Techadam's Blog

Custom links in wordpress

techadam — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:56:17 +0000

The very first thing to do after installing WordPress is to create a custom Permalink structure. A custom Permalink structure will make your blog more SEO friendly and turn those ugly URL’s into Google bait!

Follow these very simple steps for a more SEO friendly WordPress blog URL structure.

From within the WordPress dashboard, click on Options, then Permalinks.

You will then see the following options:

Default
» http://www.wordpressmax.com/?p=123

Date and name based
» http://www.wordpressmax.com/2007/05/29/sample-post/

Numeric
» http://www.wordpressmax.com/archives/123

Custom, specify below
» Custom structure

Paste the following code in the Custom structure box:

WordPress Blogroll

techadam — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:53:13 +0000

A blogroll is a list of links to blogs that the blogger likes. A blogroll is usually included in the blog’s sidebar. Some bloggers divide their blogrolls into categories. For example, a blogger who writes about cars could divide his blogroll up into categories for links to other blogs he writes, other blogs about cars and other blogs he likes about unrelated topics. The blogroll can be set up based on each blogger’s personal preferences, and it can be updated at any time.

Google Gadget

techadam — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:59:41 +0000

Google Gadgets are, well, anything. They are services, searches, feeds, games, toys, information, and anything. Basically, they are tools, utilities, and games you can add to your web pages by copying and pasting the Google Gadget’s javascript into your web page design.

Most people will want to include these in their sidebars, but they can be included in any template file in a full version WordPress Theme blog.

Deciding where you want to put your fun Google Gadgets on your WordPress blog is a little tricker than you may imagine. The average sidebar in a WordPress Theme is about 180 pixels wide. Some are narrower and some are wider. Most Google Gadgets are designed to fit within a 320 pixel width. This will break most WordPress Theme sidebars.

Narrow the Google Gadget and you can get a funky looking squished or half concealed image with scroll bars.

Basically, to add a Google Gadget to your WordPress blog, you have three choices.

You can try to find a Google Gadget that will work within the narrow format of your sidebar.
Put your Google Gadget somewhere else within your WordPress Theme.
Widen the sidebar width.

To widen the sidebar width, you need to edit the style.css file in your WordPress Theme, widening the width of the sidebar to 320 pixels plus maybe a little more, but also narrow the width of your content container column to make up for the extra width of the sidebar. Otherwise, the sidebar container will push the content column down or overlap. If you add to one container, you must subtract from its neighbors. If this is too complicated for you, consider looking for a WordPress Theme with a wide sidebar, or using the Google Gadget elsewhere.

In our example, let’s skip playing with sidebar width and put the Google Gadget in the footer so it appears at the bottom of the content as a visual accessory.

Open the footer.php template file in a text editor. Look though the code in the template file for where you want the Google Gadget to appear. Some footers only include the “Powered by WordPress” with the name and link to the WordPress Theme author. Others may include a template tag to list your categories or pages. Let’s put it before all of these.

The Google Gadget we’re going to add is the Current Moon Phase Google Gadget. This Gadget shows the current stage of the moon.

MXML

techadam — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:40:22 +0000

(Macromedia FleX Markup Language) An XML-based set of tags used with Adobe’s Flex
development system to describe the user interface in Flash applications. Introduced in
2004, it is used in conjunction with ActionScript for creating interactive Flash
programs.

The greatest thing about the Flex Framework in my eyes is its utilization of an XML
based language (MXML) for it’s primary scripting. MXML allows you to create, bind and
structure objets in a very straightforward manner. This then leads into other
advantages such as rapid prototyping and development and so on and so forth.

Mark-up languages have always been easy to author and understand, just look back at
HTML for example. Your average person interested in tech could pick up basic HTML in a
very short space of time, then boom, their a web developer just by understanding the
behavior of a few predefined tags. A mark-up developer never really wonders why the
page is working the way it is, they never wonder why they get constraint and layout
flows for free and its OK if their code isn’t perfect as they still get some kind of
output from it (unless they went wild with a comment tag).

And so now with MXML, it’s proven that an XML based language can work in the context of
creating ActionScript applications. So why is MXML limited to the Flex Framework? Well,
the simple answer is that a lot of the META-tags and curly-braces used in the MXML
language are only compatible with the Flex Framework. Those little snippets are the
worker bees of the Flex Framework who fly around making sure everything is hooked up
correctly into the underlaying ActionScript.

DISADVANTAGE OF ACTIONSCRIPT

techadam — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:20:46 +0000

One of the most inconsistant models in the browser world is the flash detection model. IE has support only through variables in VBScript, its a mess that Adobe can’t even properly address the Adobe’s flash detection kit gets you 90% there but even then there are users that can break it. No DOM Model, something that I have relied on plenty of times in Javascript programming is the DOM, although Actionscript variables are strongly typed there is no DOM support, finding elements children is tricky and when you get into the question of “chrome” it gets even worse. Weak CSS implementation, the Flex library has a Style class but its abilities are limited to a one level listing of properties, most of which are inaccessible via the Style tag, important ones too, such as width.

FLEX CONTROLS

techadam — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 08:53:47 +0000

I have just started learning flex….I have gone thro’ some of the basic controls in flex…

Class	Descripition
BaseButton	The Button component represents a commonly used rectangular button.
ButtonLabelPlacement	The ButtonLabelPlacement class defines constants for the values of the labelPlacement property of a Button, CheckBox, or RadioButton component.
CheckBox	The CheckBox component displays a small box that can contain a check mark.
Button	The Button component represents a commonly used rectangular button.
ColorPicker	The ColorPicker component displays a list of one or more swatches from which the user can select a color.
ComboBox	The ComboBox component contains a drop-down list from which the user can select one value.
DataGrid	The DataGrid class is a list-based component that provides a grid of rows and columns.
Label	A Label component displays one or more lines of plain or HTML-formatted text that can be formatted for alignment and size.
LabelButton	The LabelButton class is an abstract class that extends the BaseButton class by adding a label, an icon, and toggle functionality.
List	The List component displays list-based information and is ideally suited for the display of arrays of information.
NumericStepper	The NumericStepper component displays an ordered set of numbers from which the user can make a selection.
ProgressBar	The ProgressBar component displays the progress of content that is being loaded.
ProgressBarDirection	The ProgressBarDirection class defines the values for the direction property of the ProgressBar class.
ProgressBarMode	The ProgressBarMode class defines the values for the mode property of the ProgressBar class.
RadioButton	The RadioButton component lets you force a user to make a single selection from a set of choices.
RadioButtonGroup	group of RadioButton components to act as a single component
ScrollBar	The ScrollBar component provides the end user with a way to control the portion of data that is displayed when there is too much data to fit in the display area.
ScrollBarDirection	Defines the values for the direction property of the ScrollBar component.
ScrollPolicy	Values for the horizontalScrollPolicy and verticalScrollPolicy properties of the BaseScrollPane class.
SelectableList	The SelectableList is the base class for all list-based components–for example, the List, TileList, DataGrid, and ComboBox components.
Slider	The Slider component lets users select a value by moving a slider thumb between the end points of the slider track.
SliderDirection	The orientation of the Slider component.
TextArea	The TextArea component is a multiline text field with a border and optional scroll bars.
TextInput	The TextInput component is a single-line text component that contains a native ActionScript TextField object.
TileList	The TileList class provides a grid of rows and columns that is typically used to format and display images in a “tiled” format.
UIScrollBar	The UIScrollBar class includes all of the scroll bar functionality, but adds a scrollTarget() method so it can be attached to a TextField component instance.

ADVANTAGES OF ACTION SCRIPT

techadam — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:15:17 +0000

First and foremost browser compatibly, once your user is in the Flash environment it
doesn’t matter what browser they came from, the flash platform is universal and there
are no model incosistancies like you have with Javascript. Animation and
non-rectangular shapes are two things that Flash handles oh so well natively which
makes for a fast track to a smooth UI.

ActionScript 3.0 goes beyond the scripting capabilities of previous versions of
ActionScript. It is designed to facilitate the creation of highly complex applications
with large data sets and object-oriented, reusable code bases. While ActionScript 3.0
is not required for content that runs in Adobe Flash Player 9, it opens the door to
performance improvements that are only available with the AVM2, the new virtual
machine. ActionScript 3.0 code can execute up to ten times faster than legacy
ActionScript code.

The older version of ActionScript Virtual Machine, AVM1, executes ActionScript 1.0 and
ActionScript 2.0 code. AVM1 is supported by Flash Player 9 for backward compatibility
with existing and legacy content. For more information, see Compatibility with previous
versions.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ACTION SCRIPT

techadam — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:30:51 +0000

The precursor to ActionScript was introduced in Flash Player 4. It enabled a wide
variety of interactivity in Flash, but it was not a very sophisticated or familiar
language. Its syntax and semantics were very different from ECMAScript, although in
later versions it was possible to apply ECMAScript-like syntax to it.
ActionScript 1.0 was introduced in Flash Player 5. It had ECMAScript-based syntax and
semantics. With the release of Flash Player 6 and Flash Player 7, the language received
some semantic tweaks but remained essentially the same.
ActionScript 2.0 was introduced in Flash MX 2004 and Flex 1.0. This new version of the
language also worked in both Flash Player 6 and Flash Player 7 because ActionScript 2.0
is actually a layer on top of the ActionScript 1.0 runtime. As a result, ActionScript
2.0 isn’t as high-performance as it could be, because under the hood it’s still using
the same object model as ActionScript 1.0.
During the planning stages for Flash Player 9, it became clear that we could not
continue building upon the current ActionScript engine that was powering both
ActionScript 1.0 and ActionScript 2.0. Adobe began working to completely rewrite the
ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM). The result was a highly optimized virtual machine
known as AVM2, along with a new version of the ActionScript language to target it.
Although AVM2 will be the primary virtual machine for ActionScript code execution going
forward, Flash Player will continue to support the older AVM1 to ensure backwards
compatibility with existing and legacy Flash content.

ACTION SCRIPT

techadam — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:52:18 +0000

ActionScript is an object-oriented programming (OOP) language that is designed specifically for Web site animation. Originally released with Macromedia Flash 4 and enhanced for Flash 5, ActionScript is a sophisticated version of the script language introduced in Flash 3. ActionScript makes it possible for developers to create onscreen environments (such as games, tutorials, and e-commerce applications) that can respond to user input through the keyboard or mouse. ActionScript is an event-based language: just as is the case in real life, actions are triggered by events.

ActionScript was modeled on ECMA (European Computer Manufacturers Association)-262, an international standard for JavaScript. In the Flash 5 version, new ActionScript syntax, conventions, and features were introduced that make it similar to JavaScript, which in turn makes the language automatically familiar to most Web developers. Flash 5 also includes a new ActionScript editing environment that automates editing tasks and reduces development time.

HOW FLEX IS IMPLEMENTED IN MOBILE PHONES

techadam — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:53:43 +0000

The Flex Store application shows some of the user experiences that the Adobe Flex 2
framework provides. The Products page shows how you can use states, transitions, and UI
techniques, such as showing more information as space becomes available, to improve
your application. For example, if you change the filter options in the panel on the
left, you can see the phones drop out and move around in the main Catalog panel. As you
hover the mouse over a phone, more buttons appear that provide opportunities for adding
the phone to the compare list, the shopping cart, or viewing its details. You can also
drag the phone into the compare panel. If you add the phone to the shopping cart, the
panel shifts and exposes the cart, which was hidden underneath. This behavior shows how
you can re-use the screen real estate (the drag-and-drop operation also works with the
shopping cart when it’s visible). There are also grips on the sides of the screen that
can change from viewing the cart to the filter panel and back. The labels in the
upper-right corner of the panel also show which page you are currently viewing, and you
can click the label to change the state.