Tony Bentley - Multimedia Development - Web Technologies Journal

Do not dedicate a size for CFINPUT TYPE=”FILE”

Posted on August 28th, 2007

The following code presented a problem today:

< cf input type="file" name="uploadimage" size="35" >

I learned after repeated changes to my code that it will return a null value to the query page. Thats all.

Posted in Coldfusion | No Comments »

Remember the Office Paperclip?

Posted on July 6th, 2007

When I purchased my first version of Microsoft Office it came preinstalled with the paperclip assistant that would respond to mistakes but was never very useful. Eventually everyone turned this assistant off and just figured it out by googling or asking someone else. I found a great video that someone did which resembles exactly how useful this tool really was.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Installing Lightbox 2.03.3

Posted on June 10th, 2007

In the last year Lightbox has been a very popular method of adding a simple javascript popup to your web page. Click the thumbnail and a window pops up, loads the image and shows it in a seperate window but within the same browser. Some of the fancy things about Lightbox is it’s ability to darken the main page behind the popup and also the nice web 2.0 preload gif that is so common these days. Also when you click outside the image in the dark area, the window automatically closes. This is really easy to implement and requires only some addition to your CSS, a javascript library (scriptaculous & prototype) and the use of rel="lightbox" in your anchor tag to call the effect.

Here is a demo:

Here is the Lighbox website.

Posted in Javascript | No Comments »

XMLHttpRequest method of data retrieval from RSS/Atom feeds

Posted on June 4th, 2007

Today I decided to finally give RSS aggregation a try on my own website. I know it requires much less code to query a MySQL database, return the results and parse the data with Coldfusion but Asynchronous JavaScript and XML does not require a programming language and it retrieves data from a much more universal datasource .

Since Atom and RSS is currently the protocol for getting web content displayed among all of the current web platforms, I suppose it is good to know things like this. I did a keyword search for RSS Ajax and THIS LINK came up first, which has an excellent explanation on the framework that reads the XML and outputs the results without the browser refreshing. I can make requests to any RSS feed and never move from the single page as I flow from one feed to another. I have seen the SPRY framework Adobe has been working on for their new method of serving requests and blending some really nice effects into the response. It would be nice to develop similar techniques under OSINT.

Update: I finally found an excellent RSS parser by Aarron Walter which uses Magpie RSS Parser and Prototype to get the data from each of the RSS feeds and then puts the feeds into an array and outputs the content which displays the title and however many links I want to show for each feed. Considering there are over a dozen feeds, I am pretty happy with the speed in which the results are delivered.

Posted in Ajax/XML | No Comments »

Ditching the Flash halo in IE7

Posted on June 1st, 2007

As many of you who have upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 realized, websites built with any Flash component such as a navigation menu or animated header needs to be clicked in order for you to be able to use it. The reason is because Microsoft decided to have users activate all ActiveX controls (like flash) by having the user click on every one to activate it for every page.

Here is an example of the “HALO” that will show a halo when you mouseover the weather widget: (Firefox and other browsers excluded)

Fortunately some flash doesn’t require you to click on it in order for it to load and display data but if it is interactive, you need to click it on every page.

There is a solution that every Flash developer should be using as a fix: Embed the flash element into Javascript and call it using an id tag.

SWFObject is the SWF embed script formerly known as FlashObject. The name was changed for legal reasons.

Posted in Javascript | No Comments »

Simpleviewer integration in PHP/Coldfusion

Posted on May 25th, 2007

You need the Flash Player to view this video.

Although I am still not at a point where I am able to write the captions from a form, I do have a script that writes the XML document and populates the XML document with thumbnails from a specified folder. I also wrote a fun application that checks a folder for xml documents and displays a random image, the title and first caption from each XML document. Ray Camden wrote the random images script. Also to get simpleviewer onto this blog was a recent discovery which I included in the
SAMPLE CODES.

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

My new WIMP web server

Posted on May 10th, 2007

The last week has been dedicated to setting up a web server on my laptop. In order to develop websites using php/mysql, in the past I have simply uploaded the php packages like this wordpress blog via FTP and ran the installation scripts over via http. Now I can deploy php/mysql packages locally (on my laptop) and then once the site is in release mode I can deploy the same files and export the database to the remote server.

My initial hope was developing under the open source WAMP server (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP acronym). After installing MySQL, PHP and Apache I was able to get Apache to load PHP files using the local server path http://localhost but I could not get Apache to detect the MySQL database server. After several uninstalls, reinstalls, restarts and hours of internet research on the WAMP server installation I was at a crossroads when I saw that the Apache Windows installer was in a constant error loop and would not be able to work properly without uninstalling Windows or getting a C programmer to get Windows to run the Apache Service correctly. I know there are bundles like WAMP Server available but I wanted to do the installation from scratch so I knew how each component interacted with the others and ensure that I could install custom extensions for php and have a better understanding of the OS environment.

Once at a point where I knew a Windows reinstall was inevitable, I finally decided to try using Windows XP Professional’s built in web server, which they call Internet Information Services or IIS for short. The installation was a little bit more straightforward. I made the modifications to the php.ini file, added the PHPRC variable and added ;c:\php to the path variable in the Windows Environment Variables under system properties and then installed the php_mysql.dll extension after making sure php was working properly. In order to test php I made a test.php page that called phpinfo() and connected to the MySQL database.

Once at a point where I knew PHP was connecting to MySQL, I installed phpMyAdmin as my Database Administrator. Two hours later I made one more Windows install in php for the php_mbstring.dll extension and then had phpMyAdmin working perfectly except a Warning message saying, “Warning: Module ‘mysql’ already loaded in Unknown on line 0” at the bottom of every page that made calls to the MySQL database. I fixed this by going back to the php.ini and checking for duplicates in loading the extensions. I think the installer puts them into the page after installing the extension so you have to manually go back and delete the duplicates and make sure the upper extensions are uncommented. The only other bug seemed to be the default index.php under the wordpress directory does not show up when I typed http://localhost/wordpress/. I must use the actual path that calls the index.php file in order to view the blog. The fix for this was to go to IIS/web sites console and add index.php to documents in the default website properties.

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

A useful way of thinking about Web 2.0

Posted on April 19th, 2007

This is a sweet video called The Machine is Us/ing Us

If you are wondering where we are and where we are going with the internet, this is something worth watching.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Creating a web video

Posted on March 6th, 2007

Last weekend I was hired by Terri Dunavant to capture one her presentations so she had a sample video for her website. I thought this would be a good time to explain the process that enabled me to make it available to her and also to optimize the video for internet optimization.

I asked Terri to wear bright clothing that would contrast well with any neutral background (black, white, tan, etc). I also needed to make sure she wasn’t hiding behind any podium or in front of something that would compromise her profile.

I brought my laptop and a M-Audio Mobile Pre USB preamp so I could use a Behringer B-1 large-diaphragm condenser mic to stream the audio to my laptop. I then used a Panasonic GS250 3CCD miniDV video camera to capture the video.

Once I was back at my desktop computer at home I then captured the video and put the file on my computer and gave her an FTP login so she could download the file and then decide which clip snippets to use. She then sent me an e-mail with the time ranges for each snippet (0:40 – 0:53, 5:02 – 5:33, 5:38 – 6:11, etc).

I captured her logo graphic from her website and designed the introduction credits in Photoshop. The video was edited using Adobe Premire with simple cross fades and fade to black transitions in between each snippet. I then adjusted the volume in between some of the transitions to make them much smoother and then added my own credits to the end, again using Photoshop.

Once I completed the edited video and the results were satisfactory she setup a YouTube account and I uploaded the video, filled in the search engine keywords, description and then sent her the code for her webmaster.

The total time editing and rendering was about 6 hours.