What is the military doing to the kids? Oh man..

I won't ask, so please don't tell me.  ¶ 11:25 AM 1 comments

  Live Girls on Zoey action! So, I mentioned that Sheri and I had taped the Live Girls appearance on Zoey 101 (Brittany Spears' younger sisters show). But I didn't get around to doing anything about it until tonight.

Using my mediocre video Kung Fu I made some wmv's of it here. I'll probably get a cease and desist letter pretty quickly, so hurry and see them while they're hot.


okay version here
ridiculously small version here, in case you have a dialup or something  ¶ 10:21 PM 0 comments

  Fear my leet skillz! Well, Kat noticed before I could even finish writing this post about it, but yeah, my new blog style is 'in effect' as the kids say.

I'm actually really proud of this because it took a lot of frigging work. Of course, I'd like it to be more portable than it is, but whatever. Some of the things I'm going to add onto this are nice little floaty linky boxes and probably the ability to change the text colors as a reader. These bits are a lot easier now that I can get the info into flash. I can also include animation and video in the background, but that might be too much. We'll see.

***WARNING****
***TECHNICAL DETAILS TO FOLLOW*****

The whole thing works by having flash call a couple php scripts that read the blog text and the comments text, respectively. Flash has a couple ways of getting data, but the simplest (and in this case, the only workable) way is to read a text file that contains variables that are seperated by ampersands. Like this:

var1=val1(ampersand)
var2=val2(ampersand)

and so on. That's all fine and dandy, except that this is the freaking internet and practically every link ever made uses ampersands.

So what happens is this. Blogger takes my text and sticks it into the template that I made, then loads it on my site. You can actually look at that here if you're into that kind of thing. My flash movie loads in your browser and asks the php script for data. The php script reads the file that blogger made, then does a bunch of gymnastics to make it into that 'var1=val1(ampersand)' format. Then my flash movie sorts through all the variables and puts them in the places I've asked it to. So far so good.

The problem comes when I have a link with an ampersand (like practically every link from amazon, for instance). The flash movie is reading through the file and hits that and thinks one variable is over and the other is beginning. But it's all mushed up because there's no equals so it pretty much dies and I'm left hanging. The most frustrating part is that blogger actually makes a link with an ampersand and puts it in your comments section. So my comments just weren't working.

Right now, it's just filtering that link out, taking it apart, sending it to flash without the ampersand, and flash is putting it back together. The problem is that I don't have anything to do that in the main blog text, so I'm going to have to be careful about it until I write something to take care of it. What a pain.

What I'd really like to do is write this whole thing so that it sends everything to flash as an accesible object instead of a list of variables, but I'd have to learn a lot more about AMF to do that. Kind of like these guys did. That would sure as hell make the blog template easier to deal with.

Anyway, love my flash.  ¶ 12:48 PM 1 comments