Control Option Command

I’ve been meaning to release the theme of this blog for ages, yet I never really got around to finishing it.
After a bit of consideration I’ve decided to go for the easy option and just release it “as is”. It’s based on Sandbox and is therefore GPL-licensed. Otherwise I’d release it under my personal “I don’t give a hoot, but please credit me”-license.

If you want to use this theme for your blog without making any changes, here’s what you might be interested to know:

• The text in the top banner is entirely configurable in the theme options. You can even choose between using Flash, a static image file (there’s a template included in the theme folder) or even plain HTML text
• The Twitter widget in the sidebar is likewise configurable. Enter your Twitter ID, choose whether or not to ignore @replies and Bob’s your uncle.
• This theme is not widget ready. If you try to add widgets they simply won’t show up. The default Twitter, Feeds, Recently and Pages is what you get. I’m sorry about this. This was one of the things I was working on when I ran out of time.
• I’ve tried to clean out most of the plugin-specific styling for the plugins I use. Simply delete the following files if you don’t want my plugin-styles to override the defaults:
  • styleextras.css
  • sociable_see_extras.css
• Like I said; Work in progress. Here be dragons. :)

If, however, you want to help out finishing this theme and / or add your ideas to it here is a list for you.

• The reason widgets don’t currently work is because I wanted to make it so that widgets would always be styled in a specific manner according to their position, rather than the type of widget. For example I wanted the next box on the right to be grey regardless of whether it was an archives widget or a recent posts widget. Anal much? Yes. Anyway; I made a JavaScript that assigns an extra class to each widget based on it’s position, or “number” if you please. It’s pretty much done except for making the graphics (getting the design to be height-agnostic is a real bitch). There’s some first attempts in the images folder if you want to give it a go
• The theme does not currently validate properly. It used to, and then I messed something up. Sorry.
• The comment styling is really messy. I’d consider working it over if I were you. (I’ll get around to it some day…)
• There’s probably more I should warn you about, but it’s late and I’m sleepy. I created this theme strictly for personal use, and although I’ve gotten rid of all absolute URLs and site-specific stuff I haven’t gotten around to cleaning up the code. I’m quite the salesman, huh?

So there it is. For the geeks, here’s a github link.
For the non-geeks, here’s a direct download to the theme zip-file.

Enjoy.

No no. I’m not about to start a kerfuffle about changing the location and / or name of my blog again. I just wanted to make sure you’ve heard about the new ria.creuna.com site.

Basically me and the other RIA-developers broke out and started our own blog. If you like the code, geek and tech content from this site you should be sure to check it out. For example you could start with my huge post about URL Recognition, or you could read how my co-worker exposes the clickTAG sham for the lousy stinky piece of bad stuff it is.

Lately the internet has had a wave of sites using the cherished Konami Cheatcode to reveal easter eggs or similar functionality in the site or app.

I wrote a (crappy but working) class to implement such functionality in ActionScript about a year ago here.

I decided to polish it up a bit for the benefit of myself and anyone else and in the process ended up creating a small utility class to work with keystrokes in the process.

You can download the (fairly self-expaining) classes and a sample project right here, or read on for a bit of explanations.

(Text) Keys.as.
(Text) Konami.as.
(Archive) Neatly zipped + example.

Read the rest of this article »

Update!! Yahoo did the same dick move of cockblocking Flash. :/ To remedy this the URLRequest on line 80 had to be changed. If your project used to work but doesn’t anymore; Try this. If this is your first time here; Ignore this message.
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Ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
So, I saw that I’m still getting some traffic to this post where I suggested a solution to the Twitter crossdomain.xml problem.

The Yahoo pipes solution still works fine, but my code is a godawful mess and I decided I’d have to fix it up a bit. The methodology is essentially the same. We’ll be using this yahoo pipe, but it’s neatly blackboxed so that you just need to know your Twitter ID to use this class.

Read the rest of this article »

A fairly common task in ActionScript projects is to deal with URLs in dynamically loaded text. Whenever I faced this prospect I usually ended up with some half-assed searching for “http://” and then indexOf(” “) to determine when the URL had ended and then smacked a <a href> on either side. Which pretty much meant that “http://___||/**.tasty_cheese_omelete” would be acceptable while “google.com” would not.

Hence I always promised myself that next time I’d write a proper class to deal with URLs so that this bullshit wouldn’t pass anymore.

Regular Expressions have always scared the bejeezus out of me, but I realized there was probably no other option when looking for something that has a valid URL structure. It was surprisingly easy to find some fairly good examples for what I wanted to achieve, and surprisingly difficult to get any of them to work in ActionScript. I’m blaming it on the AS implementation of RegExp, and I’m sure ActionScript is blaming it on my implementation of dumb.

After some swearing though I managed to determine whather a string had the proper structure of a URL but it still wasn’t perfect. I wanted my class to be intelligent enough to accept all valid Top Level Domains (there’s 267 in use) but reject any invalid attempt to pass as a valid TLD. IE: egypt.eg should pass, but breakfast.egg should not. The solution ended up being storing all the TLDs in a Vector and parsing through them to check if the domain was valid.

All in all the class now does a pretty good job, although there are probably still holes in it (let me know about them when you find them).

Check it out and grab it below, and then post a comment explaining to me slowly and carefully that I can achieve this exact functionality with the

method or something similar, which I’m sure is what will happen. ;)

The code is freely available here. I would appreciate any credit and that you share whatever improvements you make with me and the rest of the world, but I have neither time nor energy surplus to actually do any enforcing, so knock yourself out.