Motivation

So as of late, I’ve been a busy boy. I’ve taken on two contracts. The first, a smaller site for a Psychic/Medium and a full-time contract with Mobile Travel Guide. My title has changed to Web designer/Front-end developer. I’m building MTG a complete site with all the bells & wistles. CMS, tracking and anylitics, WAP and handheld support, video, audio, and email subscription. Needless to say, I have my work cut out for me. It’s a lot of fun though and I feel so very motivated when I like what I’m doing.

Hello from anywhere

This is my first post directly from my blackberry curve. It was a long and arduous process but I have it set up. Comment if you want tips on how to do this. I may update this post with a tutorial later. It’s too hard to type on this damn thing with the circus thumbs god gave me.

Myspace Profile Hacking Revisited

Ok peoples, a lot of you are moving away from MySpace as Facebook has taken over. That’s cool, I understand. I for one am never gonna give you up. I still use Myspace as some of my friends still do and I want to stay in contact with them. On June 10th Myspace released a redesign that effected a lot of custom profile designs, mine included, and most of the documentation on doing a custom profile went stale. I wasn’t ready to give up. If you reading this chances are you’re not ready either. Your probably coming here from Google and I’m way down the search list of “Myspace hacks” that’s because there’s an industry cranking out crappy profile templates. Fundamentally, Myspace’s default profile is poorly designed but you know that. These sites provide cut/paste code that only reskins the profile. We want to redesign it. If you still want to use the Myspace functionality to update and change your profile, then you’re in the wrong place. Check out Mike Industries’ tutorial on how to do you own reskining. This tutorial will give you complete control of the layout but take away the functionality of Myspace’s profile editor. With that said lets get into the nitty gritty. I’ll try my best not to lose you.

First, visit my profile and get oriented here.

What do you need to know about Myspace? Good question. First off, Myspace strips out certain things from your code. Mainly the # sign. This will limit the CSS controls down to class names. The main sections of the profile use classes and the contents use ids. We can work around this by declaring the class and then targeting the tag in question but that’s tedious, I’m lazy, and it’s a cross browser compatibility nightmare. Also, the lack of a # sign in our code will minimally effect the use of hex colors. Simple omitting the # from the color code will work just fine ( 123456 instead of #123456 ) you must use all six digits and 000 for black wont work.

Myspace won’t allow you to remove or cover the adverts. If you choose to do this then fine but when you’re account is deleted… that’s on you. They attempt to control this with iframe properties but it’s easy enough to get around this.

Call in a post with Jott

So as of late, I’ve been finding a lot of little tricks for WordPress. The latest trick really impressed me and will be very handy when I’m away from the computer, say, disc golfing or something. Here’s the concept, call a 1 866 number, tell the automated voice system you want to post to WordPress, and then start talking, clearly. In about two minutes it’ll show up as a post under your author name on your blog with a link for users to listen to your post. It’s that slick. Total setup time is about 15 minutes and there are some things you can do to set it up further. Don’t like texting into twitter all the time? It can update your twitter account too as well as a host of other online utilities. Here’s a brief tutorial on how to set it up for your WordPress Blog:

• Go to http://www.jott.com and set up an account, it’s free and quick.
• Enter in your info and agree to the terms of service
• Verify your email address,/li>
• Enter your phone number (you can add more numbers later)
• Call 1 866 JOTT-123 and it will activate your phone with your Jott account and
• start you on your first jott, to yourself.
• Go to the “Links” page in your Jott account and add WordPress
• Fill out the info for your blog and blog author and hit “Save”
• Now call 1 866 JOTT-123 and say “WordPress” when it asks you “Who do you want to
• Jott?” Then Start your message.
• Remember to speak clearly and in a place without a lot of background noise. Jott does a good job of picking out the right words but it’s a good idea to check the posts when you get back in front of the comp.

There’s a ton of usage with this web utility and voice posts to WordPress blogs is just the tip of the iceberg. I’d love to hear about how you’re using it.

Flash in 2008

So there’s a huge demand for Flash in the web design circles right now. I’m trying to understand why Adobe decided to make ActionScript 3.0 into a development code and widen the gap between design and development. Where I used to be fairly fluent in all of Flash, now I find myself quite deficient in the ActionScript arena. Flash has been a very powerful tool for a long time now, and the advent of AS3.0 has furthered that progress. The problem now is that designers like myself are left behind. It would require someone else to develop the code while I do the animation. I’m feeling pretty down about it as Flash used to be my trump card, now I’m unsure to even include it in my resume.