Website Designers and Webmasters

Here we go again:

(This one isn’t really that bad… its just a humorous waste of time.)

Note: I have a cell phone, and don’t have any use for a home line, but you need a phone line to have DSL, so here I am stuck with a phone line that Century Tel can Spam, and cell to Telemarketing companies… I don’t have Dish either, so all I use Century Tel for is Phone and 6.0 MB/sec High-Speed Internet.

I’ve had Century Tel DSL for just over a month at my new residence, and yesterday, I get a call from them letting me know that I can package all of my services… It would have been nice to have received that information when I first signed up, but you take what you can get with Century Tel.

Sweet, what can you tone down my ridiculously-priced services to?

Century Tel Representative: “I can package your High-Speed Internet and your phone together for $80/month. (and with the service charges, taxes, etc. it comes out to about $100/month.) Do you have the 1.5 MB/sec or 256 KB/sec?

Me: “Uh… I have 6.0 MB/sec High-Speed Internet… What would it cost for that speed?”

Century Tel Representative: “It says you can’t get more than 1.5MB/sec at your residence…”

Me: “A speed test just told me I’ve got 4.3 MB/sec which is usually what Century Tel gives when you pay for 6.0 MB/sec. Can you tell me what it would cost to package the 6.0 MB/sec?”

Century Tel Representative: “No, I don’t have the price for that.”

HAHA?!?! You called me to tell me you don’t know the price for the package you would sell me… Priceless.

-Thank you for wasting my time,
-Ashton Sanders

(P.S. Click to view all posts on Century Tel.)

(P.P.S. As of Today, if you Search Google For “Century Tel”, this blog comes up on the bottom of the first page! HA!)

Here is a Loading Bar I developed using the ratio of Loaded bytes to total bytes.

ActionScript _xscale

This script uses three main elements. The first one we will discuss is: “_xscale”

//This is used to specify the
//width of an symbol (ie. movieClip)
_root.movieClip._xscale = *number between 0 and 100*

To go into more detail into that last element, if your movie clip is named “loaderbar” and you made it to be at its full length (about 200 pixels lets say), you could type:

_root.loaderbar._xscale = 50;
//That would squeeze it to
//100 pixels (50%)

This is what we will be using to slowly move the bar across the screen as the file is loaded.

Here is a Flash Loading Bar to demonstrate the _xscale Property.

This is continued in ActionScript Loading Screen Part 2
-Ashton Sanders

There is an awesome Flash Animation that you should definitely see.

There is very little ActionScript, but nonetheless it is one of those animations that you could just watch forever and still not see everything.

Click to see this Sweet Flash Animation.

(This was designed and Created by Geoffrey and Ashton Sanders of Websites in a Flash)

-Enjoy
-Ashton Sanders

Today was my first day of real annoyance with 1and1.com. (Click to see my last Service Review of 1and1.com.)

Today, all of my website I had hosted with them went down for about 2 hours. When my server crashed, I was on the phone with a client doing tweaks on a website, and the site would not come up any more…

But the worst part of it all was I had just convinced a client to switch over to 1and1.com, and they had just published an ad in the LATimes. So they had all these people coming to their site… and it was down for two hours…

Of course I can’t really blame 1and1.com. Electronics fail all the time, but still… for three years with GoDaddy, I never had my site go down (that I know of=]).

-Ashton Sanders

What is a FavIcon?

A FavIcon is the image that appears in the left side of your address bar for certain sites. For example, here are the FavIcons for Websitesinaflash.com, Blogger.com and Google.com:

It is actually a very simple process thanks to HTMLkit.com. All you need to do is make a square image that you would like to become your FavIcon, and upload it to this site. They’ll give you a zip file with the FavIcon in it, and you can upload it to the root of your site. WALA! Here’s the site:

http://www.htmlkit.com/services/favicon/

-Ashton Sanders