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.

The main reason I decided to write this was foxtrot:

The “community” is bringing out so-called enemies of flash. But I think the web is what it is today to a great part because of flash. I hope apple will one day open up and actually make the best web experience possible by putting flash on the iProducts (but seriously doubt Mr Jobs will ever come to his senses). The way I see it, blocking flash on apple products is a business decision (as flash would compete with the cash flow of the app store) cloaked in a technical and sorry excuse and passing the blame onto the very company (Adobe) which has repeatedly tried to work with mac to achieve improvements.

HTML5 killing flash? Flash not dead!

I could write paragraphs about it, I for one am very excited about the new possibilities with html5 and css3 and even cs5! I could go on but I’ll just reference some of the best articles I’ve seen:
//links links links

• Why the Open Screen Project is so important, Lee Brimelow
• My Thoughts on the Future of Flash, Grant Skinner
• Web development will become much more complicated, Lee Brimelow
• Flash: not dead yet. But HTML5 is still-born, Dan Florio (PolyGeek)
• Steve Jobs: HTML5 Will Kill Flash, Simon Urbina
• HTML5 vs. Flash, Remy Sharp
• Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web, Dan Mall (via A List Apart)
• Flash Player: CPU Hog or Hot Tamale? It Depends, Jan Ozer

I recently stumbled across a site that could easily help with your web hosting needs. They are called Web Hosting Search and as the name indicates, they don’t offer hosting, but offer a database of different hosting companies which make it easy to search and compare rates and services. I found my current host and could have actually gotten a deal for the same plan I currently have, which would have saved me a couple dollars a month! They even have a hosting coupon page which displays specials offers they can get you with a number of recommended hosting providers.

We’re merely a guide that tries to shed light on the web hosting business, to sort out the good deals. We rank web hosting services, write reviews and help customers find the right company and the right plan.

They have company profiles for each hosting company and the opportunity for customers to leave a review and rate the host. I think this is a great feature, as it gives an insider’s view of the company. This is a hard thing to find when you don’t have a recommendation from someone you know. When the time comes for me to look for hosting options, I’ll be sure to start with webhostingsearch.com.

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.

Thanks for your patience as I’ve been tinkering with the theme, layout and css of circlecube.com.

I started with a free theme from Justin Tadlock, Options Theme, available at theme hybrid. I’ve changed that theme quite a bit, from restyling it to fixing bugs I found and updated many other things on the site as well. So the reason I’m going on about it is I think I’m finished… and I’m asking you to let me know if you see anything that looks odd or fishy, or even just want to make a suggestion or comment on how much you like/hate the redesign. Comment on this post or contact me!

And as always, if there’s something you would like me to write about or have questions you can also contact me. I’ve even set up a poll in the sidebar showing post ideas I have which you can vote on and encourage me to write the one(s) you want most first! So let me know what you want, it encourages me to write more as well. And be sure to subscribe to the circlecube rss feed so you won’t miss anything that’s coming up!