melbourne chapter

Chris Shiflett recently posted an article on crossdomain.xml and the dangers of allowing cross-domain Ajax requests. Something to keep in the back of your mind when using public services or crossdomain.xml services. Flickr, Youtube, Yahoo and Amazon are all fixing/fixed this issue. In short separating out the public service for API that operates to its own domain is enough to stop this potential security vector.

If you need to nicely align and image in a line of text here’s how you do it

.inline-img {
 
/* Firefox */
vertical-align:middle;
display:-moz-inline-block;
display:-moz-inline-box;
/* Everybody else */
display:inline-block;
 
}

Presto!

Recently my colleagues and I discovered some sneaky SEO strats being used to direct seemingly large amounts of competitor traffic to the RSVP personals site. Read more about it here

Keep your eyes out on soon-to-be media coverage on the story

An old gem but thought it was worth a post: connect telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl

A colleague found a nice little map integrated into a google search result today, looking for ‘design a cake’ found a company (3rd on the list) with an icon to display their location in Google Maps - quite nice. So what is involved for us to integrate this into our websites? Some discussion on the topic was on this website and the howto is on this website here. Very nifty!

Stumbled across this today, has anyone had a play with it? http://gatineau.adcenter.microsoft.com/Gatineau/ Sounds like Microsoft looking at what is going on and trying to mimic the movement (again).

I was suprised to find today that google was indexing some of my flash files which has lead to some discussion about how google is extracting the text, how it is navigating etc. We assume that now they must be using OCR, as the original issue was extracting the text from the flash file without ensuring that it is displayed to the user. A call to google or a hunt on the net is in order! If anyone knows anything about how this is working and ways for flash developers to code up google’able friendly flash swf files please post!

From day dot for our new company Radiant Logic PTY LTD we have been purchasing 100% sustainable premium green power. Climate change is something that greatly affects everyone and making the switch is a very important step for companies to follow, and us as a web application development company primarily operating on computers and servers need no exception! I was very glad to hear during the week that the current hosting company that we use for VWS in Australia has gone 100% green also, meaning that our customers are helping reduce carbon emmissions. This area is something that we will be working on a lot this year forming a greening community with a few different companies to talk about changes that companies can make to reduce their carbon footprint. I think it is important for staff to raise the issue with the directors of their company and start making this change.

When publishing a number of email addresses to a web page you run the chance of a spam bot scraping your site. There are a number of alternatives; such as using a mail form, obfuscating the mailto link with JavaScript or even converting the address to an image. While mail forms will conceal your email address from spam bots, they also conceal your address from the users who may simply want your address for other correspondence. Obfusticating your mailto link with JavaScript is also pretty useless since, being client site any spam bot can “resolve” the link much like your browser. And last but not least using images to display your address takes away the linking functionality. So I suggest a different alternative - Why not use Flash to display the address?

Using Flash, we can load the address client side in parts; “username” “domain” and form the address in a Flash textfield. Then we can simply use the getURL() function OR better use the textfield htmlText with an anchor to simulate our mailto link.
Here’s a hardcoded example of how I do it:
1. Create a 200px x 18 px document (FPS doesnt matter)

2. On Layer 1 add a textfield to the first frame, setting it to type dynamic, and give it an instance name of address_txt
3. Create a new layer above the previous layer for your Actionscript and add the following:

address_txt.htmlText = (username != undefined && domain != undefined) ? '<a href="mailto:'+username + '@' + domain + '">'+username + '@' + domain+'': "no email";</a>

4. Now using Publish your document (making sure you publish a html page in addition to your swf file)

5. Open your published html file in Dreamweaver or your favourite editor and append the querystring “username=joebloggs&domain=gmail.com” to the

<param movie="..." ></param> and <embed src="..."> </embed> tags:

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" width="200" height="18" id="mailto" align="middle">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="movie" value="mailto.swf?username=joebloggs&domain=gmail" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
<embed xsrc="mailto.swf?username=joebloggs&domain=gmail.com" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="200" height="18" name="mailto" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />
</object>

6. Finally run your movie in the browser and you should see your email address in the Flash textfield!

An excellent video on web pop culture by Cultural Anthropologist Michael Wesch…Enjoy!