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Scrolling in Flash

Monday, April 5th, 2010

I have been getting a lot of questions for a good way of scrolling in Flash. So I thought I would let you know about the Scroll Flash Tutorial I made on how to do that. It gives you the code and the explains  basic functionality.  But if you don’t know anything about programming, I also created a simple Auto Scroll Flash file or in other words a Flash Text Ticker / Text Scroller file.  It’s completely customizable by XML so you don’t even have to know Flash to use it and it super easy to add to any website. You can change the font size, color, link color, background color, and add multiple lines of text if you want, and you can even setup a timer to display each text line item. If you buy it, there is also a help file that will give you a step by step process on how to edit the XML file and add the Flash scroller to your webpage.  To see a few examples of this file in action, click the example  image below.

If you guys have any more specific questions about scrolling in Flash,  just let me know by sending me an email through my contact page or leaving a comment.

Cya

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Posted in Flash Information | No Comments »

Groovesharks Amazingness (wotw)

Thursday, April 1st, 2010


For my second entry into the website of the week (wotw), I wanted to rant on how much I love Grooveshark. If you don’t know what it is yet then you need help. Grooveshark is another online music system that allows you to listen to music. Like other music websites like Pandora, and Jango you can set up radio stations that will randomly play songs similar to the artist of your choice. But unlike those other sites Grooveshark allows you to create your own playlists, listen to any song at any time, replay songs, and there aren’t those annoying ads between every song. The only ad is on the right and that’s for the free version. You can pay $3 and the ads will go away, but its really not all that bad with the single add on the right. They also have some really cool features like the RSS feed of songs you are listening too and they have a really cool Grooveshark WordPress Plugin. For me who sits in front a computer more than 8 hours a day,  a really well made music site that allows you to listen to the music you want is vital to get those creative juices going. The most amazing thing of all is that the whole site is made in Flash and has really great features like the use of the back and forward button (you know how often Flash sites suck as this).  Check it out, I highly recommend it, and maybe down the road I will create a cool Flash RSS Grooveshark Reader or something.

Cya

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Posted in Useful Websites | No Comments »

Detect Iphone

Thursday, March 11th, 2010


I got inspired and wanted to finish up the iphone version of my website. To do this, first you need to detect the iphone and then redirect the user to another webpage. Here is the script to do that:

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<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
	if ((navigator.userAgent.indexOf('/iPhone/i') != -1) || (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('/iPod/i') != -1)) {
		document.location = "http://www.scottrockers.com/iphone.html";
	}
// ]]></script>

Add this Javascript inside your <head> tags. and change the document.location to the page you want the user to get redirected to. The reason I have a iPhone version of my website is because my home page is made in Flash and as you know the iPhone can’t display Flash yet. So I created a basic html page that has a div in the body of it that is sized to 300 width by 350 height. And if you put this line of script in the <head> section it will tell Safari that the viewport should be the same size as the iPhone screen. Setting this line of code forces the content to always fit the window.

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<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0;">

Now, if someone wants to bookmark your website, they can hit the + sign and then click “Add to Home Screen” and you want to specify what icon to use for the iPhone, then create a 57px by 57px .png formatted image, put it up on your server and put this line of code in to your <head> section as well.

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<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http://www.scottrockers.com/library/images/sriphonelogo.png"/>


Just make sure the href tag is the correct destination to your image. What is cool is that you don’t have to add the corners or shine effect on the webclip because the iPhone will do that for you.

If you want to see all the actual html code, you can just go to scottrockers.com iPhone Version and click view source.

Cya

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Posted in Simple Code Tricks | No Comments »

Free Web Icons Download (wotw)

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Website of the Week (wotw) is a new series I am doing on my blog, featuring one website per week or as often as I find a good one. I was basically doing this before when I would talk about other really useful websites that I use all the time or ones I come across while surfing on the net. Now this will by no means be anything close to thefwa.com in terms of awesomeness but it might be useful to anyway out there who is a surfing trying to find some good stuff.

This first entry in the Website of the week is Free Icons: More than 100,000 Icons in One Place. Its a really great site for all things icons, and if you still can’t find an icon that you need you will surely find something that could help you at least get started. Be careful though, you can spend hours looking at all the different  icons without even realizing the time flying by.

Cya

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SEO Check List

Friday, March 5th, 2010

I wanted to create a SEO check list for every website that I work on, that way I could go back and reference it after finishing up a site. These methods are proven and if you follow this SEO checklist as well, then you will have increased traffic on your site too. If you want proof of it working, you can check out my other post Search Engine Optimization Techniques where I explain more in detail about all these points. This check list is just a quick guide to help remind you of whats left to finish on the website to optimize it for Search engine ranking. Here we go:

  1. First, you need to validate all of your webpages on your site (meaning your  html code needs to not have any errors or warnings in it). This is the most important step because if the bot can’t index your page then how is it going to know how to categorize it. You can do that here: w3c Markup Validation Service
  2. Select the keywords that pertain to your particular post or page. Its important to select your keywords using a Keyword Tool, like Google Adwords Keyword Tool, so you know how many people are searching the specific terms you are choosing and which ones have the least competition.
  3. Insert your keywords into these parts of the webpage:
      1. Title – Very important, the title appears in the search engine results page as the link, Google uses the title tag for determining page relevance and ranks the page higher if the saearch phrase is found in the title.
      2. URL – Your keywords should be used in the url that specific page,  either in the directory or file name. Its good to use hyphens instead of a space in naming convention.
      3. headings – Every page should have a heading <h1> tag, and the keywords should be used in this and the h1 tag should be used only once.
      4. Text – In the text on your page, its very important to use the keywords in the first part of your webpage content. Also, if there is a small amount of text on the page it could cause the page to be ranked poorly too.
      5. keywords Meta Tag – Every webpage should have the keywords used in “Keywords Meta Tag”.  You add this line of code in between the <head> tags:<meta name=”keywords” content=”Your specific keywords” >
      6. Description Meta Tag – You add them like this:<meta name=”description” content=”A description sentence about your page or post pertaining to your keywords” >
      • Links – Use keywords in your links instead of using “click here” or phrases like that.
      • Images – all <img> tags should use the alt attribute using the keywords
      • Include a robots.txt file in the site root of your website. Even if the robots.txt file is blank upload one to your server because it will prevent your site from producing error messages every time a search engine spider visits your site.
      • Include a sitemap.xml file in the site root of your website. There is a website that will automate or help you create/ edit  a sitemap.xml file, it called xml-sitemaps.com.

      This is just  a really quick seo check list that will dramatically help with your websites overall SEO, but if you don’t think your site is being indexed by google still, you can go to google.com/addurl and add your site url and google will start to index your site.

      Cya

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      Posted in Useful Websites | 1 Comment »

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