Hello Tomorrow™

I recently accepted a medium-term freelancing contract which will take me up to mid April 2009.

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I’ve had the google toolbar installed for a while now. It’s a very useful add-on to FireFox me me as I use google Notebook and Bookmarks and the toolbar provides nice easy access to both, so it’s a winner.

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The main motivation for this little downloadable Flash demo site is simply that I wish there’d been something similar to this when I built my first Gaia based Flash site.

Hopefully, it will help other AS/Gaia novices get their head around a few things and give people a kick in the right direction.

View Demo

Here it is: http://www.tmrw.co.uk/demo/gaia-framework/

Source Files

Download it all here: http://www.tmrw.co.uk/demo/gaia-framework/gaia-as3-demo.zip

Dependencies

You’ll need the Gaia Flash Framework extension installed, you can download that from here.

Notes about the demo

1. This particular demo is built on Gaia v2.4.9 - the AS3 version
2. The site this demo is based on (designbygrain.com) was my very first AS3 site, I’m not a programmer and I’m not promising my code is as organised or tidy as is should be, but hopefully someone out there will find it useful!

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Yes, I’ve tweaked the layout and design of the site again and you can bet it’ll change a bit more over the next few weeks - I needed to make it a bit easier to actually see what the site was about.

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Per gallon ‘of what’ I’m not entirely sure - it’s just a quote I saw while looking at reviews for which bike to buy, and it stuck like in my brain.

Anyway, last weekend I bought myself a new toy, a shiny new Kona Blast 08 mountain bike…

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Intro

There were 3 main reasons for re-designing and moving this site over to WordPress…

• To make it easier to keep up-to-date
• Get a more permanent presence on the old internet and replace the temporary portfolio style site, which was just a quick-fix after Christmas
  
• And finally and most importantly, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation for anyone who’s not sure what that means) - To get the site indexed well by Google and bumped up the results pages, getting more and more work directly from people finding my site independently on the internet.

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For anyone who’s looked at this site more than twice you’ll have noticed that this site’s changed from looking like this, to looking like however it does right now.

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FLIR is short for Facelift Image Replacement, and it’s a really easy way (waaaay easier than the Flash based alternative sIFR, which replaces each header etc with a separate tiny .swf flie) to generate image replacements for any bit of html text on a web page - that means you can easily use any font you want on a web page instead of having to settle for the classics like Arial or Tahoma etc. FLIR, for example, is the thing that’s making all the headings for the articles on this site use Souvenir as their main font.

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Before you shout ‘MacBook Pro!’ - that was way out of the budget I’d set myself (less than £800 if I could manage it), so out of the question from the start. It was, unfortunately, the one that I really really wanted to get. It’s powerful and looks nice, and OSX is a joy to work on, but you have to pay a lot of cash to get it. Sorry Apple, maybe next time.

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Answer: Yes! It work’s really well.
I mentioned over a week ago that I’d decided to use WordPress (2.3.1) as the solution to provide a full CMS for a site I’m building (I’ll post a link to the final site when it goes live, along with some information on how I managed certain aspects of it).

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FFFFOUND! is one of those sites that you just, well, find - then wonder why no one else though of it before.

The idea is really simple, it’s an image bookmarking site. You find an image on the Internet that you like - be it an illustration, an amazing photo, some inspiration for something you’re working on or just a piece of art - then you click on a link in your browsers favourites (that you add via the ffffound.com website) called ‘POST TO FFFFOUND! and said image is sent to your FFFFOUND! account, so you can keep them all in one handy place. Mine are here for example.

That’s not all though. They look and see what images you’ve added to your account, see what other users like the same images as you, then recommend other images to you based on the other users similar tastes.

At the moment it’s in a Beta testing stage, so you can’t sign up without an invite. After looking unsuccessfully on Google for one I just emailed them and asked for one. They sent one back the next day.

If you can get your hands on an invite it’s worth checking out and trying it for yourself. It’ll waste a good few hours of your time just browsing the growing collection of nice looking stuff.

Credit goes to EveryoneForever where I first spotted this.

You can’t really see much from that one image, but click here for pretty amazing video of it in action - http://www.pablovalbuena.com/augmsculpt_condeduque_web.mov

No, I couldn’t work it out at first either. More about it at http://www.pablovalbuena.com/

After working in the web/graphic design industry for other people for over 7 years I figured it was time try do my own thing.

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