It's hard to identify an art movement while it's in progress. Like the ups and downs of the stock market, the defining elements of a movement may not become clear until you come out on the other side of the boom or bust. Even so, the Flash aesthetic has developed enough to be identified and examined.

Many of the common elements of Flash design have evolved because Flash facilitates certain aspects of animation, while making other aspects more difficult. The Flash aesthetic is born when techniques developed to deal with Flash's strengths and limitations are carried over into other media.

The majority of any art is developed by not beginners learning the form, nor...

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With Jim Heid

In the absence of finalized rich media standards for the web, plug-ins were developed that enabled websites to offer streaming video, animated vector graphics, annoying music tracks, and the like. Over the past couple of years, W3C recommendations have emerged to suggest standardized ways of doing what proprietary plug-ins already do so well.

One of these is SMIL™, the W3C recommendation for multimedia; the other is SVG, intended to deliver vector graphics such as those already used in Flash (but with some essential differences from Flash).

When faced with SMIL, many web designers shrug; when shown what SVG can do today, most Flash designers laugh....

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Macromedia released Flash MX in mid-March of 2002, including enhancements to the player and the authoring tool to improve accessibility for people with disabilities.

Admittedly, some areas like screen reader access couldn't possibly get any worse than they were in previous versions of the player: popular screen readers such as JAWS and Window-Eyes ignored Flash content completely. Other features, such as the ability to add captions (which has been available since Flash 5), benefit from improvements Macromedia made to the Flash architecture in this release.

The changes have also automatically improved access to existing Flash content when viewed in the Flash Player 6, but to...

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In Christian theology, it doesn't matter exactly when you accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour. As long as you do it before you croak and ask forgiveness for your sins, you're in like Flynn.

This, apparently, is the Macromedia philosophy when it comes to accessibility.

The company's flagship product, Flash, is intrinsically inaccessible to anyone who cannot see properly and is very often inaccessible to a deaf or hard-of-hearing person. It's also completely inaccessible on slow computers or any machine that lacks the Flash plug-in, rendering those viewers more functionally disabled than they actually are.

Macromedia has, however, undergone a kind...

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Anti-Spam

Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist - MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: Getting the most out of MT-Blacklist Birdhouse notes on Comment Spam - Why this web host is forcing comment registration Blacklist to Mod Security - by Peter Wood Brad Choate: SpamLookup - anti-spam plugin Interview with a Comment Spammer - The Register's interview with a blog comment spammer. MT-Approval Plugin - Prevents comment spam from spam bots MT-DSBL Open Proxy Comment Filter - from Brad Choate MT-Moderate - Plugin for moderating trackbacks and comments from Chad Everett Mod Rewrite to Block Bot Spam - Mod Rewrite method to divert comment spam bots to a 403...

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In " Flash Access: Unclear on the Concept," I dissected Macromedia's plans for making Flash accessible to people with disabilities. At the time, Macromedia had ignored accessibility completely. Once it had belatedly committed to solving the problem, the company did not know just what it was getting into.

People keep telling me to stop being such a bitch, so here is a much cheerier and less disempowering update. Macromedia no longer ignores accessibility and does know what it's getting into, but only the very earliest steps have been taken.

The screen reader problem

The new Flash MX authoring environment and the equally new...

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With all the new features in Movable Type 3.2, the question on the minds of a lot of our current users is, "Yeah, this looks good, but how easy will it be to upgrade?"

We think the new version's not just the easiest version of Movable Type by far to upgrade, but it's the easiest of almost any web application we've seen. It'd be easy to tell you all about it, but it's even better to show you. So we've created a brief (one minute) Flash video to show you just how simple it is.

You can click on the thumbnail to start the 818KB movie.

[This is part fifteen in a series called "Our 32 Favorite Features of Movable Type 3.2".]

Trackbacks:

Q Daily News - Anil's breaking into spoken word - July 15, 2005 08:34 PM...

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Monitoring your web site's activity really only serves two purposes: ego stroking and visitor analysis. It's a lot of fun to watch a site's visitor base grow, but being able to see what a reader is looking for and how they visit is something that can immensely help your site grow .

Unfortunately, I haven't found a single statistics analysis package that does everything. There are lots of packages that do lots of different things, all presenting data in slightly different ways. Combine what you can glean from each of them and it'll become more clear who is visiting your site, what they want to read, and how they came in. Once you know all that, you can...

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At long last I'm proud to release CustomFields 1.0. I had previously mentioned this plugin and had created a DropCash campaign for it. The campaign surprised me as it reached its target much quicker than I had estimated. A massive thank you to all those that donated towards the campaign and also to all of those that donated subsequently. I was especially happy as 20% of the proceedings was donated to help the Hurricane Katrina victims. Read the announcement to find out more about CustomFields, otherwise go grab your copy!

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12.13.2005

The Crushing Blow

The Crushing Blow is a promotional site for the Ford Fusion done in Movable Type. But the fun starts with the videoblogging aspect of the site.

The videos follow a fake (or are they?) band, Hurra Torpedo, "a rock band from Norway that bangs out pop songs on beat up old kitchen appliances." The videos follow their journey to infamy, from their stay in a concrete wigwam to the band's arrival in their trusty automobile.

You can enter to win Hurra Torpedo's car, too. Comes with free air freshener!

Posted by ginevra in New Sites at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

12.12.2005

Okay, Atom's Ready

For the (many) people who've...

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Upgrading or installing Movable Type can be rather intimidating. There are few things I have screwed up so badly attempting, even when they say it is super easy, idiot-proof. I always seem to be the idiot who still can't make it work. I have now upgraded two separate MT installs to MT 3.2 and thought I would share my notes with you. Please note that Jay Allen (Product Manager of Movable Type), Chad Everett (of Don't Back Down and Everitz Consulting), and Arvind Satyanarayan ( Movalog) have all helped me at various stages in upgrading, and if I didn't have friends who knew what they were doing, honestly I just wouldn't attempt this on my own. But that's me, and I have over 20 blogs...

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Neil Turner and is cross-posted on Neil's World.

Since upgrading to Movable Type 3.2 I've dumped Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist and instead made SpamLookup handle comment/trackback spam on its own. The plugin is included by default on MT 3.2, and while it can do a good job as it is, you might like to try some tune-ups to make it more effective. Moderation and Junking

In Movable Type 2.x, comments just had one status - published. Any spam blocking system could only accept or deny comments and trackbacks. In MT 3.0x and 3.1x, comments gained an additional status - ‘moderated'. This was where comments could be held for human...

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Updated August 29, 2005. Originally posted in 2004.

Spammers have discovered bloggers and sooner or later if you allow comments or trackback pings on your weblog you will get spammed.

Blog spam appears in many flavors:

1) Basic comment spam. The spammer leaves a short uneventful message in a comment field in one of your entries. The spam comes from the URL placed in the comments URL field. These URLs link back to every conceivable scam. The spammers leave URLs here to create a link from your site to theirs, thus increasing their Google ranking. Spammers are also now linking to legitimate sites that have not cleared their pages of comment spam, thus increasing the Google rank...

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Ok, my games index is now live. It's a fairly complete list, although I know there are a bunch of DOS games that aren't on there just because I don't have them with me anymore (they're at home with Mom and Dad collecting dust). Anyway have a peek. If you're geographically nearby let me know if you'd like to borrow something. (While I'm at it, I might as well make this a Movable Type tip-- click the 'more' link for the goods.)

...

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I don't have a complete knowledge on IRI. So below contents might have some misunderstandings. If you find one, please feedback to me.

* At first, this post was written in part of Cool IRI for a permalink. So in this post, you'll often see the words, "this plugin". "This plugin" means that a plugin for a Movable Type bloggin tool, which enables you to create a Cool IRI for blog archives.

You may be stunned by comparatively long page. I swear this content is not deeply technical and is just common knowledge. If you have no time to read it, just see some pictures. Perhaps it will do a little for you.

What means a "Cool" ?

If you've never heard of Cool URI, I...

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Sooner or later, you may be called upon to create or maintain an internal website. If you work for a major corporation, or are contracted at one (as I am), internal sites may comprise the bulk of your work.

Don't be afraid of internal sites. In many respects, they are very similar to external sites. There are two main differences though. • Internal sites tend to be much larger. • They're geared toward employees, not the great unwashed masses.

Let's say you work for Fergus & McFungus Associates, a major corporation that produces lots of useless things that people just can't get enough of. The CEO, Angus McFungus, approaches you in his usual...

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Back when video games were still fun (we're talking about the 8-bit glory days here), graphics were a much simpler matter by necessity. Bitmapped 2-dimensional character data and background scenery was individually drawn, much like today's resurgent pixel art. Hundreds and later thousands of small graphics called sprites were the building blocks for all things visual in a game.

As game complexity increased, techniques developed to manage the multitude of sprites while keeping game play flowing. One variation saw sprites being plugged into a master grid, then later pulled out as needed by code that mapped positions of each individual graphic, and selectively...

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Mena | December 07, 2005

I've just returned from Paris after attending Les Blogs, a weblogging conference organized by our European office. I'm still a bit jet-lagged and, at this moment, I haven't the energy to write up a long post about the morning talk I gave (plus the heated Q&A). However, I'd like to post the bulk of the speech I gave.

I was fairly hesitant to give this talk since I knew that it would stir up some heated discussions and I tend to prefer avoiding controversy -- especially considering my role at Six Apart. I ultimately decided to speak about civility because I, personally, haven't really seen anyone raise this topic from inside the industry and I do believe...

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The website's articles may only be reprinted after a written agreement and then only when naming the original author and date of initial publication. In addition articles may not be used or distributed incompletely or in a misleading way.

© 2005 mgs software. All rights reserved.

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Les Orchard's got a cool hack for Movable Type that lets you easily generate in the hCalendar format from right within the application, using Firefox's GreaseMonkey extension. You can check out the whole story on Les' blog, complete with a screencast video showing how it works.

We've covered a lot of the potential for Greasemonkey in some earlier posts on ProNet.

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