Multimedia Blog

Go to the admin page for your wordpress blog and select Tools>Import>Blogger. Click the authorise button and it will take you to a the google login page. When you login it will ask you to confirm that you want wordpress to access your posts. Thats it, it imports all your posts and comments so that you can switch your blog to wordpress.

I've been meaning to buy a domain and build a custom wordpress theme for a while. The plan is to switch my blog to wordpress, pick out the posts on this one that I think are significant and repost them. This will act as a blog/portfolio.

I've been getting increasingly frustrated at not being able to post SWFs and use plugins like syntaxHighlighter that rely on javascript files. Shaun asked us to familiarise ourselves with wordpress over christmas so it seems like as good a time as any.

Purchased my domain, webjot.co.uk from godaddy. Pretty pleased with the domain, I spent a while finding something short, memorable and relevant. Found a really good domain search tool called Bustaname that helped me out.

I decided to host my site with godaddy as well since they were cheap, well known and had 1-click wordpress install. so far they have been really good. The customer support is amazing and I got the 12 month deluxe package with the domain (2 years minimum with .co.uk) for about 60 quid.

I've installed wp and uploaded syntaxHighlighter. Planning on uploading lightbox to display my swfs, videos and images. Now that christmas is over I'm going to design a custom theme and have a crack at developing it. I have a basic tutorial and a more complicated tutorial to follow so I'll see how it goes. Will post my progress.

A friend sent me a link to this youtube video. Made by a guy called 'BLU', check it out

I have seen a few sites with headers that respond to mouse movement. They have limited movement but give the impression of a 3D environment. The interactivity is really engaging and I have found myself playing with them for well over a minute.

After searching around for a bit, I found the method used to create the effect. jParallax uses multiple PNG images with transparency, combined with jQuery and CSS. There is a plugin to make it display properly in IE6 since it doesn't display PNGs with transparency as expected. Seems like a fairly complicated effect but definately a process worth learning.

I'm going to hunt for a step by step tutorial and try to implement my own design with a doodle style landscape. I'll be posting my progress.

Watched a video on CSS-Tricks about CSS short hand. I was already aware of the short-hand for the border properties but the short-hand for background and font will save me time and make my code more readable. Bare in mind that the values must be in the correct order. You can omit certain values if you want them to just assume their defualt vale but you cannot change the order. Here they are:

Background:
color | image | repeat | position | attachment

element {
background:red url(image.png) repeat top left scroll;
}

Font:
style | variant | weight | size | height | family

p {
font:bold 1em/1.2em georgia,"times new roman",serif;
}

Border:
width | style | color

element {
border: 4px solid red;
}

List-Style:
type | position | image

ul li {
list-style:square inside url(image.png);
}

If anyone codes their tweens in flash rather than relying on timeline animation here's a really good custom TweenClass called TweenMax that I've been meaning to share for a while now. A million times easier to use, less code and a lot more features. Makes sequencing complicated tweens fairly easy once you get the hang of it. The guy who actually wrote the class is pretty active on the forum as well, so if you have a specific problem he will often tell you where your going wrong

I was looking for a AS3/PHP contact form so that I can redesign the interface to match my design that I mocked up in photoshop. I found a simple contact form script on Mike Garcia's blog that's license free. Thought I'd let people know about it because it looks easy to implement, you just have to change the emails address in the php file and a couple of file paths in the script within the fla.

This is simple but I never knew it mattered before.

While looking for something completely different I just discovered why my tweens in AS3 sometimes break mid tween, especially when I am using multiple tweens within the same function.
You are meant to declare your tweens as variables before using them within a function like below. You can take a look at the full post HERE

var myTween:Tween;

function doTween(event:Event) :void
{
myTweenX = new Tween(this, "x", Regular.easeInOut, 10, 200, 1, true);
}

I read an interesting article today about Nottingham announcing a bid to become the World Design Capital. The award aims to encourage the use of design to further the social, economic and cultural development of the world's cities. From what I can make out Nottingham is in a position to make a strong bid. If Nottingham is successeful it could attract investment and encourage economic development. It would give Nottingham a certain status and the city would gain global recognition.

I found this article and all the related websites really interesting, I knew Nottingham had a growing creative industries sector but I wasn't aware of all the networks and partnerships that exist. I don't know a lot about the creative industries sector 3 year growth plan but it's being backed by the city council and it seems like it's going to encourage further growth. It will be interesting to see if Nottingham can put itself on a par with cities like London and Manchester in the future.