Burch's Blog revamp

Josh Dura strikes again, with another great Macromedian blog design! He did Mike Chambers' blog a couple of weeks ago, and now he's had a hand in Greg Burch's new blog, which has been given a similar feel.

I think I've given up trying to keep up with these guys, but one day I WILL have time to finish some of grand ideas I have for this site... sigh.

Who are you looking at?

Yesterday, I intalled Flash Communications Server on my local machine and spent rather too much time in video conversations with various friends, some of whom are abroad. I spoke with James, who is spending a year in Kenya. I haven't spoken to or seen him for 6 months, and despite his rather slow and intermittent connection, it was cool. Text chat is an essential plan-B to have at your disposal!

If someone could find an easy way for people to pay for this service (as easy as a phone bill) then it could become a primary application of the software. 56K is all that is needed and a lot of people now have broadband and webcams. With good promotion, such a service would be profitable, charging less than 1p per minute. Based, of course, on some fairly primitive assumptions.

The only problem with video-conferencing that I found, is not a technical one. It's something that doesn't seem to be a problem when you see it in futuristic television programmes from the 80s. Eye contact is an extremely important aspect of a face-to-face conversation; even more so when there are several participants. But, short of dangling my camera in front of my monitor, so that it obsures most of the other person's face, there's not a lot that can be done. :-)

CustomActions DTD

Well, there was no standard and Macromedia weren't doing anything, so I made a draft of a DTD for the XML format, used by CustomActions in Flash MX.

Since every extension uses different conventions, which aren't often consistent within the same document, I had to make some decisions. The main thing being that I made all tag names and attributes lower case. Please let me know if your XML does not validate against it but you think it should; this was based on my own interpretation. Also be aware that many custom actions XML files contain unclosed tags, which you will have to fix. It didn't take me long though to do a few search-and-replaces on my CustomActions directory to correct the capitalisations and close the <br />s.

Just a little note, before anyone says anything. IE tries to parse the file as XML, which causes an error, so don't bother trying to browse the file in IE.

Just stick this at the top of your CustomActions XML file:

<!DOCTYPE customactions SYSTEM "http://www.peterjoel.com/Components/customactions.dtd">

and here is an online XML validator, you can use.