Flash, Twitter and crossdomain.xml

22nd April, 2008

As part of the latest FRED website update, I’ve been asked to include a twitter feed integrated into the flash file itself. Not knowing much about twitter itself apart from the basics, like knowing I’d have to take data from a feed and have to make some actionscript that parses the XML, I started the necessary research to see what people had done before me.

It is fortunate then, that I stumbled across this post, Twitter Issues, which describes a scenario that is not unfamiliar to me. It also provides a solution which will ultimately save me time later on! Basically, since some major security updates in Flash quite a long while ago, it hasn’t been able to access data on any server different to the one it is hosted on without express permission from the other server in the form of a special file called crossdomain.xml. I had the same issue when developing the original FRED Roles database stored on one site and accessed via flash from the other. Now Twitter themselves could have solved the issue by simply using a * (star) in their file to allow access from anyone, but for whatever reason they chose not to.

Looping Smarties Pattern

16th April, 2008

Yesterday I was given the interesting task of creating a looping pattern of smarties to be printed off in giant scale and wrapped around the outside of a van. After buying several smarties and taking a few photographs later, I produced this pattern:

Separating Posts from Pages in WordPress

16th April, 2008

I decided that what our wordpress-cross-CMS for Ocean Addict required was the ability to browse through the thousands of expected Pages (pages because of the fact they exist outside of the post timeline as a form of static content) forming the school listings via the inbuilt category system. This was easily achievable by creating a page template specifically for displaying a school listing with the Comments and Categories shown and by using the useful plugin Page Category Plus for replicating the Category selection interface in the admin (I was already aware that this was possible since Pages are simply Posts that are treated differently but still have all the same mySQL fields).

While this side of things worked exactly as expected it threw up a unique issue I hadn’t considered.

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Snugglebums Teddy Bear Logo Idea

7th April, 2008

Update: Finished design here!

So here is the latest logo design project working for Neovirtua for my placement year, to create a graphic for the new Snugglebums Website we shall be working on in the near future.

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