Good News

It's not very often that you see the News reporting on uplifting or good news. It's really a shame that the general public is so attracted to "bad news"; creating a television system where only "bad news" gets good ratings.

I did happen upon a couple great stories of good people doing things that only good people would do. There's this story of Unbelievable Sportsmanship as well a Boy Scout Doing his good turn.

Enjoy a little piece of goodness, and do the world a favor: turn off the "bad news."
-Ashton Sanders

CSS Scroll Box instead of iFrames

You've probably heard "iframes are horrible with search engines." Well, they are.

I recently had a client want me to create scroll boxes for their website so they could fit 1000+ words into a 300x457 pixel scroll box. How can I create this scroll box without the iframe? Well, you are about to find out.

Here is how you use CSS to create a scroll box instead of an iframe:

We're going to use a css attribute called "overflow," and by setting it to auto, it turns a normal div into a scroll box!

#scrollbox {
  width:300px;
  height:457px;
  overflow:auto;
}
<div id="scrollbox"> *enter endless amounts of words*</div>

That's it!
Enjoy

Simple PHP Blog

I have already done a lot of ranting and raving about Blogger and Wordpress.

Although I consider these two to be the leaders of the blogging pack (by a large margin), I did run across a blog using Simple PHP Blog, and was impressed. It doesn't have all the crazy features like the other two, but it does have a feature which really attracted my attention. On the bottom of every post there are five dots, and you can rate the post 1 to 5. This way, people can interact with your posts and website without actually having to write a comment.

Don't get me wrong, the comment function is still intact, but the percent of comments compared to visitors is tiny, while the percent of "ratings" to visitors is much higher.

Another note: Simple PHP Blog isn't database driven. You can run it on a server without needing a database!

If anyone ends up using this system, please let me know how it goes.
-Ashton Sanders

1 year and 100+ posts!

Well it has been a year since my first post here on Website Design in a Flash, and this will be my 104th post!



This was my first blog that really got me started in the world of blogging, and I have learned a lot. I hope that I can continue to provide useful information for people working to tame the Internet. My posting frequency has slowed down over the last couple months, but I will try to pick it up again.

Here's to another year of Website Design Tips and Tricks!
-Ashton Sanders

Flash Random Scene ActionScript

I recently created a Flash Animation that would randomly play one of three different Flash scenes. Then after each scene, it would go back to the beginning and randomly choose another scene to play. This was all programmed in ActionScript in Flash.

I have a feeling that even though this code is very simple, it will save a little bit of time if I have it stored here for the future.

// First Choose a random number
//from 0 to the number of scenes
num = random(3);

//Depending on which random number
//was chosen, go to a flash scene
switch (num)
{
  case 0:
    gotoAndPlay("scenename", 1);
    break;
  case 1:
    gotoAndPlay("scenename1", 1);
    break;
  case 2:
    gotoAndPlay("scenename2", 1);
    break;
  default:
    trace ( " no case tested true " )
}

That's it!
-Ashton Sanders