Flash, Twitter and crossdomain.xml

April 22nd, 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.

FRED website

January 4th, 2008

An opportunity to work on a flash based website came up shortly before christmas where the company previously named ‘Uncle Fred’ had rebranded themselves to simply FRED and wanted their site updated to reflect these changes. Their website can be found at http://www.fredstalent.com.

The updated version is currently being tested at http://www.srjm.co.uk/FRED/

Freelance Project

August 9th, 2007

Seems I have found a bit of a freelance job to do creating a page design for a website aimed at buyers and sellers of houses. Best get brainstorming on some designs and reading up on vector graphics!

Other Stuff

Always interesting to look through for inspiration - Computer Arts Tutorials