Larissa Meek, former interviewee, bikini model, and etc, has joined the Devlounge team. Watch for her first article sometime in August. If you are interested, she recently wrote an article for that other site (Vitamin) titled Web Design-isms: 7 Surefire Styles that Work. Be sure to give it a read if you haven’t yet. We’re excited to have her as part of team, and it is just another addition in many we hope to continue to make throughout the summer to improve content and content flow.
Back to normal
I am happy to report everything is back to normal. You can now also read Jonathan Snook’s interview without any problems. Enjoy the weekend everyone. Sorry about todays earlier mess.
Off tonight
We’re having major database issues it seems right now with WordPress. Unfortunately, you are going to have to wait to read our interview with Jonathan Snook. (It is currently still on our rss feed, but I’m not sure if it will remain there or not because I have deleted the post). Ever since the new design, certain posts seemed to have problems, which I was able to fix by reposting. Then, some interviews would only show photos and not the interview itself. The latest case was the Snook interview. When I posted it, it was fine. Moments later, it wasn’t working. I’m going to be doing some major backups tonight and installing a fresh copy of WordPress. Sorry for the inconvenience. This is a pain in the ass for me as well.
New Author and Category: Actionscript
I’d like to take a moment to introduce you to the newest member to join our staff team: Alex Jillard. Alex is an experienced flash and actionscript developer, who approached me about bringing flash related articles and tutorials to Devlounge. We are always looking to expand our reach, and we think by catering to flash developers in just another step in doing just that. Tomorrow, a new category will be added to the articles page called “Flash and Actionscript”. Watch for it to begin to be populated very soon. We are very excited to have Alex on board, and we hope many of you will find his posts informative and useful.
To get an idea of what to expect from Alex, here are some of his favorite articles he has written:
- http://www.sanctifiedstudios.com/dynamic-movie-clip-referencing-in-actionscript/
- http://www.sanctifiedstudios.com/if-and-else-statements-with-actionscript/
- http://www.sanctifiedstudios.com/3-tips-to-help-debug-your-actionscript/
Also, here is a teaser to an extensive XML / Actionscript article he is currently working on:
Using Actionscript to get XML content where you want it
I find that there are many tutorials out there showing how to make a simple xml driven project, like a photo gallery or menu, which is great, but if you want to use xml elsewhere, you’d be a bit stuck.
The goal of this tutorial is to teach you how to use xml and Actionscript together to get dynamic xml driven content exactly where you want it. I will be showing you some logic for using and creating xml, a good technique for getting that xml into Flash and breaking it down so it is easy to access as you need it, and how to that data onto your website or application where you need it.
To give some visuals and examples to the tutorial, I’ll step you through making a website using everything you’ll learn. In the end you should have gathered enough knowledge to use xml when and where you need it.
Looking for your input
One thing Alex has asked if for me to ask you, the readers, for article suggestions. What kind of tutorials do you want to see involving Actionscript and Flash, and what do you want to know in general? Please leave your suggestions in the comments; we’d really love to hear them!
Features page returns
The feature page is back up, and Devlounge 2 (the WordPress theme) will be available either tomorrow or the following day. I’ve been weeding through various errors today, and I have noticed one thing. It seems some posts and pages have been effected by the database restoration we underwent a few weeks back. It has caused the page design to break, when it shouldn’t have. I’ve spotted many of these and fixed them by reposting the article and / or page (only way to fix it is to delete the old so it’s out of the database). Of course, it is impossible to look through every single post and page, so if you notice any problems, please just let me know. I’m pretty sure I’ve got most of them, but you never know when something will slip through the cracks. That takes care of today’s updates. Tomorrow new feed options will be introduced, and hopefully I’ll be able to stop with these updates, because I’m sure it’s annoyed some most of you. 😉
