markstar » General

New Year(ish), New Look

Mark — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 17:30:24 +0000

I’ve always wanted to create my own WordPress theme for my site, but haven’t had the time (or patience!) before. I was hoping to have it complete by the new year but it took a back seat whilst I worked on the StatefulToolkit. Over the past week I’ve had chance to implement the design, and here it is! I hope you like it.

Now to get back to the StatefulToolkit…

Happy New Year!

Mark — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:16:25 +0000

OK, so it ’s a couple of days late but I’m now back at work and in the swing of things so I thought I’d write a new post.

2009 was a good year for me, I started my full-time job at MMT Digital after finishing university and have really started to delve a lot deeper into programming. The last year has seen me really improve my understanding of OOP as well as use design patterns and frameworks in my daily work.

This year, my new years (programming) resolutions are to:

Finish the Flash game I started programming in Autumn 2009
Pull together and publically release my stateful toolkit (AS3)
Learn more about TDD (test driven development) and optimisation
Blog more
and finally, play!

I’m hoping that by posting my resolutions I’ll actually stick to them, especially the top two – I’d really like to seem them out in the wild. I’d also like to blog more, even if it’s just some of the random things I come up with when playing with code!

I hope you all have a successful and enjoyable 2010!

SWFObject not embedding Flash in Firefox

Mark — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:18:23 +0000

Whilst working on a site that used SWFObject to add Flash to a page, I came across a situation where my Flash movie wouldn’t embed in Firefox, but it would in all the other browsers. Here’s an code excerpt from the page.

<script type="text/javascript">
   swfobject.embedSWF("myContent.swf", "myContent", "300", "120", "9.0.0");
script>
 

   Alternative content

After spending around an hour on extensive research (Google!) and checking the case of my code, I still couldn’t find a solution to the problem.

Eventually I discovered that Firefox executes JavaScript at a different time to other browsers. Other browsers appear to load the page and then execute the JavaScript on the page, whereas Firefox appears to execute the JavaScript when it gets to it. So by moving the script to below the div it miraculously worked in Firefox. It would probably be better if the embedSWF function was called on document ready. You can see the corrected code below. It’s so simple when you know how!


   Alternative content

 
<script type="text/javascript">
   swfobject.embedSWF("myContent.swf", "myContent", "300", "120", "9.0.0");
script>

Hello World

Mark — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 20:33:53 +0000

I’ve been meaning to set up a blog for a while. I’ve not found the time whilst being at university, so instead I’ve made some contributions to the blog at psyked.co.uk. Now that I’ve recently graduated, I thought it was the perfect opportunity for me to finally buy a domain and get blogging!

The primary focus of the blog will be the Flash Platform, however other web and desktop technologies may crop up from time to time. I’m also hoping to share some of the small projects and experiments I do in my spare time.

Well, that’s the first post out of the way! Hopefully future posts will be more exciting!