can be said for a lot of CSS based websites,I know.But at least I can read the text in these sites.Perhaps I am just not used to the flow of a flash layout after being so comfortable with the “holy grail” of a css layout.
And it does seem like a lot of flash designers dearly love the scrolling text box with a very small font for the text.
I was just at one a minute ago squinting at the tiny print and thinking am I so old because I am getting a headache reading this crap I have no interest in!
Continue reading I’m still not sold.

Flash Slideshows

This guy JEROEN WIJERING is a generous genius.
Working confidently off of the honor system, he is providing his flash players for images,visual and sound,free from his web site
JEROENWIJERING.com.Not only are the source files well documented and commented but they are very easy to understand and implement.

As you may have been following my journey into flash without a dime to my name,you might have guessed I would rather go the borrow route rather than try to create a flash doodad by myself.
I am waiting to get paid for this one site I’m working on in order to buy a one time license for 15 euros($23 american).

And the beauty of the deal is that he is extremely permissive about who can use his players.He doesn’t object to the little guy using one on their personal site(my art portfolio for instance)just to the big guy being a douche and using his stuff for their well financed projects.Apparently we Americans are the most honest when it comes to reusing his players.He says it’s his fellow Dutchmen that are the major offenders.

I think he must be a really cool person.He is in university and the cash he gets from the paid licenses help out.

New Job!

A month ago I answered a CL ad for a site redesign job. I was answering a lot of ads all at once and didn’t keep track of them all.I got a few responses and did some work as a result but the overall return was disappointing.That’s ok, I had a lot of work to do on my portfolio site and also the downtime forced me to log back into myspace after avoiding it(a time waster) for a month.This reconnected me to a few people I’d forgotten were so cool. It was myspace and it’s community of myspace coders who got me into web design in the 1st place.Because after a year of working on my page I thought:why not do it outside of the myspace restrictions? And that was how I began.Probably not the most orthodox introduction to web design but it was what got me started.So…Back to the story.I was waiting for 2 people to send me their photos on disc,I can’t do much to the bar lounge site I’m working on now until I get them. I can’t start this other job until my client signs up for hosting (I’m making him do it by himself) and gives me his login info and sends me pix as well.
Which means I was back to thumbtwiddling.Yesterday an email came through from that batch of ad responses I sent out one month earlier. I reread my original email which was not professional at all.I stated I was bored out of my skull and would do the redesign for half of her price.The fact of needing more working sites to stock my portfolio with drives me to say crazy stuff.
I love this stuff. I’ll do it for free and I would like to make $ doing something I love. But I should be careful of desperation plus boredom.Because I committed to a site redesign on a free hosting plan.There aren’t any hosted ads but there is no php support or even a cgi-bin…I can’t use my toolbox of scripts and it’s back to the barebones of web site development.I know: you can make some very nice pages without server side scripting.CSS and html or xhtml(what I use) are the meat.PHP is the frosting.