Based on the wonderful feedback I got on my last post, I just put together a new beta version of Asaph. It fixes the most common problems people had with the last one. This includes:
- Usage of cURL or url fopen wrappers, based on what's available
- magic_quotes are now reverted automatically
- The RSS Feed should now display images properly
- Lots of smaller bugfixes
Again, to install just unpack the zip, enter your database settings in lib/asaph_config.class.php, upload it to your webserver and point your browser to admin/install.php.
If you already installed the previous version, just replace all the files and skip the install step, as the database layout didn't change.
Asaph version 1.0 - ZIP ~50kb - Updated: Asaph version 1.0
I have some more plans and ideas for future versions of Asaph. Don't hold your breath though - this will take some time :)
Over the past few weeks I developed Asaph - a small blogging system, that allows you to instantly post links and images directly from any page on the web. This makes Asaph the most fun to use application if you want to collect and show all the cool things you found elsewhere. Asaph is not a full blown blog and it does not aim to be one - it just does this one task, but it's pretty good at it.
Watch a screencast to learn what makes Asaph worth using: Asaph Screencast on Vimeo.com
My own Asaph blog can be found at asaph.phoboslab.org.
Asaph is currently in Beta stage. It needs PHP5 and MySQL4 to run. To install, just unpack the zip, enter your database settings in lib/asaph_config.class.php, upload it to your webserver and point your browser to admin/install.php.
Asaph version 1.0 - ZIP ~50kb - Updated: Asaph version 1.0
Feedback is much appreciated!
A few weeks ago I was asked to build an Intranet-Site for a small company. Nothing too fancy - just the usual groupware stuff like News, Calendars a Blackboard etc. I was given some Photoshop Files which were easily translated to XHTML. The layout was already approved by the client so this step was pretty much a no-brainer.
I always wanted to try out the Drupal CMS and figured this Intranet-Site would be a perfect fit for it. Drupal was developed with community sites in mind; every aspect of it was designed support the extensive built in User and Rights management. Just what I needed.
My XHTML file was quickly adjusted to function as a Drupal template. Not everything was working right from the beginning, but I figured I'd first work out the hard stuff and care about these "small rendering bugs" later. So I carried on to build my content - which is where my odyssey started.
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Doing logo design isn't easy. Making a logo for PhobosLab felt particularly hard, because the name, despite of the very real Mars moon Phobos, is quite abstract for a weblog. Well, I settled for the real thing and actually used Phobos as a logo, as you can now see in the page header. No, it's not the Deathstar - Phobos has a huge crater on its side, in case you're wondering.
I also pimped the stylesheet a bit, but in the end didn't do the complete redesign I intended to. The image on the right was a first draft of it.
Update: Yeah well, as you can see, I did do the complete redesign now.
1990s (complete with frames) vs. shiny Web 2.0?
Edit: Turns out Ron Paul also has a new Web 2.0 site for his 2008 campaign.
Better late than never... As I promised earlier, I uploaded the complete Flash and ActionScript source for Venetianization. It is, potentially, a framework for simple yet very powerful and accurate music visualization movies. Effects can be programmed for a set of elements and issued at nearly exact points in time. The complete source (Flash CS3, ActionScript 3) can be downloaded here: venetianization.zip
A few word about the inner workings of this: As you saw in my demo project, you work on an 2D array of circles. You basically animate these circles through 3 layers of definitions:
- Selections - which of the circles to animate
- Actions - what to do with them
- Sequence - when to issue them
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I completed my first real Flash project last week. It's an animation for a musical piece and it's called Venetianization (long load times, be patient). One of the goals of this project was of course to learn Flash, which however I still don't know how to use. Instead I learned ActionScript 3. So, there is not a single element on the stage; everything is scripted. And to my own surprise, I quite like ActionScript.
ActionScript 3 is the embedded scripting language of Flash 9 and a complete rewrite of its previous versions. I only had a short look into ActionScript 2 and did some simple stuff with ActionScript 1 at work aeons ago, so I can't tell you exactly what changed. But I can tell you that ActionScript 3 is really clean and thoughtfully designed. It takes the very flexible nature of ECMAScript (Javascript) but adds lots of instruments to organize and structure your code more strictly. You are not forced to use those, but you'll help yourself greatly if you do so.
Of course there are also some (many) things that don't work as good as they are supposed to. Most of them, I believe, are to blame on Flash itself, rather than ActionScript.
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As Tag Clouds become more and more common in blogging systems, one wonders why this intuitive approach hasn't been used for other media types like images or videos (or video previews).
The idea to scale elements in their relevance of importance is not new, however it wasn't possible to do this with images in websites so far. HTML and CSS offer no direct mechanism to position images of different sizes in a pleasing way.
To solve this problem, I developed a simple PHP script that calculates sizes of DIVs based on their importance and arranges them in a fixed-width grid, while closely maintaining their order. The grid is pre-generated by PHP with a width of 768px in order to fit on small screens, but scales with the help of JavaScript to fit in any browser window.
Here's a demo of how this actually looks in action: Grid-Solver Demo
There are also some real-life examples (both NSFW!) of this technique at pr0gramm.com and pornsnotdead.com.
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