Aug
20
August 20, 2007 at 10:41 pm
Yay, my first php built site completed yesterday night. I’m quite satisfied with the results of my first site built fully in php. I must say MAMP is definitely an essential developer application when working with php. I highly recommend it.
Building the site must have took twice as long compared to have building the site in HTML, but it’s such a time saver when it comes to updating or fixing specific areas of the site. So it pays off in the long run.
Something I must note is that PHP4 does not let us use ‘public’, ‘protected’ or ‘private’ variable declarations, we must just use ‘var’. That was a mistake I made when I uploaded it onto my test server, I keep getting this error: “PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in line [...]” that I didn’t get with MAMP, which I had set to PHP5.
A little bit about the site, it was a re-design of an older html based website. The new site isn’t up yet, but it should be up in no time. I’ll keep you all updated. For now a very tiny teaser:
So the re-design focussed alot on increasing the usability. I’ve add a side navigation bar as well as a drop down navigation at the top. I’ve included alot of whitespace, and basically cleaned up the site a bit. The biggest challenge was cleaning up the original markup, which had tables…*gasp! and some other deprecated tags. Other than that it was a very fun project I must say.
My next project: turn my website into all php!
Read | No comment
Aug
13
August 13, 2007 at 7:01 pm
For one of our assignments for webmarketing class, we needed to create an approx. 15 sec. flash web banner under 40K. It was surprisingly challenging, since whenever I decrease the file size, I end up with low image quality, since there is less data stored in the bytes. 40 K is definately small, so every K counts!
Here are some tips I found:
- Optimize your raster images in Photoshop first. Use the save for web and devices option. Play around with the settings. I suggest using JPEG compression since I found it to produce the better quality for the size. If you use blur, it makes some of the quality loss less visible, but don’t over do it.
- In Flash, don’t embed fonts! Break your fonts apart. Yes, it does mean you can’t edit them after but this is the quick and dirty way. Once it is broken apart, the fonts turn into vector, which makes like a 5 K difference. (I know big whoop, but if you’re working with a 40K limit, it makes a difference!)
- Use as much vector as possible. Create all your images in flash if possible. Photographs take up too much bytes.
- Try going grayscale with photos. Less colors= smaller file size.
Read | 1 comment
Aug
2
August 2, 2007 at 12:41 am
This is the first time I’ve come across this problem, so I thought I should blog about it since I found it rather interesting.
Problem: When I embed a external swf with text content that is loaded through an XML file, and then put a mask over it, the text just doesn’t appear in the text field. Everything else such as the graphics and movie clips work loaded fine. When I take off the mask the text will load fine in the text field.. how weird.
However, the solution was very simple: just embed the font!
Here’s the explanation I found on actionscript.org forum:
“Flash has a limitation where TextFields cannot be rotated or have their alpha values changed (including masking) if you’re using the system fonts. By embedding the font, Flash Player is able to use the raw vector data just like any shape.” -Dr. Zeus
Thanks! I guess I really do learn something new everyday.
Read | No comment
Aug
1
August 1, 2007 at 2:57 am
Without further delay… this blog is finally up and running! I must say I’m very impressed with Wordpress blogging system. It is very well built and is fully customizable.
I really have to thank The Undersigned for writing a great tutorial on how to make your own Wordpress themes. Thanks to the tutorial, I was able to make this blog that I have here before your eyes. Basically, when I was designing my blog, I wanted it to remain consistent with the rest of my website. I’m pretty happy with the result.
So what exactly is this blog going to be about. The short answer is.. everything. Basically, I’m going to try to keep readers up to date with site updates as well as anything I find interesting that relates to new media such as graphic design and anything to do with the web.
Thanks for reading my post.. hopefully I didn’t bore any of you to sleep just yet.
Read | 3 comments
