Website Designers and Webmasters

If you haven’t read my first rant about Century Tel, Click Here to Read it.

Disconnection from Century Tel!

Yes! It’s March 20th! It’s been exactly 1 year since we first signed up for Century Tel. I signed up for one year of service, and it couldn’t have been over quick enough. But now it is. Unfortunately, my account won’t just automatically cancel. I have to call them again….. Here is the blow by blow of what happened:

I have two numbers in my phone, and I didn’t know which one to call. I called the first one, which happened to be the wrong number. So after three minutes of pressing buttons, the tech support couldn’t transfer me. But he did confirm that the other number I had in my cell was the correct one.

Try #2: I call the second number. After another three minutes of hitting buttons, I get to another tech support guy who can’t help me…. But this one can transfer me. So I get transfered and wait a bit. I get a lady who asks for all of my information again. I tell her I’m canceling my account, and she has me wait I’ve been on hold for 10 minutes. Finally she gets me disconnected.

And it looks like… I could have canceled my account a couple months ago… But that’s the special thing about Century Tel, everyone you talk to has a different idea of how it works.

Now I just cross my fingers and hope that I don’t have to ever talk to them again…
-Ashton Sanders

Yesterday, I learned how to do two advanced things with paths in Flash ActionScript.

For an introduction, I’m creating a flash animation that will calculate a loan. What many people don’t know about loans is that someone can choose to decrease the rate on their loan in exchange for increased closing costs. I’m making a Flash Animation that will allow you to do that. It will also allow you to select different types of loans, (which will change your interest rate, and closing costs).

In this Flash Animation, I had an ActionScript function that was called from many different movies, and I need to use a lot of variables to make sure it reacted differently to every request.

Here are the things I learned:

Creating Variables From Paths

My ActionScript Function call was simple.

On (rollover) {
function(this);
}

Then all I needed to to was take the path to “this” and break it up into variables so that my Flash ActionScript will be able to do different things for each request. This seemed simple enough, I thought I could use the ActionScript Function split(.) to break apart the path into 4 different variables and thus allow me to do different things for each request. Unfortunately, what is returned by “this” is not a string so you can’t split it… or do anything else that would work on a string. But you can do this:

function(path){
path2 = path._parent._parent._name;
path3 = path._parent._name;
path4 = path._name;
}

And that will give you the name of every Flash Movie Clip in your path in the form of a string! That is a very useful Flash Action Script technique, but it lead me to the next problem:

Using Variables in Paths:

Lets say that within your Flash Animation you have movieClipB inside of movieClipA. You also have a variable in movieClipB called “num”;

The ActionScript path to reach var num from the root is:

_root.movieClipA.movieClipB.num

But what if you need to use a variable in a path. (This could occur if you have multiple movies all using the same function.)I thought this would work.. but it doesn’t:

path1 = “movieClipA”;
_root.path1.movieClipB.num;

But the above ActionScript does NOT work. However this does work:

movieroot = “_root”;
path1 = “movieClipA”;
movieroot[path1].movieClipB.num;

That is how you use variables in a path!

To begin this post, I have a questions:
1) Why doesn’t everyone know about this?

In my searching the web today, I found this article:

Leading Psychiatrist Admits Normal Children Are Diagnosed With Mental Disorders
Statement Adds to Controversy over Drugs Prescribed for Questionable Psychiatric Diagnoses

With increasing international concern about the large number of children labeled with so-called psychiatric disorders and prescribed mind-altering drugs, even the pioneer of psychiatry’s billing bible and “godfather of ADHD,” Dr. Robert Spitzer, has now admitted that normal children are being labeled. Spitzer, a Columbia University psychiatrist, told BBC2 that children experiencing perfectly normal signs of being happy and sad are being labeled as mentally ill. While admitting this, he stopped short of informing BBC viewers that there is no scientific evidence that any of the millions of children so diagnosed have any physical abnormality that justifies the diagnosis. Nor that because of this, psychiatrists cannot agree on who is sick and who is well. Yet despite this fallible “science,” worldwide sales of psychotropic drugs prescribed to treat “mental disorders,” including stimulants antipsychotics and antidepressants, now exceed $80 billion annually.

Read the rest of the article

It’s a shame…
-Ashton Sanders

Animating with Flash is great! It’s the most fun you can have while making a website. But a flash animation doesn’t become interactive without ActionScript.

ActionScript Allows you to send orders to many different sections of your flash animation. Any Flash Animation can have hundreds of different movie clips graphics and buttons. A Flash Movie Clip, Flash graphic or Flash button can be within other Flash Movie Clips or graphics. This Can create a very complicated system of Flash Graphics, Movie Clips and Buttons.

If you look at it like a folder system, it becomes easier to understand. Lets Say movieClipA and movieClipB are inside movieClipC (And those are their names respectively.) This is what the hierarchy would look like:

• movieClipC
  • movieClipA
  • movieClipB

To send an order to movieClipB (like to stop) this would be your command:

_root.movieClipC.movieClipB.stop();

What is this “_root.” thing?
This first section is where you are starting the command at. “_root.” tells the command to go to the very first level of your flash movie. To compare this to a Windows machine, this is like telling your computer to go all the way back to “C:\”. Then we have the name of the first movie (movieClipC), and then the name of the second movie (movieClipB). Then Finally we have the command to stop (stop();).

More to come soon,
-Ashton Sanders

I’ve already discussed how to create a 301 permanent redirect using PHP that allows you to forward one page to another. But what if you you have an entire site to redirect? What if you’ve changed domain names? There has got to be a better way to redirect your site besides, adding a php 301 redirect to every page. Well there is! It’s called .htaccess.

My next post will be a quick introduction to “.htaccess”.

If you only want to redirect from one page on your site to another, this is the .htaccess code to use:

redirect 301 /oldfolder/oldfile.htm http://www.websitesinaflash.com/new.htm

There are three parts to this redirect (make sure you put 1 space in between each element):

1) “redirect 301″: This declares that you are doing a redirect, and that the code is 301: Permanent Redirect.

2) “/oldfolder/oldfile.htm”: This declares the page you want to redirect from.

3) “http://www.websitesinaflash.com/new.htm”: This is where you want the page to redirect them to.

This is useful when you have renamed pages, and want to make sure google knows where your new pages are, and also any visitors that would be directed to that old page will automatically be directed to the new page.

But what about directing an entire folder or site to another folder or site?
You’ll have to wait for next post. =]

Enjoy
Ashton