I’ve had a lot of time recently so I thought I would take the opportunity to get back into Flash. So without further ado here is my latest offering of a lion roaming the jungle. As always, just click on the thumbnail to load the movie.

I know that it’s by no means perfect but I am rather proud of this one, a lot of hours went into it.

And (I hear my imaginary readers ask) what else have I been up to?

Well, I have been learning all about Expression Engine which seems to be a great (if rather pricey) piece of kit, and it’s always good to learn about other CMS’s.

I’ve also been trying to bring my javascript up to scratch and learning a bit about the various libraries like jQuery, prototype and mootools.

I still didn’t get any work. A couple of people expressed an interest but then never got back to me, that’s really annoying! I think it also has a lot to do with my lack of business experience and woeful ineptitude when it comes to self promotion.

I will be getting a part time job in the next couple of weeks to tide me over. Not something I wanted to do but beggars can’t be choosers.

Although, actually this post is more of an experiment than really offering anything new to the site.

Hopefully you will have noticed the rather “stylish” heading to this entry. For the uninitiated, the fonts (typefaces) you see on a web page usually live on your computer. When you navigate to a web page your browser interprets the information it is given and assembles it on your screen pulling the font from a collection on your hard drive.

Obviously this has always been a great hindrance to web designers and developers, there being no point in choosing a beautiful and obscure font to compliment a design when, in all likelihood, the viewer will not have that font installed on their computer, which will then default to a boring, and possibly design breaking, standard font. The only alternative, until relatively recently has been to replace the text with an image of itself. The problems with that being a. Increasing the size of the page in kilobytes, thus increasing loading times. b. Breaking the cardinal rule of mixing content with presentation and, c. Most important of all, taking away the viewers ability to increase the size of the text and also making it invisible to anyone using a screenreader.

For the heading above I have used the sIFR (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) technology available here which utilises a combination of Flash and Javascript to hide and replace the text with an embedded font of my choice (here I used “Hobo Std” as a rather extreme example). The beauty of this method is that it can be resized (although I seem to be having issues with that on the Mac) and degrades nicely, if the viewer has no Flash player or Javascript turned off it will default to a prespecified “common” font which means that it will also appear to screenreaders.

The sIFR technique has been around for a while and is being improved upon all the time. I only recently learned how to implement it after reading this excellent article. After that it was just a case of making it apply only to the heading of this specific post and not to the headings on the rest of my site, which required nothing more than a simple conditional statement applied to this posts unique number ID.

I’m currently working on a custom 404 page for this site, which I hope nobody ever sees, and waiting desperately for someone to hire me.

Click on the thumbnails to open the files.

These were all made last year when I was spending most of my spare time learning animation in general and how to use the Flash software. Most of them are exercises from the two animation “bibles”, Preston Blair’s Cartoon Animation and The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams. The retro style cartoon babe comes from Christopher Hart’s Cartoon Cool.

I must also give a lot of credit to Justin at Cartoon Smart without whose excellent video tutorials I would probably still be staring at the Flash interface and scratching my head!

I do hope to be adding a few more soon, and, as I have already said, I am seriously thinking of making a Flash version of this site.

Watch this space!

I have taken every possible measure to ensure that this site appears more or less the same in all modern web browsers (no two browsers work in quite the same way) so if the layout falls apart on your computer it is because you are using an outdated version of your particular browser and if I were to hazard a guess I would say it is probably Internet Explorer and more than likely version 6 or below. There are links to the latest versions of all the main browsers on the about page although in my not so humble opinion you can’t beat Firefox.

I don’t have any real excuses for it taking so long, obviously my Dad passing away did take the wind out of my sails for a while, but I think it has been more a case of just getting started. Building your own website, especially when you don’t have any real content, is a lot different to building one for someone else where the project is driven by their needs and goals. Once I did get started it has only taken a couple of weeks from Photoshop® to the web.

I am pretty happy with the outcome and overall “look” of the site, though it will change over time. There does seem to be a small issue with page loading times at the moment and I am not sure if that is down to my internet connection or the fact that my webhost keeps the database on a different server to the rest of the site. I am taking steps to address the problem.

With this being my first blog post, the sidebar is somewhat low on content, so, for the time being I have included links to some of the more universally interesting blogs that I subscribe to and left out the more “techie” ones.

As I mention on my about page I do hope to add some Flash® content in the not too distant future and if I ever get time I would like to make a complete Flash® version of the site.

So what will I be blogging about? That’s a good question. As the purpose of Apostrophe Art.com is to promote myself as a designer/developer I think it’s probably best to confine my writing to general internet development topics and news on any projects that I will (hopefully) be commissioned to do. The long term aim is to turn the site into an online portfolio.

If you would like to know more then by all means contact me and why not leave a comment while you are here?