The past 2 years, I have been so busy with other aspects of my life and knee-to-head-deep in work related projects that I haven’t posted with any regular frequency. I have a great deal of things I would like to write about, but my priorities have been with my family, (primarily my 2 year old son Owen and my 3 month old daughter Delaney who are both wonderful), getting work done and participating more in my local community and user groups. I have also found that using micro-blogging and other Web 2.0 social services like Twitter, Pownce, and many others have really contributed to me not feeling the need to post as much to my blog.

I decided that if I was going to do any sort of writing or blogging at all, that I would want a much more robust system that met the following criteria:

• More efficient at day to day tasks and operations
• More robust plugin API and extensibility layer
• Additional CMS like features
• Better support for theming/skinning and CSS
• Better support for valid XHTML
• More robust and flexible administration controls

Back in early 2003, I adopted an early beta version of Pivot and have hacked it to death over the years to the point where upgrading would be more pain than its worth. I had considered moving to their new 2.0 version, but in the end, with the criteria and features I had in mind, the API, extensibility and community around WordPress really impressed me more. I had already written some plugins and custom shortcodes for several clients of mine over the past year without getting too deep into the guts of WordPress and was impressed from that perspective in that the documentation was clear and easy to follow. Then I got a chance to meet Matt Mullenweg in person a few months back at an event in Philadelphia, and he impressed me with his ideas. So I installed WordPress and after only a few hours I was able to take the vast majority of hacks and modifications I had incorporated over the years to Pivot and convert them into true plug-ins for WordPress.

The first three I made are Glossolalia, WP-List Filter and TwitterRSS. Glossolalia wraps my text-to-speech system for generating and cacheing MP3′s for consumption by Flash other players into a WordPress plugin to automatically generate spoken word copies of each entry on demand. It was easy enough to tie in the delivery with another popular WordPress plugin: Martin Laines 1-Pixel Out Audio Player this made things so simple. Wp-List Filter is a plugin that adds a filter to the wp_list_pages() function so you can alter the the way WordPress outputs and tags the UL data for the top level menu of pages in your system. This allowed me to implement my own custom CSS variant of the “sliding door” style/technique for CSS based tabs for my main navigation. This technique was made popular by an article by Doug Bowman on a List Apart a few years back. I just added an extra span so that I never have to worry about the width, I have an image for each edge of the tab, and an image in the middle that is scaled as needed for the background, a little more CSS, but better results. This was pretty much impossible to do with the default wp_list_pages() function. If I get a chance to clean up the source a bit, I’ll probably release this for folks to tinker with. The final one TwitterRSS was to accomplish one of my goals to incorporate all the micro-blogging and Web 2.0 Social Services that I use into feeds I can display on my own site. You can see it in action here.

All of these items made the decision to move from Pivot to WordPress very easy. Much of the functionality I had to hack into Pivot was already in WordPress or just a search and install away from the huge library of community developed plugins. So I’ve been working on and off the past month or so to move all my old posts, and not just my blog but my entire site infrastructure and odds and ends that have accumulated over the years following me from server to server – nearly 5 gigs worth of cruft (not including email, client work and other domains I host). I have paired it all down and things are running lean and mean now. Everything has been moved to an entirely new server at MediaTemple.net – I have been using them for my hosting for over 6 years now and highly recommend them.

There are some really great plugins for WordPress – two of my favorites are centered around the iPhone. The first one I want to mention: WPtouch iPhone Theme With this plugin installed if you visit my site with an iPhone (or Safari 3 and set the user agent to iPhone or iPod Touch) by default you will get an experience and theme that is optimized for the device. Its also smart enough to allow you to switch back and forth from the optimized version to the full CSS styled version.

The second plugin is: WPhone a lightweight admin interface for the iPhone and other mobile devices. This makes it super handy to administrate the site from remote. Although now there is a full blown iPhone native app that WordPress released to handle this task and it works very well indeed. They were even nice enough to release the source code to the community which will only encourage continued development.

I still have quite a bit of content I want to flesh out around the site, particularly the Services, Portfolio and Community sections, but the bulk of the work and configuration is done and I’ll gradually flesh those three sections out over the next few days to weeks. I also spent several hours making sure I have 301 Redirects in place for all old links and popular content, and for items that might have had their locations and URL’s re-arranged or changed. However, if you notice any 404′s, errors or other missing content or JavaScript issues, please let me know by dropping me a note. Beyond that the two other big things I am working on. The first is to implement a cacheing plugin for WordPress as its default architecture is to always dynamically build pages by way of queries to a MySQL database. One nice feature of Pivot, it that is was all flat XML and pre-rendered pages so it was always pretty fast to serve up, and there was never a possibility you might run out of database connections. As long as Apache and PHP could stay up, your site would stay up. I haven’t really load tested things with WordPress and my current configuration but I’d like to do whatever I can to optimize the loading and prevent potential failure due to loads on MySQL. The second item is to consolidate a great deal of the JavaScript libraries that are leveraged in various parts of the site. There are several that are used and even though they are in packed format, it still eats up a ton of transfer. I also want to follow some optimization and best practice tips that team members at Yahoo have come up with such as moving scripts to the end of HTML content and other little items that should help on the load and execution time.

Finally this site is now geared at the most modern browsers capable of CSS and transparent PNG files. I’m not even bothering to put in hacks or support for anything but the most current browsers, like Safari 3, Firefox 3, and IE 7 and any Flash content will require the latest Flash 9 or possibly Flash 10 player. For a client I would offer a bit more backwards compatibility for sure, but I’m not as concerned about that for my own personal site. So if you are running Internet Explorer 5 for Mac or any browser that hasn’t been released in the past few months to a year and the site doesn’t look or operate properly for you. I encourage you to upgrade, not just for my site, but for all the other benefits of using the latest versions bring to you like security enhancements, additional features, bug fixes, etc. That being said, if you are using the latest and greatest and things are just not working for you as you would expect, please feel free to drop me a note.

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Adobe’s RIA technologies enable you to rapidly build and deploy the most engaging applications across browsers and on the desktop. The local Philadelphia Adobe User Groups are hosting a special joint, live event to share exciting new information on Adobe’s platform tools and technologies for building RIAs. You’ll see an exclusive user group video presentation by Adobe Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, hear some important product news, plus get your hands on some exclusive shwag and other giveaways.

Be part of the fun and excitement and join the rest of the Adobe developer community by participating in this very special event.

Food, beverages and cool prizes will be available for all attendees. We have got some great goodies for this event, and some awesome raffle prizes.

Super special thanks to Alex Hillman of Independents Hall for hooking us up with the meeting space at the last minute! Shout-outs to Alex’s partners at Indy Hall: Bart Mroz and Geoff DiMasi for their support and general coolness all around.

DATE: Monday, February 25
TIME: 7PM – whenever
LOCATION: Independents Hall




DIRECTIONS: 32 Strawberry Street, Philadelphia, PA

Park on the street if you’re lucky, otherwise there are several garages in the immediate area that you can easily use.

Make sure you arrive early for the Red Bull!

Here are some related links for the Flex 3.0 and AIR 1.0 releases:

Official Adobe Press Release: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200802/022508AdobeAIR.html

ADOBE AIR 1.0 LINKS

Get AIR 1.0: http://www.adobe.com/go/air

AIR 1.0 Runtime Install Page: http://get.adobe.com/air/

AIR Tools – Free SDK, EXtensions, etc. : http://www.adobe.com/products/air/tools/

AIR product page: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

AIR – Getting Started: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/getstarted/

AIR for Flash Developers: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/develop/flash/

AIR for Flex Developers: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/develop/flex/

AIR for AJAX developers: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/develop/ajax/

AIR FAQ: http://www.adobe.com/products/air/faq/

AIR Marketplace: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=productHome&exc=24&loc=en_us

AIR Developer Center: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/

30 On AIR – great videos about “Why AIR/Flex/Flash”: http://www.30onair.com/

Aptana – Third Party IDE for AIR, JS, etc: http://www.aptana.com/air

ADOBE FLEX 3.0 LINKS

Get Flex 3.0: http://www.adobe.com/go/flex

FREE Flex 3.0 SDK: http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/downloads/?sdid=ZFCT

Flex Builder Free for Students! More info here: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200710/102407adobeflexedu.html

Download Flex Builder 3 Professional 60 Day Trial: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=flex3email

Mike Potters post about the launch: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/flexteam/archives/2008/02/its_on_-_flex_3.cfm

A brand new site from Adobe focused on Open Source: http://opensource.adobe.com/

Flex.org Community Site – All things Flex: http://flex.org/

RIA – Rich Internet Applications: ttp://www.adobe.com/resources/business/rich_internet_apps/?promoid=BTMAX#

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So other than some community events related to local Philly events and our User Group meetings, and now this entry, I haven’t posted much at all since October of last year. I’ve just found myself utterly immersed in work, local community events and family time so the blog just hasn’t been a priority. I have been using twitter quite a bit – http://twitter.com/rhall/ if you want to follow me. I’m very excited to post about some of the projects I have been working on, and I’ll do so over the next few weeks as they all finish “baking”.

One project I can mention briefly that is still in somewhat stealth mode, but is now popping up everywhere is Redlasso – http://www.redlasso.com/ I’ll post more about it another time, just wanted to put up a link for now since its not open to the general public, but if you are interested in find out more, go to the site and sign up.

More to come soon…

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A reminder that December 6th, this coming Thursday evening at 6pm at the North Bowl Lounge N’ Lanes The Philly Creative Guides Second Annual Mega Social will be taking place.

More info here:

http://www.phillycreativeguide.com/news/2007/11_november/event/index.htm

And if you use upcoming.org – the event detail is there as well:

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/335308/

Join your compatriots in the Philly creative industry for an evening of socializing, networking and fun at Northern Liberties’ hot spot – North Bowl Lounge n’ Lanes. The cost? Once again, absolutely free with a donation to the Philadelphia Marine Corps Toys for Tots Campaign. In return you’ll enjoy complimentary food, drink specials, camaraderie and prizes. Last year was a blast, so don’t miss out on the Second Annual Creative Mega Social!

I wanted to point out that I am going to be there representing The Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group and Adobe, and will have over $5000 worth of goodies to be raffled away, including full boxed copies of the CS3 Web Suite, and Flex Build 2 with Charting Components, along with all the other raffle items the 7 other local Philadelphia based groups in attendance will be giving away.

So grab a toy or two to donate, come on out and put a smile on a childs face, all while having a great time and having a great chance at winning some cool prizes.

If you do plan on attending, please RSVP here:

http://www.phillycreativeguide.com/rsvp/

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I am really looking forward to the keynotes, bird of a feather sessions and sneak peeks. There is going to be some amazing stuff shown and announced over the next few days. If you thought the barrage of applications and info from the CS3 suite of apps, AIR, Flex, etc. has been fast and furious, well its still not slowing down – we are going to see some pretty-frigging-cool stuff very soon. It also been really fun getting to see and catch up with friends and acquaintances I have made over the years that I often don’t get to see except at conferences – got to see Matt Voerman for the first time in almost 3 years! Looking forward to bumping into more folks and meeting new ones as well. I’m also eager to attend some of the partner sessions now that I am an official Adobe Solution Partner.

Also not to diminish the news or importance, but my wife and I are pleased to announce that we are expecting our second child! Owen our first child is 16 months old and he is amazing, and now he will have a little baby sister or brother in about 7 months this coming April. My wife Melissa and I are both very excited about having another child. I am not quite as nervous this time around having been through it once and I can’t wait to meet our new baby in April.

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Grab the extension/patcher for Flash CS3 Professional from here: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIR:Flash_CS3_Professional_Update

Documentation on its usage, etc. is also on the page with links towards the bottom.

For me this comes just in time to share with our user group members (Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group) – perfect timing actually as the Adobe On AIR Bus Tour will be rolling into Philadelphia on Wednesday, so this gives us a bit extra to talk about. Also, our “Hot AIR” contest is still open until midnight tomorrow night – more details here: Hot AIR Contest Details and here: We Need Your AIR apps for Hot AIR Contest in Philadelphia!

For those of you who are totally in the dark about the event – please visit the following links and come on out on August 22nd (this Wednesday) at 6:30pm to the Franklin Institute for an awesome FREE event.

Pertinent Links:

• AIR Bus Tour Philly Info: http://onair.adobe.com/schedule/cities/philadelphia.php
• General AIR Bus Tour Info: http://onair.adobe.com/
• Philadelphia Flash Platform Group: http://www.pfpaug.org/
• Hot AIR Competition Info: http://www.pfpaug.org/core/pivot/entry.php?id=25

The event is FREE but you must register here: http://www.eventsadobe.com/adobeonair/user_info.asp

Event Summary:

Topic: Adobe Integrated Runtime – AIR (Previously code-enamed “Apollo”)

Description: AIR is a cross-platform runtime that allows web developers to leverage their existing web development skills (such as Flash, Flex, HTML and JavaScript/AJAX) to build and deploy web applications and content to the desktop. Currently in public beta, it has a rich set of features, with support for building both HTML, Javascript, Flex/Flash and Acrobat/PDF based applications.

FREE Food, beer, RedBull, cool prizes, give-aways and swag, software, and access to Adobe experts! Plus there will be some Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wiis setup for your gaming pleasures.

There is still time to submit an entry for the Hot AIR competition! Get your code together by noon this Tuesday, the 21st at midnight and get a chance to win some rockin’ prizes and demo your AIR app in front of the crowd.

This will also be a GREAT networking opportunity at a very cool venue – we have over 200+ local developers and interested parties registered to attend – come on out and make some new friends.

Bring your laptop and any code (html/flash/Flex) you want to get running as an AIR app and stop by the Q&A table for assistance from experts.

Event Date:
Wednesday, August 22

Event Time:
Doors open at 6:30pm

Event Location:
Fels Planetarium in the Franklin Institute Science Museum
222 North 20th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
lat 39.957846, lon -75.17247

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First off several betas just hit labs.adobe.com: Flex 3 beta , Flash Player 9 Update 3 , and Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) B1 M4 (aka Adobe Apollo), Adobe AIR Extension for Dreamweaver. There is a lot more to it than just the betas. There is a huge AIR developer derby going on with unbelievable prizes for the best AIR applications developers can come up with. I’m super excited about the AIR Bus Tour as it is making a stop in Philadelphia at the Fels Planetarium in the Franklin Institute – a very cool venue indeed, don’t miss out on a date in your city, make sure to register! The bus tour will be interesting to follow with live video and data feeds as the AIR Evangelists hit 18 cities across the county in three legs over the next few months in a custom AIR tour bus.

The Flash Player 9 Update 3 beta has some great new enhancements including an API for hardware accelerated fullscreen playback, multi-core support for improved rendering speed on machines with multiple CPU core’s, enhancements to the On2 video decoder for better performance and quality and several other items, Tinic Uro has some more detailed info on this as well as Emmy Huang. Ted Patrick dishes the dirt on all things Flex, including info about Flex 3 Nightly builds and the public Flex 3 bugbase, there are new videos about Flex 3 and the AIR Bus Tour on http://video.onflex.org/, just too much cool stuff.

I’ll post up some more links later tonight on this stuff, but right now I’m a little jetlagged from the trip out here today, and need to get some rest for the rest of the week.

Tomorrow also marks the kickoff of Apples WWDC conference – hoping to hear some official words on Flash support for the iPhone – the latest commercial clearly shows Flash content functioning in the iPhone Safari browser, but there havent been any official announcements yet from Apple or Adobe – no one wants to feel the wrath of Steve and spill the beans before he does, but it is looking like its pretty much a shoe-in that the iPhone will have a full featured Flash player when it ships.

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You do not want to miss this meeting, thanks to Comcast Interactive Media, we are giving away 4 iPods, and courtesy of Adobe, a copy of one of the Adobe CS3 Premium Software bundles (your choice if you win), along with some other goodies! Comcast Interactive Media is also sponsoring the event and providing pizza/salad/sodas so you wont go hungry.

More importantly you do not want to miss our speaker for this event:
Arpit Mathur: Lead Software Engineer for Comcast Interactive Media
Arpit will be discussing Flex/Flash Large Scale Applications, we might even be able to talk him into showing off his DiggGraphr, Digg Flash API contest entry which has made it into the top 10 Finalists: http://digg.com/contest

More info about the event can be found here: http://www.pfpaug.org/

If you plan on attending, please RSVP by dropping us a note via this link: http://www.impossibilities.com/contact.php

Event Summary:

Speaker:
Arpit Mathur – Lead Software Engineer for Comcast Interactive Media

Topic:
Flex/Flash Large Scale Applications

Date/Time:
Thursday May 31st – 6:30pm-9:30pm

Location:






Comcast Interactive Media Headquarters in Center City
1500 Market Street – Philadelphia, PA 19102
Google Map: http://tinyurl.com/2o5v4w

Hope to see you there! If all goes according to plan, we will also be announcing some additional Flex resources for the Philadelphia and surrounding areas!

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In all the excitement of the CS3 launch event yesterday (March 27th), there was a bit of info that I didn’t see covered anywhere. From what I understand, all copies of the individual point products and the various bundle suites will include a special DVD. This DVD is the “Adobe Video Workshop“. It’s a pretty unique set of training and overview videos covering the gamut of CS3 products as presented by various members of the designer and developer community. There are also many member’s of the Adobe staff that have contributed to the contents. I am pretty excited about this myself, as I was fortunate enough to be asked to contribute three videos to the project:

• An introduction to Adobe Device Central
• Working with Device Central and Photoshop CS3
• Working with Device Central and Flash CS3

This was the first time I had worked on recording a product training video; it turned out to be a challenging and fun project to work on. The individuals I worked with at Lynda.com and Adobe were extremely helpful in getting things done and putting the polish on the final product. I just saw the final versions of the videos I did back in December for the first time today, and I’m really quite pleased with how they turned out. The editing that the Lynda.com staff did is just tremendous. I haven’t seen the entire range of videos, but from what I understand the full version has a great interface and player mechanism to highlight the biographies and info about each of the video authors and allow you to navigate around through the various products and videos. I’m eagerly awaiting my copy to see it in its entirety. I’ll see if its possible for me to post a small snippet of the intro from one of my videos here. Otherwise, make sure to check it out when you get your various CS3 products when they start shipping. All of the videos should end up online, when I know for sure, and where that may be, (or if Im just imagining things) I’ll update this entry (updated – see below).

In the meantime, there are plenty of great videos online for CS3 products already at Lynda.com, including some fantastic videos about Apollo that Mike Chambers put together, and they are FREE! I also found out that there are several big CS3 packages coming soon from Lynda.com:

• Dreamweaver CS3 Essential Training
• Flash CS3 Essential Training
• Illustrator CS3 Essential Training
• InDesign CS3 Essential Training
• Fireworks CS3 Essential Training
• Photoshop CS3 One-on-One

From what I understand there are even more in the pipeline.

I want to give a special thanks to Tanya Staples of Lynda.com, Jen deHaan, Carol Linburn, Tim Wohlberg , Kathy Charneco, Sonja Brix, Fabian Padge, and Bill Perry of Adobe.com for the opportunity and assistance in working on the videos. Thanks guys!

One other quick-tip for any aspiring video-training authors – do yourself a favor and pick up a USB noise-cancelling headset. I can’t recommend highly enough the Plantronics .Audio 550 headset it drowns out all background noise including whirring hard drives and other ambient noise you might find around your computer.

The Adobe Creative Suite 3 Video Workshop is now live and available online! Jump directly to it here: http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/ or read more about it here: http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/about.html

It launched earlier today with over 200 videos. Tons of great content. You can find the three videos I contributed in the Device Central CS3 section or jump directly to them from the following links:

• Using the Device Central workspace: http://www.adobe.com/go/vid0184
• Using Device Central with Photoshop CS3: http://www.adobe.com/go/vid0185
• Creating Interactive Content for mobile devices (Flash CS3): http://www.adobe.com/go/vid0267

If you are considering purchasing any of the new Adobe CS3 products it should be really helpful. I highly recommend at least a quick look through the topics, products and new features the videos cover.

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