I’ve joined Cornerstone Media Group of Atlanta as the Senior Web Designer and Front-End coder! A bit stale as far as news goes, I’m going on 6 months already. The reason I bring it up now is that we’ve just relaunched our website. This new look is not just about new appearances and aesthetics, it is about a new approach. The redesigned website has new features that make the user experience easier and more intuitive. There is a dynamic portfolio and the company blog is tied more into the site and more into the business. Most employees are signed on as an author on the blog. We’ll do our best to flood the inter-web with good content related to what we do and our expertise. Three of our most popular business solutions now are highlighted buttons that can take you straight to landing pages with more in depth information on each solution; SEO, Web Design and E-Commerce. The redesigned website offers a freshness that comes with change. We hope you enjoy your new experience at cornerstone. If you’re in need of any web services chances are we’ll have a solution at CSMediaGroup.

Great news, Happy to share that Krista and I are expecting the newest addition to the family!

October 29th 2009! Is the day, it will be an exciting Halloween to say the least!

Thanks everyone for your support and happy thoughts. Here’s the picture proof that there aren’t eight in there. Just one.

Any advice for transitioning from 1 to 2 kids? What to expect?

I’ve been thinking about this blog and what kind of content I want to be creating for the world and yes, you. I really enjoy creating working tutorials and open source project or components available to download and learn from. I make these available so that you are able to pick it apart and hopefully learn something from it. And in the best of scenarios it helps you solve some problem in one of your own projects, or you contact me and are able to teach me a better way I could have done it (my personal favorite). There are no shortcuts to this kind of stuff. Learning is a process, and the way I learn (especially when it’s related to flash) is to get my hands on something that already works and pick it apart. So that’s what I try to provide in my “tutorials”- I use the term loosely because, they aren’t really walkthroughs per say, but more working examples for you to look into and see how it has to (or at least could) fit together and work. I have really enjoyed the direction I’ve gone with the blog, and to get to my point…

I have also learned a lot of what I know from books. Reading books and understanding the whys to all the ways things are done in actionscript has helped me a lot. It may have been an epiphany, but I thought – why not share the ones that have made the biggest support for me, or at least list the books that sit the closest to my keyboard when I am working through a project.

So books are good. I will be continuing with my tutorials and open source working examples and put up as much code as I can, but I want to also talk about where I learn some of the things I learn.

So if you follow the blog, thanks! You’ll start to see a larger variety in posts. Dare I put this in writing but I’m also trying to increase the frequency of posts. I’ve been pretty good at getting at least one post a week, so I’ll try to bump it up to at least 1 and a half posts a week Go ahead and subscribe to my feed if you want to be sure not to miss any of them, and please jump back to the posts when it’s interesting and let me know, comment with any books that have helped you better understand you specialty.

To accompany the last presidential debate, I ask a question:

Who to vote for?

It’s not just about what party you’re affiliated with, who you agree with more on an issue or which candidate you understand better… it’s a combination of them all. It’s more important how a candidate can handle the different issues facing us today than how they perform in a debate or advertisement.
There should be somewhere to assign a weight to each issue on the table and then issue by issue see which candidate I agree more with. Then it would calculate and tell me who I really support according to how I prioritize the issues. So if I think the only issue worth voting about is Iraq or the economy and I agree more with Barrack Obama or John McCain on those issues it will be reflect in the results.
It’s pretty hard to explain the whole idea, without building it myself, so that’s just what I did… while I couldn’t stop thinking about it I coded it.

Check it out, and I hope it helps! Cause we’re gonna need all the help we can get on this one! It can help you decide or just test yourself and see if you really support that candidate as much as you think.

Go try it here!

I pulled info from CNN’s election center mostly because all the info was gathered for me already, each of the big issues, descriptions and the candidates position. I have a slider for each issue where users select how imortant it is to them (on a scale of 0 to 100 percent). Then users compare their own position on the issues with each candidate (on a scale of 0 to 100 toward each candidate). This is all considered while your support is calculated. Each issue’s importance as a percentage is multiplied by the amount you agree with each candidates position. These are all added up and totaled to give a final percentage. This is innovative in that it’s not just who you agree with mpre, it’s who you agree with more on the isues that you think are more important! Let me know what you think about this and let the candidates know what you think about their positions.

Voters Aide the flash app to help you decide who you support by letting you prioritize the issues and choose which candidate you lean towards on each issue and see the overall results.

Ryan has announced a contest to investigate how Google is actually crawling swfs. He introduced the term “fleximagically searchable” to be included in external content, which is then loaded into the Flex swf. Hoping that google will read the external source file through the swf. Also testing how this shows up in the search results. Even though I think there a lot more to SEO than just letting Google crawl your site, there’s the pagerank and everything that Google uses in it’s top secret algorithm to determine search result position ranks.

Here’s the official rules:

• It has to be a Flex application
• ‘Fleximagically Searchable’ must be dynamically loaded. It can’t be static text inside of your application. – But I don’t care how you load it, in fact that might make a difference in how Google ranks you.
• The first link must be deep linked directly into where you load ‘Fleximagically Searchable’ into your application. Feel free to use any deep linking methods out there.
• Nothing in your code can dynamically load the phrase automatically. It has to be the result of a user interaction.
• You must provide source code and be willing to talk about exactly what you did.
• Multiple entries are allowed if you want to try different things.

They seem to be a bit vague in places, but we’ll see if Ryan decides to clarify anything.

More information: I’ve found that’s helpful at Peter Elst’s post. And Ryan explains Google and Flash’s relationship development here. Here and here is what Google has officially said. Here is the official press release from Adobe about their new

I’ll have a couple entries I’m sure… and I’ll be sure to post about those as well.